Woke up to sound of real roosters crowing just outside our window a good 45 minutes before the alarm went off, which was fine because I had already been awake for nearly two hours, listening to the pounding rain. As we were winding down our New Zealand leg of the journey, my mind was starting to turn to the next leg, the botched cruise. The more I started thinking about it, the more I came to the conclusion that sitting on a ship for 5 days to get to a place that we could be in less than 4 hours was a monumental waste of time. For us, vacation is about how much we can see and do in a short period of time, and with the change of itinerary of the cruise ship, we were getting on on Saturday and not getting off again until at least Thursday (at a port that had no excursions) and not in Sydney until Friday! Six days of doing nothing but sit around reading, eating, drinking, and NOT seeing anything of any country. So I concocted that idea that maybe we could try to get our money back from the cruise line (which turned out to be wishful thinking, as they had NO incentive to do that - it's a rigged system, I soon learned), but did learn that our credit card benefits included trip insurance, so with the proper paperwork we should be able to recover any losses we take by canceling the cruise. Instead, we would fly out early to Sydney, rent another campervan (they're even MORE affordable over there!) and drive around the countryside for two weeks there, fly over to Kuala Lumpur and rent a car there (it's cheaper to do so in Malaysia than Singapore, saving us even more money), and giving us an extra week there before we resume our regular schedule for Hong Kong. By the time Hubby woke up to the sound of the feral roosters, I shared by idea with him. It was such an about-face after all the planning I had done, he couldn't get his head around it, but as the day wore on, he became more and more convinced that it was a better way to go. He liked the idea of spending more time in Malaysia, his desired destination to begin with, but that was cut short by the late arrival of the cruise ship and an impending deadline to get home, so he was game to try it. It will mean a lot of logistics for me to figure out, but I was game, too. We managed to get going pretty early, and headed out for another day of sight-seeing and landscape viewing. In Middlemarch, we stopped for a quick coffee and nosh, then stopped again in Omarama at a nice little shop with a cafe in back and free wifi for customers, so we ordered a cup of tea and another nosh and proceeded to start my research, spending several hours learning about campervans in Australia and flight information and so on. There's one important phone call I need to make first thing in the morning that will set this whole thing in motion, then off I'll go, turning the next two weeks of our schedule upside down! (Tee-hee!!) We left the cafe at 5:00 when they closed, and drove through Twizel (where part of the Wargs chase from Lord of the Rings was filmed here; and the largest battle scene ever - the Battle of the Pelennor Fields - was set in a remote Twizel field, until we reached Lake Pukaki, which has the most unusal light blue color for a freshwater lake, strictly glacier blue, so different you can even see it from the satellite views on Google Earth! Closest thing I've seen to it has been around some of the islands in the Bahamas, absolutely gorgeous. We found a bit of a dune area on the far side of a causeway where many other campers had already bedded down for the night (even though it was only about 5:30), and settled down for the first hot-cooked meal in days! Though the weather had cleared up for most of the drive, it was still cloudy and occasionally spitting with rain and wind, obscuring what is no doubt an incredible view of Mt. Cook at the end of the lake, but which I am hoping will become clear later, or at least in the morning. Still haven't seen the Southern Cross, and now we're running out of time, at least in New Zealand. Settled in for the most relaxing evening we've had in a while, though we've had to put the heater on, as the mountains around the lake are still covered with snow, and I'm guessing the blue water is pretty darn cold, too! Tomorrow, we only have a few hours drive to the Holiday Park I've reserved, and I'm going to have to buy some wifi time to start getting all this stuff done for the major shift in our vacation plans!
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