Bas Siebring's Blog

Tag: pictures

  • Rangitoto with Aaron and Val – October 27

    After our last blog update about our future plans, it’s not like we’ve been just waiting around till we can get out of New Zealand! No, on the contrary! We are trying to make the most of our time here in this beautiful country and we are making a lot of beautiful (day) trips. I’ll be posting a few blogs this week with pictures of the things we did over the last couple of weekends.

    First of all: Rangitoto!

    A few weeks ago we were supposed to go skiing with the Science department (Bas’ colleagues) for the weekend, but unfortunately the mountain had just closed on the previous Monday, partly due to the wonderful summery weather. So, we decided to take a day trip to Rangitoto Island instead with our friends Aaron (Bas’ colleague) and Val (his wife). Rangitoto is a volcanic island just off the coast of Auckland. It is a very young island, formed only about 500-600 years ago and pretty spectacular! Such a very different landscape, so close to where we live! We hiked for a couple of hours around the island and up to the summit. The views were stunning.

    Since we took the early-bird ferry (at 7 am!) we took the 1pm ferry back to town and still had a few hours in the afternoon to relax before heading out to Linda and Neil’s place. Linda is Bas’ head of department and they had offered to host a BBQ for the science teachers. It was a beautiful warm evening and we sat outside on their porch till past 10pm, enjoying delicious food!

    Have a look at the pictures to get an idea of what Rangitoto looks like and what fun we had that day!

  • Maria in New Zealand – part 5 (October 7 – 11)

    Here it is; the final photo blog with pictures of Maria’s stay in New Zealand.

    It was a beautiful sunny day when we were walking part of the Abel Tasman track on October 7th. We had booked the Abel Tasman National Park Discoverer Day package. The boat cruising along the coast dropped us off at Bark Bay around 11.30am and picked us up at Anchorage Bay 12 km further at 3.30pm. It was a gorgeous walk and the views were stunning at times! After that we drove on to Nelson, where we stayed the night.

    The next day we drove from Nelson to Picton, but we did a bit of detour towards Seddon, to visit the Yealands Estate winery. This remarkable vineyard even produces wine for the Dutch market and we had actually had a couple of their wines with our Christmas dinner last year! We had a nice tour and tasting, before returning to Picton. We went to bed early, because we had booked the early (7am) ferry, which meant we had to check in at 6am and therefore get up at 5! Ouch!

    However, this gave us the opportunity to drive from Wellington to Turangi on Tuesday, and arrive there quite early (around 3pm), leaving us some time to relax, go for a beautiful walk around the village, have dinner and sleep before heading back to Auckland on Wednesday the 10th.

    We were back home around 2pm. Since it was Maria’s last day (she had to fly back to the Netherlands on Thursday the 11th of October) we spent the day unpacking and packing, relaxing, going out for dinner in Titirangi (delicious Indian food) and watching Boer zoekt Vrouw on Uitzendinggemist together 🙂 It was difficult to say goodbye on Thursday morning, but we definitely have had some incredible 3 weeks creating many lovely shared memories!

    Bas and I only had a few more days off, before we both had to go ‘back to reality’ (working), which we spent relaxing and preparing for the last term of the school year. Time is flying actually, since this is already Bas’ final term teaching in New Zealand, but we’ll tell you more about our plans for the future in our next blog. Stay tuned!

  • Picture update: second big trip in New Zealand!

    School holiday, time for a trip!

    After 10 weeks of hard work, Bas can now enjoy two weeks of holiday. The system in New Zealand is quite straight foward: 4 terms, seperated by two weeks of holiday. Anyways, we have a quite massive picture update, starting of with the visit of Marten and Mirjam and their kids. They came for a housewarming :-). Pretty nice weather and company, nice food. Everything for a good NZ night of fun. After that it is mainly pictures of the first 3 days of our 8 day trip on the North Island of NZ.

    We started of with 3 days in a  spa resort, to relax, get massages, hang out in the sauna and all the pools. Awesome stuff. Anyways, have a look at the pics, more to come!