Author archive
6 June 2010
Expecting traffic and immigration woes we headed back to Vancouver early to avoid being late for our Alaskan cruise departing at 1700. Supposedly, it is a requirement for passengers to be checked-in and boarded two hours prior to departure, with a strict close-off at 90 mins. So, we had to be at the Cruise Centre in […]
5 June 2010
Pike Place Market Jet lag was on our side today and we were up before the crack of dawn. First stop was the Pike Place Market … home to Seattle’s fish market. Wow! The ginormous scallops, lobsters and prawns were tempting even though we weren’t hungry … but we weren’t tempted enough to actually eat […]
4 June 2010
The weather took a turn today. Shortly after lunch we picked up our Avis rental car and headed to Seattle. The drive itself was under 3 hours but the border crossing took about an hour due to queues with the usual photographing and fingerprinting. We took a detour to our motel at the character-rich University […]
3 June 2010
We met up with an old school friend Hong Tee for lunch today. I hadn’t seen her since school … errr … some 20+ years ago. It was a nice catch up over a yum char lunch at Chinatown nearby. The quality of their har gau (prawn dumplings) and also the prawn-and-scallop ones were top […]
2 June 2010
Above: Homogenised milk at a cafe; for one to add to coffee or tea. We arrived at 1415 on the same day we left home, thanks to the international dateline. The queues at Vancouver airport for the arrival formalities were long. The officials were thorough in the questioning of visitors. We managed to clear all […]
2 June 2010
We turned up at Auckland airport to check-in armed with a contingency plan in case the flight at 2000 to Vancouver was full. Fortunately there were seats available and we were issued with boarding passes available. We weren’t seated together because the remaining seats on the flight were spread through the aircraft. No complaints!
11 April 2010
Cincaluk is fermented tiny shrimps or krill … it sounds gross but it is somewhat like Thai fish sauce which is made… Posted by Alex Chan on Saturday, April 10, 2010
5 April 2010
Thanks to the switch from Daylight Saving back to Standard Time, it wasn’t too hard to wake up for our 7am flight from Hokitika to Christchurch connecting to Auckland.
4 April 2010
From Hokitika we drove down to the two Glaciers … Franz Josef and Fox. Actually there are many more glaciers but these are the two that are open to visitors and managed by the Department of Conservation (with marked walking tracks etc for safety). While glaciers are pretty, the rivers that run from them aren’t […]
3 April 2010
We drove from Picton to Hokitika today to set ourselves up for the glaciers tomorrow. The road trip would have been 5 hours non-stop but naturally we stopped a little bit to take in the scenic beauty. We picked up a hitch hiker Phil from Germany who was bound for Greymouth (in our direction). He […]