After working out all the red tape for months we now have our
nine month tourist visa for New Zealand. If we
planned on staying in New Zealand for less than three months we would not need to
pre arrange a tourist visa but because we want to visit this country for
longer we had to get health checkups, chest X-rays, and hand over all
our financial information. New Zealand wants to make sure we do not
bring in diseases or show up without enough funds to see us through for nine
months and still be able to buy a flight out of the country.
We will be flying over to Auckland from Darwin on
September 14, 2007. Nine months should be enough time to see both the north and
south islands that make up New Zealand. It will be early spring and cold (for us) so we
plan on hanging out somewhere on the North Island waiting for summer to
arrive while
finishing our second book.
We are looking for suggestions on cheap places to stay on the
north island for an extended amount of time. We also need an address to send new gear to
which does not necessarily have to be the same place we stay to finish the
book. Because we will be landing in springtime in the southern
hemisphere we are thinking about working on the book in either Auckland,
somewhere north of the city, or at least somewhere on the North Island.
I know there are hundreds of New Zealanders on this list and/or people who
have traveled there and we are eagerly looking forward to your advice.
We have talked about working on our book before but this time I can promise
that it will be finished. It is completely written and we are almost
ready to hand it to a professional editor.
We need your help. Recently we have received a real bashing and kicking
around on Amazon.com about our first book. One person even said we
were "slow learning"
which cuts deep given my history in Special Education. I accept
constructive criticism from those who have actually read the book but if you
read some of the comments it is obvious that either the posters have a low
reading comprehension or, more likely, he or she never read the book. If you
have read our book and think you can add some balance to the discussion
please add your comments at the link below.
Cindie has done a second radio interview with ABC
Australia. This time she is in the studio so the MP3 file has great
sound quality. The beginning starts out a little slow with a rainy
weather forecast but, if you are patient and get past the beginning, this
interview is more in depth and my favorite. I have not yet made a
video with this audio file but you can enjoy the mp3 audio file from the link below.
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