Why the move to NZ?

We love to travel and we travel quite a bit. We first went down under from Oct 15, 1999 - Jan 15, 2000. We had an awesome time, did a lot of camping, hiking, backpacking, river and sea kayaking primarily in the South island. It always remained my favorite country and mari's second favorite country (nepal is at the top of her list!)

Last year, we visited NZ in the winter (june 2005) just to make sure that we could hang out here for some time in the winter season. It was actually a pretty dry winter last year, and we were rained out just 3 days (on a 21 day trip). We had Maya with us, and our friend Lara was with us for a large section of the trip. We found it fairly easy to travel in NZ with a kid and decided we needed to move here for a few years

We were in the process of adopting Pranjali, and the paper work and all the other bureaucratic delays took a fair amount of time. Finally in October 2006 we got her paperwork all sorted out and her US passport. To avoid NZ paperwork, we applied and got a 1 year visa (immigration is a much bigger hassle along with wait lists, tons of paperwork, forms etc). We wanted to leave before the peak of the tourist season and get settled in, the kids in school etc. So come Nov 30, we packed bag and baggage and left for NZ ..

lobo