Thurs. Sept. 1 CRISIS IN CAMPERVAN --DEAD BATTERY DETAINS – Frantic Rush to Ferry
We got up early and were able to follow the directions to the ferry terminal without getting lost. There was a long lineup but we easily got into the terminal before the cutoff time, a full hour before the 8:25 sailing. To kill time, we had coffee and juice and got our cereal together. Before we had a chance to eat our cereal, boarding started so we put our food aside. When it came our turn to go, I turned the key but nothing happened. Since we got such an early start I had my lights on in downtown Wellington and since we hadn’t left the car during breakfast, there was no warning beeper to remind me that I had left my lights on. The battery was dead.
Meg- What to do? The ferry was boarding and we had a long line of cars behind us waiting to board. Owen tried the key a couple of times but no response from the engine! We were going to miss the ferry and the next one wasn’t for hours. I jumped out of the van, and signaled apologetically to the cars behind me to go around. I then ran up the head of the line. As soon as I got up to the traffic director asked me, “flat battery, love?” To which I responded breathlessly in the affirmative. He waved me to the office to get a battery restart kit and told me he’d come along to help once he got the others boarded. We were saved! Ten minutes later he came to our rescue, attached the wires of the kit to or battery (which would have taken us half an hour to figure out) and ….
Owen-- The engine perked up immediately and we let it run for about 5 minutes to get a bit of a charge going before we got onto the boat safely. We spoke to the staff there so they’d know we might need a boost on the way off, and they were fine with it. Everyone was very friendly and make jokes at us coming on deck holding bowls of muesli and yoghurt but we were just relieved that we hadn’t been left behind.
The ship was obviously only about 1/3 full and all of the lounges had tons of space, so we settled in some recliners that had a view out of the starboard side of the ship. The services included two cafeterias, a bar, a movie theatre, a truckers’ lounge and a VIP lounge. The upper decks had the best views and that’s where I went to watch us leaving Wellington. I would have caught more views but spent most of the trip at the I-Site desk (staffed by a highly capable Mark), working out our South Island plans. Meg and I had timed out our week there using driving times (but we found distances were distorted when roads wound through mountains) so we went over that with him. Mark revised some of our times, made tons of recommendations and convinced us to focus on Doubtful Sound rather than Milford Sound. After several calls we were booked in for a campground that night and had tickets for glacier climbing and fiord cruising.
South Island, Sandwiches, Seaweed and Seals (dead and alive)
We were only about 30 minutes away from our destination so Meg and I caught the last views of our trip from the top deck and watched the islands and trees go by as we pulled into the town of Picton. It was pretty but we had to get going, this was the first of three days of lots of distances to cover in relatively little time, the South Island being large with large gaps between attractions. The road was in good shape and we made nice time, enjoying sea and sand vistas from this not too twisty coast road. We stopped for lunch at a seaside pullover spot and had to protect our sandwiches and eggs from clouds of seagulls. While walking around, I noticed that one of the rocks was actually a seal and watched it waddle around while eating lunch. We strolled along on the other side of the point and found huge clumps of seaweed, a dead seal on the beach (sad) and a pool full of seaweed that reminded Meg of a pearl necklace. Further on a rock barked at me and this time it was a family of sea lions telling us not to get any closer. We watched them for a while before heading back to our van and continuing.
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| Spot the sea lions! |
The road passed by many more beaches and through a few stone tunnels, one telling us not to pass trucks in a tunnel barely wide enough to pass our van through! Through good timing, our next break occurred in wine country and we pulled over for a quick tasting before hitting Christchurch. We tried three reds and bought a bottle of their excellent Pinot Noir to keep for our final night in NZ.
CHRISTCHURCH CAMPING AND QUAKES
Back on the road, our GPS helped us to find our campsite just in the nick of time (before dark). We had chosen it because our guidebook was published before the Christchurch earthquake and this was the only one we could guarantee would be out of the red zone (the affected area). We easily got a powered site and pulled in just as the rain started. It poured most of the night and we both got our coats soaked moving things into the kitchen and laundry. It was annoying that night, but it was really the only bad weather we had during our entire stay in NZ, so we were exceptionally lucky on that front. As we cooked and laundered a few people came by, but for the most part we had the room to ourselves. We talked to some people who had been living in the campground since the earthquake and were still waiting for their insurance to come in and to find out if they could ever move back to their homes. One fellow also fascinated Meg because he worked in a slaughterhouse putting a bolt into the heads of 240 cattle a day. We camped in the kitchen, talking to the few people coming through, organizing our things and leaving the oven on with the door open for some badly needed heat.
By bedtime, the rain had let up a bit so we got settled into our dry bed and listened to the drops on the roof while we fell asleep. At 3:30 in the morning I woke up thinking that someone was rocking the van trying to get in. Then I thought that high winds must be rocking it, as they had in Wellington, but I couldn’t hear a breath of wind. Finally my head cleared of sleep, and in a moment of clarity, I remembered where we were. Later, we found out it was a 4.9 quake, certainly the largest I had ever experienced.
Friday, Sept. 2 Perilous Pass- Precocious Parrots at Scenic Pullover
We awoke and everything was intact, Meg had slept through the whole thing (sigh, as usual, ed.). The previous night we were worried about the chance of snow in the forecast as we were travelling over a mountain pass and snow could close the road or require chains (which we didn’t have) to be worn. The forecast was clear and an old guy in the kitchen said that we shouldn’t have much trouble.
We packed up and headed towards the mountains. Along the way we marveled at the 30-foot high trimmed hedges that surrounded many sheep farms, it seemed to be a lot of trouble to go to for a rural property. These weren’t small hedges; someone would have to take a crane for half a mile to cut the top of these suckers flat. We noticed that the closer we got to the mountains, the more the fields were covered in frost and later snow.
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| Our snowy drive into the mountains. |
Ominously, an ambulance raced by us and then we stopped when a police car blocked our side of the road. A car ahead of us had gone off the road and over the edge because of the ice! The thought of turning back went through our minds but the constable suggested that we’d be okay if we drove sensibly. While the road was bare in the sunny parts, it was sheer ice in the shade, however the tires on our van looked new and so we forged ahead. We couldn’t go too fast as we were behind a large truck. We followed it up and down switchbacks, across icy patches and through several clouds of thick mist as we headed towards the pass. We pulled over for a break at an almost impossibly pretty mountain lake surrounded by mounds of snow – the lake glistened in the sun, reflecting everything around it. It came complete with an outhouse (much appreciated, ed.) and some locals having a snowball fight.
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| A nice place to take a break. |
We continued on, slipping in front of or behind the truck depending on who had applied the brakes and when. There were very few cars on the road, which put little pressure on you if you were driving switchbacks at cautious speeds. We went through the town of Arthur’s Pass and then began our slow descent. At a scenic pullover (with no view) we saw some Kia birds in the lot. They were mountain parrots that we assumed would be shy, but came right up to us and hopped on the van, blocking our exit. Apparently they are very curious and have strong beaks. They’re notorious for pulling the rubber insulation out from around car windows and windshield wipers.
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| Our campervan plus curious parrot. |
We proceeded onwards, continually surrounded by views of snowy mountains and rivers and all of that good stuff. We had made excellent time and were seeing the under-populated Wild West coast. We drove a little further and stopped for lunch in Hokitika, which is famous for its greenstone. We didn’t need the jade but grabbed a nice soup with a chicken and mushroom pie from a little bakery that had a gourmet cheese room. It also had some kind of indoor bee with live bees visible behind glass, whose honey you could purchase.
Tears of the Avalanche Girl- Day before Glacier Hike
After that it was a shorter than expected drive along the coast to the Franz Joseph Glacier. It was named this because the explorer who took credit for discovering it wanted more funding and so named it after a rich and easily flattered European ruler (the one from the movie “Amadeus”). The Maori name (Ka Roimata o Hine Hukatere) means “tears of the avalanche girl”, much more expressive. We checked in at the adventure place about our hike the next day and got our wristband passes for the local hot springs. The places in our guidebook all sounded similar but the first place we went to (Chateau Franz) offered us an ensuite double for $50, hard to beat. Not to mention they also had free popcorn and free soup at 6 pm. To stretch our legs, we took a hike up the hill to an old abandoned mine site used to produce water flow for the town. The project was long abandoned but the entrance was still there. We got about 250 metres in and then the water got too deep, even for Meg’s hiking boots. It’s too bad, as it went much further and we could hear but not see people deeper into the mineshaft. We splashed out and headed back to town, picking up
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| Meg explores the ancient mine shaft. |
groceries on the way. Meg had a nap and I got some typing done. At 6 I grabbed some soup and it was a pretty good vegetable soup with curry flavor. We then got dinner together and ate away from the TV as they were showing Jack Black’s Year One which hurt to watch. After eating, we headed to the Glacier hot Polls which weren’t nearly as nice as the ones we went to near Rotorua, but were still quite relaxing. They had three pools of warm water that were from natural springs and then heated with gas. They were nice, but if we had paid the $25 entry fee we’d have been disappointed.
Back at the backpackers we had our only negative hostel experience in NZ. A bunch of drunken hormonal kiwis (Meg referred to the girls as being harpies) kept howling and shouting in the kitchen and I asked them to quiet down, which they did for about 3 minutes. After I drifted off, Meg had to shout at some American boys who were cranking up the TV volume at midnight. The noise from the kitchen and TV room carried all over the building and it was the noisiest place we had to deal with. We figured out later that the problem was that we were close to ski country and we dealing with in-season tourists, who ranked much higher on the yee-hah scale than off-season tourists.
Saturday- Seventeen Scared Souls Scale Gargantuan Glacier
Obnoxiousness was not limited to Kiwis and Americans as at breakfast two German women were shouting at each other at 7 in the morning and two guys working on the building complained about all of the dishes that hadn’t been done by our irresponsible housemates. We got our stuff together, packed the van and walked to the adventure centre to go on our glacier hike. We got splash pants and crampons and Meg got a raincoat to prepare for our hike. The crampons were kept in a fanny pack until they were needed. Then we took a 10 minute bus ride to the parking lot and another ten minutes through the woods and then we could see our destination. It was like an avalanche of ice between two mountains covered in gravel with just a bit of that “glacier blue” visible at the very top. Our approach to the ice was over a dry riverbed and we noticed that we took a more difficult hike through the woods and over the rocks than most people. We figured that this was to weed out the people who might not be able to hike a glacier if they had difficulty on normal land.
We got closer and closer to the glacier as we walked between mountains with pencil-thin waterfalls coming off them. Our first glacier trek was a very steep path over what looked like a gravel pile, which was really about two inches of stone over the ice. As we crossed over this pile we really got to see the textured plane of ice in front of us and sat down to put our crampons on. Our guide Chris reminded us both of our nephew Kaleb, and his job would be a very cool one to have. (Owen said, “Who does he remind you of?”, and I immediately thought of Kaleb- the mannerisms and resemblance were uncanny) He stopped regularly to give us information about glaciers and seemed very interested in his work. He had wounds on his face and legs so we figured he did adventure climbing on the ice in his spare time. Chris said it would be cool when this coast of NZ had a big earthquake and he hoped to be there for it. Chris also mused that it would be best for the island if all of the people were removed and the whole place declared a wilderness reserve.
We learned how to put on crampons (little ice picks for your boots) and headed to the ice. While we waited a Kia was hopping very close to us, completely unafraid of people. It started to go for our guide’s lunch (but Owen thwarted its plans) so it then squawked at us indignantly until well after we had left its territory. As we headed on the ice Meg wasn’t too confident (I was the oldest there by 15 years and not happy about potential breakage, ed.) and so stuck close to the guide but soon got the hang of it. You had to make sure that you lifted your feet and smacked them down into the ice which made a satisfying crunch when you walked along the ice steps. Our guide brought an ice pick and hacked on the ice steps before we got to them. It was a very sunny day which was lucky as this was one of the rainiest parts of the world and had over 200 days a year of precipitation. We walked along ice steps looking down into crevasses and up towards the mountains. We checked out many ice formations, explored a few ice caves and on our way back squeezed through a crack that I thought was
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| Happy that our ice cave isn't collapsing onto us. |
impossible to get through when I first saw it. Some of these caves were icy blue-others green, they all had their own colouring. The experience was unique and provided a real rush, everyone was quite positive on the way back. Among our group were a nice English couple and a large number of Malaysians who had very little English (and thus accidentally went into verboten areas, to our guide’s consternation).
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| More glacier action! |
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| Don't do what the stick person does! |
Winding our way to Wanaka and Weird movies
We hiked back and hopped on our bus into town, about 30 minutes later than we would have liked. We quickly dropped off our gear, thanked our guides and got into our van. We had about 4 hours to get through a mountain pass to our next destination of Wanaka. The drive started off very twisty as we went by the Fox Glacier, Franz Joseph’s sibling. It then straightened out and followed the coast heading towards an obvious mountain range. As we ascended we stopped at an awesome lookout over the ocean with sort of flowerpot rocks off the coast. A plaque told of explorers landing in the area, but finding the sea treacherous and the vegetation impenetrable soon moved elsewhere.
The road through the pass was not nearly was winding as I expected and was amongst the most scenic drives of our vacation. Lots of mountains, snow, lakes and rivers. We pulled over at a campground in the late afternoon where we could have camped for a low rate, but no
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| A campground we didn't stay at along the Haas pass. |
electricity meant no heat. The park’s scenery was jaw-dropping, with a ring of mountains around it and a stream nearby. More lovely scenery followed and we made Wanaka just as we were losing light. It was a huge campground and the snow boarders hanging out in front of their cabins, beer in hand, did not bode well for a restful night.
We walked across town, a solid 25 minute walk, to check out the local movie theatre. The 7:15 show was “Billy Te, Te Movie”, which we knew nothing about. The theatre was attached to a café and you could have steaming bowls of food brought to you while you sat. They also allowed alcohol so we got a beer, a gin and tonic and small popcorn for our movie experience. The theatre was full of old couches and easy chairs to sit on, with traditional seating at the back. It even had an old car to sit in and pretend that you’re at a drive-in. The previews included funny low-budget films made by people at the theatre and clips from NZ films we’d never heard of. The feature itself was a documentary on the life of a Maori comic/singer who became an iconic variety show host until he died young of heart trouble. It had a lot of insight into the treatment of Maori people and Kiwi culture during the 70s and so was kind of interesting. There was an intermission (which reminded us of films in Istanbul) and the smell of fresh-baked chocolate chip cookies wafted into the theatre. This was a very cool place.
On the way back we got the impression that drunken 17 year olds were the main inhabitants of Wanaka. Big trucks kept driving back and forth along the main street, going much faster than they should have. At one house there was a lot of whooping and a drunken naked kid yelled at us and waved his unimpressive reproductive equipment in our direction. Back at the campground, we heated up dinner in a kitchen full of young snowboarders drinking beer and playing cards. All the tables were taken, but we found that the TV room was deserted. That’s the problem with young people today; they’d rather play cards than watch TV! There was some sort of code there, as when a plastered girl started squawking and wouldn’t stop she was told to leave until she calmed down. A few people seemed to realize that as long as things didn’t get too loud, no complaints would be made.
Close Encounters with Russell Crowe- the Prequel…
The TV room was set up stadium style around one TV and we had a fine meal watching the film Gladiator, starring Russell Crowe. (Coincidence? I think not- see Sydney blog for more on me and Russell, who is technically a Kiwi, not an Aussie). We went to bed fairly late and slept well, we were in a family area and thank goodness none of the noise of the partying made it to our section.
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| Kids these days! |
Sunday we slept in fairly late and were amazed that the kitchen wasn’t more of a disaster after the night before. We headed downtown to the I-site and they helped us to book the plane trip over Milford Sound. Meg asked whom to e-mail about how good the I-Sites were and they suggested she contact the prime minister (shades of Flight of the Chonchords...). We drove on towards Queenstown along a short road that turned out to be the twistiest part of our trip. Most of the way was along lakeside roads with mountains behind us but as we came into town there was a long series of hairpin turns that gave the steering wheel a real workout.
LOTR PART 2 (Frodo Flies to Fjordland!)
Queenstown is the central area for skiing and adventure touring (bungee jumping was invented here) so we avoided it and stuck to the area close to the airport. We did some food shopping and had lunch before going over and checking in at our flight office. The staff there was very helpful and went out of their way to book our campsite and tomorrow’s tour pickup for us as we didn’t have a cellphone. We grabbed a coffee and then went back for our flight. On the way down Meg and I were the only passengers so I sat up next to the pilot with Meg behind (how cool is that! I smartly took an anti-nausea pill as the last time I went up in a small plane,
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| Milford Sound by air. |
over Nazca, was disaster. Trouble is it made me sleepy so I missed some of the flight, Ed.). The views were amazing, flying just over (and almost skimming) a mountain range, crossing frozen and wet rivers and lakes under a sunny sky. The view was so much closer than what you’d get on a commercial jet and seeing the topography slowly unfold in front of you was stunning. After about 45 minutes we emerged in Milford Sound, which resembled a Norwegian fiord (hence the fact that it was part of Fiordland) and we circled the length of it before landing. While there, we took a short walk to the beach for ground-level views of the sound and had our first experience with sandflies. These are really blackflies, similar to midges or no-see-ums. Apparently they’re the most harmful species to humans in NZ (i.e. nothing in NZ is really harmful, except for Sauron) and they’re quite annoying. (Video can be seen at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YRNwuxtYCSs )
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| And on land. |
On our trip back we were full with 9 passengers and Meg and I got the worst seats over the wing because we had the best ones coming down. Our route was slightly different and we saw NZ’s highest waterfall, fed from a bowl-like frozen lake and a few different river valleys. It was well worth the extra cost and is something we’ll always remember (the part I was awake for, Ed.).
At the end of the flight we needed to make time for our next stop, Te Anou. The roads out of Queenstown followed some beautiful lakes but weren’t crowded at all. They straightened out as we headed further and we pulled into our campground just as the sun was setting. We stretched our legs by walking along a nearby beach where three photographers were catching the sunset over Lake Te Anou. One of them took our silhouettes at the end of a dock; let us know if you see it on a calendar somewhere! Our
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| Getting arty at Lake Te Anou. |
campground was huge, with all types of sites, cabins, a motel and a lodge. The kitchen and TV room were very modern and clean and we spent a good evening there. The campers there were very interesting, as they weren’t chatty at all but everyone was chopping vegetables and cooking real food, not ramen and jarred pasta sauce. I have no idea what that means. The evening was very cool but we had our heater and so slept well.
Monday- LOTR PART 3- the Fellowship Sails to the Silent Sound
We got up the next morning and barely had time to get ready before our bus showed up, we were the first ones picked up on the route. The driver was very chatty and enjoyed telling stories about the town and we were his first passengers of the season (their springtime. We picked up a friendly Australian couple and a friendly American couple and a quieter Brit. The drive down was lively, but we had to meet up with another bus. It passed us without stopping, so we turned around and headed back to the meeting place. Along the way the bus passed us the OTHER way so our driver pulled over and made a call. (This was very funny to all of us, including our driver, who was pretty laissez faire, not so sure what the driver of the other bus thought! Ed) Eventually the other bus pulled up to us and we took on a bunch of extra passengers.
We got to the harbor and boarded our ship/boat. We sat with the American couple, he was a retired child psychologist/published mystery writer and she was a speech therapist teaching for a term at a Christchurch university. We had a fine chat, sipping coffee and cruising along beautiful Lake Manapouri , with the captain occasionally making announcements as we passed interesting parts of the area. We landed at an interpretation centre mainly concerned with the nearby power plant and then boarded a bus, swatting sandflies all the way and then squishing them against our bus window. Our bus driver was also our guide and knew the area well. The remote road was the most expensive one built in its day, mainly to set up construction for the power plant. The road was narrow but afforded great views as we descended through the rainforest to Deep Cove (permanent population: 1) to board the boat to Doubtful Sound. Apparently Doubtful Sound isn’t a sound at all, but a fiord, sounds being formed by water erosion and fiords formed by glacial scraping. Whatever the cause, it was what we imagined Norway to feel (or the land of the elves, Ed).
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| A typical Doubtful Sound moment. |
Twenty-two kilometers later, at Deep Cove, we passed an outdoor education centre and then said goodbye to a couple who were overnighting in the sound (lucky bastards!). We boarded a second boat and started our proper tour of the sound. We ate our lunch listening to the commentary of our nature expert and split a bottle of wine with our American friends. The boat went out into the Tasman Sea, where the water became much choppier and they had to close the bow viewing area. We saw some sea lions reclining on the rocks and turned around again to further explore the sound. There were high rock walls, waterfalls that fell so far down that they became mist until reconfiguring themselves on some rocks, snowy peaks and thick vegetation. (If you saw the movie “The Mission”, multiply that
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| Doubtful Sound waterfalls. |
waterfall by ten and you would approximate the ones we saw, only they were a lot thinner, ed). At one point the captain shut off the engines and asked everyone to be quiet for a few minutes so that one really got a sense of the presence of the place. From about 30 meters away, we even saw a few little penguins scurrying up into their nest.
Bond Sneaks in to Dr. No’s Underground Cavern and saves the world!
We retraced our steps back and stopped at two huge tunnels that were the outlet for water from the hydro power station. The second one had been drilled by the same machine that did the France/England Chunnel. We popped into the power station on the way back, driving for 2 kilometers underground until we hit the viewing area. The lake we were on was 190 metres above sea level, so by having it flow into the sound they can generate electricity. The generating room looked like something from a Bond film but the time spent there was a little long for what it was (unless you liked to pretend you were trying to infiltrate a huge operation to do some evil scheme, and had to sneak past the guide and the twenty other tourists to flip the switch, turn off the power plant and save the world, ed).
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| Inside the power plant. |
You can skip this scintillating (not) bit (Ed)
We headed back across the lake, got the boat, then the bus back into town and said a fond farewell to everyone. It was amazing how a day where you’re mainly sitting back and taking things in can seem so tiring, and this was. We had dinner and caught up with the news on the TV. All of it was about the upcoming World Cup of Rugby and we talked to a British man and French woman who were here just for that event. They were still getting over the time change and headed off to bed early. We charged up our electronics, amazed that we had yet to use our converting generator; everything just needed the adapter for the differently shaped pins and had no trouble with the 220 voltage. Weird. Then bed.
Tuesday – We were in no rush, so we took our time over breakfast. Our drive today was to Dunedin, on the other side of the South Island but along good roads. The main excitement was when we got caught behind a house on a transport truck that was so wide that they stopped cars coming the other way and got them to pull over so they wouldn’t get crushed. After about 10 minutes the house pulled over to let us by.
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| A truly mobile home. |
Hexagons and Hogwarts
The GPS led us down some strange streets but we ended up finding our hostel called Hogwartz, which was up a long flight of steep steps. The room was really nice; the walls were burgundy, the bed had an old fashioned iron bedpost, we had a reading lamp; a wardrobe and shelves on which to hang our clothes and unpack our backpacks as well as our own sink. (We were chuckling with glee, delighted with our good fortune in finding a room like this for only $50 per night. Similar to Harry his first night at Hogwarts, I expect, ed). Meg tested the bed while I went to the town square (actually a hexagon), got some travel info and took advantage of the city centre’s free internet service with a pint of draft at hand. The sun came out and life was good.
Tourist Traumatizes Ranger over Squawking Sea Lion and the Tale of the Procrastinating Penguin
After I came back we drove out to the nearby wildlife peninsula (Otago) to the unflatteringly named “Sandfly Bay”. It was actually a beautiful place; you had to trek across a green paddock full of sheep and
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| Sandfly Bay, note the lack of flies. |
traverse steep sand dunes to reach it. Meg lingered at the top as there was a sheep field with lambs frolicking about. They knew she was coming, as signs warned people to leave the beasts alone during lambing season. Back on the beach, about 8 huge sea lions were snoozing there and we watched one come in and slowly make its way up the beach to have a rest. We were to avoid them at all cost if they showed interest in us and not to get between them and the sea. The ranger (Graham) was there and Meg reprimanded him for getting too close to a sea lion. The fearsome beast reared up, seemingly preparing to attack him as he got close. She apologized most profusely when Graham identified himself and explained what he was doing (some DOC seal tracking thing). (But if he had turned out to be a tourist I may have saved his life by warning him to get away from the animal, so there, I think, ed) He showed us what he said was a penguin through his binoculars but it just looked like a blob on a rock.
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| The only yellow-eyed penguin we could spot. |
The yellow-eyed penguins were the main attraction on the beach. Their daily custom was to return to the beach nest as the sun came down to regurgitate food into the mouths of their loved ones. They were so timid that it anything (usually humans) on the beach scared them they’d turn around and go back to the sea for the night, letting their family starve. This meant that we were to freeze (or quietly sit down) if we saw one and all tourists were directed to a viewing blind at the other end of the beach. We walked to the blind, passing several more sea lions and arrived to find it full of tourists waiting for something to happen. One tiny penguin had landed and was very slowly hopping up the adjacent hill. He was going so slow and stopping so frequently it would be midnight by the time he got to the top! Despite Graham’s enthusiasm, it was on par with watching paint dry, so most tourists headed off. These included a group of Germans we had encountered at the Waitomo Caves hostel, the Franz Joseph glacier trip and they turned out to also be staying at Hogwartz. Coincidence? We think not… (They were probably following us, due to our Russell Crowe connections, ed) Back at the blind, Graham came over and was concerned about a particular penguin who should have returned. One possibility was he was eaten by a shark, not a rare occurrence. We chatted with Graham for a little longer but it was clear we’d see no more little “happy feet” so we pushed off and made it across the huge dunes as the sun rapidly set.
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| Sea lions at Sandfly Bay (calendar shot). |
The sheep were still out in their field, as they would be all night. Barns are almost unknown in NZ and animals just deal with the weather. We saw a few prize horses wearing coats as they grazed but all of the other animals were on their own. It was pretty dark by the time we got back to the van and night driving was something we hadn’t done before. This probably wasn’t the greatest place to start, as the twisty road out of the park was under construction, the shoulder was eroded, and on the other side a steep cliff dropped to the icy waters below. We slowly made it back to the city, luckily encountering only 3 or 4 cars along the way. We were doing well and congratulating ourselves on our map reading skills when we made a wrong turn that had us headed back to the unit scary peninsula road. (Luckily Owen was able to do a 3-point turn before we got run over, and we got back on the city-bound road).We had a few wrong turns and one-way streets, but thanks to our GPS (Sean) we were able to find our way home. Got a great parking spot and then got dinner underway. The kitchen was completely full and we wouldn’t have gotten a spot on the stove if we hadn’t spotted a second kitchen off to the side that we called squatter’s rights on.
After dinner we headed straight downtown to celebrate – this was the first day after Labour Day that I hadn’t worked since 1992 and that demanded a cocktail. I wanted to have it equivalent to 9 am Eastern Time but we didn’t want to stay up until 1am so we clinked glasses at a demure 9pm. The place Owen chose, Carousel, was described in the Lonely Planet as having, “a late 30s crowd looking pretty much pleased with themselves to be seen somewhere so deadly cool”. Sounded like just the sort of place we never go to –hence our #1 choice for that evening. We were happily underdressed in our stinky hiking attire, but we cared not… Our potions
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| And what were you doing on the first day of school? |
were tasty and we slurped them rather than sipped. I quaffed a second one and Meg had a cappuccino (which was either on the house intentionally or by accident). Upon returning to Hogwartz, read our muggle books, and had a delightfully enchanted sleep.
Weds. MOERAKI’S MARBLES
Once again we had the luxury of being lazy, lingering over breakfast and taking our time packing up. We went to the I-site for info and got some milquetoast information on tourist options at Christchurch – whenever we got the younger workers at these sites we felt that we only got the official version of things. Meg picked up a DVD on Maori Culture and we headed off.
This is a Maori myth about the creation of the Moeraki Boulders…
In the dream time, there was a giant mother and father who were only able to have one child, whose name was Moeraki. They lived on a lonely coast far away from other giants, and there were no playmates for their son. Every day he used to stare out to sea and pray for a friend or playmate, but the only company he had were the seals and seagulls. On the day of his fifth birthday his father gave him a special present; a set of marbles each one as big as a man. He gave his son a big net to keep them all in. Moeraki was delighted and played with the marbles every day, and polished them until they shone as bright as the sun. He was so proud of them he took them everywhere he went. One day a seal companion of his asked him if he could see the marbles. Moeraki was eager to show them, but he opened the bag too quickly and they all fell out, one of them killing his friend. Moeraki was so distressed by this that he threw all but one of his marbles into the sea. The seals watched this and they kept vigil over their dead cousin for three days. After that they left special scratches on the coast showing it to be a place of tragedy for seals and abandoned the place, never to return. And that is why to this day, you will never find a seal by the Moeraki Spheres. But under the hill Moeraki dreams with his remaining marble, waiting for the day the scratch marks will fade, and the seals will return.
(Okay not a Maori legend, kudos if you noticed the Australian reference... I made it up…ed)
Highways along the coast were nice and quick and neither of us were planning on stopping at the boulders site, but we saw a sign along the highway and remembered reading about them in the guidebook. These are huge, perfectly round boulders that sit in the surf and gradually erode. They’re formed like pearls, with calcium building around a core underground, and then they get unearthed by erosion and tossed on the beach by gravity. Very fun to see and try to clamber onto (very cold water around them!) and an excellent driving break.
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| Big, round rock, conquered! |
CANADIANS CHASE CHEESE – CHUNKY CHEDDAR IS CHOICE …TRES CHIC!
Our next break was in Oamaru because it was supposed to have one of the best cheese factories in the country (The Whitestone Cheese Factory and Café). It did. The restaurant part of the factory had a free 3-cheese tasting that hooked us so we ordered the 6 cheese platter for lunch. While waiting for our platter, we went to the viewing area to tour the factory, wishing we had the opportunity to do a Gilles Duceppe and wear hairnets and have chunks of cheese thrust into our faces. All we had was a view behind thick glass of workers cleaning up after a hard morning’s work and of a room filled with huge wheels of slowly moulding wheels of blue, which were turned twice daily to keep their round shape. Back at the restaurant we got our platter, resplendent with generous cheese chunks, crackers and bread and an amazing quince puree. They gave us a description of all of their cheese and instructed us in the order of devouring them (mildest to strongest). Alas they weren’t licensed so instead of wine we had a nice frosty glass of milk with our meal. It was all YUM and we ended up buying some quince puree along with old cheddar and smoked cheddar – these served us well in self-catering situations well into our trip.
We then walked around Oamaru as it contained some of the best preserved Victorian buildings in NZ. The local I-site had a video to tell us why. Oamaru was a boomtown that was once as big as Los Angeles, but then the ships went to other ports and it shrank. While it was booming, trees were scarce and almost all of the important buildings were made out of durable limestone. During its downtime, no one wanted to tear the old buildings down because there was no interest in developing things there. The end result, beautifully preserved buildings and a reason for tourists to come there in the 21st century. There was a woman our age at the I-site and she admitted that the one thing to do in Christchurch was to walk around the earthquake site and see the damage and a year’s worth of work (not much).
The drive into Christchurch was simple and we made good time back to the same campground we stayed in before (no earthquakes this visit, though). As we were getting dinner together we realized that we had left some food and Tupperware back at Hogwartz. Oops, but these are the normal casualties of travel and changing rooms almost moving every night (and certainly not the last time we do this). We ate well, planned for our upcoming trip to Australia and went to bed.
Thurs. EARTHQUAKE AFTERMATH- CHRISTCHURCH ONE YEAR LATER….
We started off by booking a cabin for our final day in NZ, giving us more space to repack our things and get organized for the flight to Australia. We drove downtown and found a parking spot in the botanical gardens and then took a walk downtown to circles the red zone. This area is far from a rectangle, as we often went a block down a street before seeing that we had to retrace our steps. There were people everywhere doing the same things as us and all access points were guarded by the army. Brick and stone buildings were often crumbled and all of the churches had lost their steeples, which were often sitting on the ground next to their cracked and broken buildings. Most buildings looked fine but others had obvious cracks in them or bits of the top that had crumbled.
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| Christchurch, post quake (check out what's written in the window!). |
The vision that had the most impact for me was not the images we saw in books of people being rescued from high rises, or twisted bridges, it was one you could miss if you weren’t looking in the right place. We were walking by going what appeared to be a normal looking building with a café inside. It had a sign “closed until further notice”. We looked through the windows and saw a forlorn sight..the chairs were upside down, some turned over as if the patrons had just left. There were overturned paper coffee cups, the specials on the board, and most chilling of all, the newspapers from that date in February sitting visible on the counter by the window. We couldn’t talk for a while after that, as we absorbed the impact of the earthquake on a personal level.
All the buildings in the red zone had codes spray-painted on their windows and notices regarding their sate of damage posted on their doors. The famous cathedral was in the centre of the red zone and couldn’t be clearly viewed. After walking for almost 2 hours around the zone perimeter we had lunch at a café on its fringes. It was very busy with the locals and one of the few active businesses so lose to the red zone. (Across the street was a fish and chip shop which was closed due to damage). A hip server gave us a vinyl record (75rpm) with a number painted onto it (typical in NZ- you order at the counter and pay and they bring you your food when it’s ready) so they’d know where to drop off the food.
After lunch we continued our hike and saw what looked like some wreckage but was actually some mangled bits of the twin towers donated in recognition of the Christchurch firefighters' participation in 9-11. We could get closer on this side and could see that some skyscrapers were not sitting straight and how few of the dangerous buildings had been demolished so far. There was a continuous flow of contractor trucks coming and going from all sides. A crowd formed in one area to watch a backhoe smash an old apartment building to bits. As we cut close to downtown we saw holes in the road and cracks in the pavement. We spoke to a friendly pensioner who had just gotten out of hospital (unrelated thing) and had witnessed the quake. He said that usually quakes went up and down or side to side but the bad thing was that this one did both, and reduced most building foundations to sand. He said that his house was badly damaged but he was still hosting the reception for his daughter’s wedding there and life had to go on.
We walked around to the art gallery, which was not open despite the tourist literature. The staff at the gift shop (which WAS open) recommended the local museum, which had just re-opened the week before. Alas, time was getting on, so we chose to return to the gardens and had a 45 minute run past the fields and by the Avon River (which you could pay to punt on). Back at the camp, our cabin had good heat and a TV and other amazing luxuries! We made dinner, re-organized all of our stuff and went to bed.
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| Meg with fallen spire. |
Friday, Sept. 9 Fond Farewell to the Land of the Long White Shroud (New Zealand)
We got up and finished our packing, filling Leo (our van) one more time and being glad that we had booked a proper cabin for our last night. We parked by the botanical gardens again and headed to the I-site, whose staff didn’t have a lot of information but told us of a nearby post office. We headed there, hit an internet café to book our Sydney hostel and had a coffee in a nearby café/technical book store. We then drove Leo to the Spaceship port and were met by a very laid back guy who didn’t hassle us at all and offered us a free lift to the airport (what a contrast with the staff in Auckland). We also gave our fuel canisters and some leftover food and laundry detergent to some very grateful campers who were just starting out (good karma). The Spaceships guy said it had been busy as people showed up for the rugby world cup and he said that they were a very different sort of clientele. He told us his story of his son’s day care being in the red zone and running to get there to find him-the longest 20 minutes of his life- luckily the son was okay but the car park in front of the daycare was all torn up and destroyed by the quake.
We were early to the airport, but not so early that we could visit the nearby Antarctic Centre, oh well. It was our first time flying Emirates, which had the most competitive price and we were disappointed that they didn’t have backpack bags for us (big plastic bags). While we waited I spent the last of our NZ money on a weekly Guardian newspaper and a bag of chips. We got aboard with no problem as the flight was only half full. I speculated that so many people were coming to NZ for the rugby that planes were flying off nearly empty, explaining the great rate we got. We had everything complimentary including some surprisingly good food and lots of movies. Meg was surprised that an Arabic airline would serve alcohol, but they did (go Emirates!). The hot towels were also appreciated. After such a lovely flight, what could possibly go wrong?
