Author: Chris C.

[update: added panorama and a couple other photos]

We took our time in the morning getting up and out. Wednesday had been a long day and we needed the rest. Plus we figured we were letting the first wave of annoying tourists crash through the Fox Glacier park. When we got there it was indeed crowded but not so bad. A well-worn path led from the large car park up to the “terminal face” of the glacier along a lively river (coming from the glacier, carrying curiously GREY water). One the way we had to cross two streams … Fording raging, boulder-strewn streams is not Sharon’s forte; her stubby little legs just aren’t suited for hopping from rock to slippery rock. She made it over though (hooray!) and the glacier was big and green/blue and dirty. It was probably smoother and whiter farther upstream but that costs big bucks for the helicopter ride or big calves for the hike. We made it to the terminal face, in fact we went a bit too far by inadvertently following a guided tour group past the ropes. You can see Sharon (tiny) in the second image here, in the lower left of the image. Below is a panorama of the scene; for scale, you can again make out some people in the lower left.

We trekked back to the motorhome, did a drive-by of the other glacier 20 minutes up the road (the small photo here), and then stopped at a lake by the road and had lunch. Then we set in for the longish drive up to Greymouth, a mix of twisty mountain roads (which Chris is quite tired of now) and flat straight runs through farmland. Our arrival in Greymouth, intended as a shopping respite for Sharon, was disappointing as all the stores were closed. It was 5:15pm, and everything was closed already. What is it with everything closing at 5pm in this country? Don’t these people need to break even? The hours aren’t even posted so they can close early. Grrrrrr. We found a jade store that was still open — staying open “late” for some lingering customers — and we picked up some swag and got the hell out of there.

We spent the night at a holiday park on Rapahoe Beach about 10 miles north of Greymouth. Our campsite backed up to the dunes and overlooked the ocean. We walked through some flax plants a few feet and were on the beach. Once again, this was a rock beach with billions of ocean-rounded rocks of all sizes. Sharon filled her pockets, carefully evaluating each stone. We walked a bit down the beach to the Rapahoe Hotel and Restaurant. More of a bar that happens serves food, it was filled with happily mangy locals drinking beer, playing video games and gabbing. When we walked in the way was blocked by a big golden retriever who immediately got up and plopped back down a few feet further into the bar. Stella, as she turned out to be named, was there with her family. Stella later molested her beloved Homer Simpson doll (note mangled head in photo). After a “jug” of beer, a whitebait sammie for Chris and fish and chips for Sharon, we walked back up the beach to our camper to watch the sun set and settle in with the ocean waves crashing by us.

Tonight is our last night in the camper and while we won’t exactly miss it, it has been very comfortable and we’ve not come even close to killing each other. Chris is a master now at driving and our last day in it will be heading across Arthur’s Pass to Christchurch where we’ll turn in the camper and catch a flight back to Auckland.

[update: added two panoramas]

Spent the night at Makaroniko up the lake from Wanaka. We were a bit surprised in the morning to see a small plane land on the other side of the road. They were carrying tourists on short flights around the region.

We drove on to the Mount Aspiring area for several hikes. The first walk was in a fern forest at Cameron Flat that lead to an overlook of a river.

We found this weird fungus on the way. Sharon’s been buying field reference guides to local flora and fauna, and every time we get back to the campervan following some exploration she dives into her books to try to figure out what in blazes we just saw.

We went up a long gravely path to the top of Haast overlook. It was quite steep and we were feeling rather bold and adventurous for doing this climb, until we were passed by an older couple and then a man carrying a baby. Germans, of course. Ha! We are losers. Well, anyway we made it to the top.

Next was Fantail falls where a partially dried out river bed has been taken over by crafty travellers. There are stacks of rocks all over the rocky bed which is next to the river which is right across from the falls. We made a few stacks and went on.

Haast? The actual town of Haast is a bit Cromwellian (read: weirdly plastic and dull). From there we drove out to Jackson Bay.

On our way to the glacier area we took a longish walk to a beach that (supposedly) had crested penguins. We were there around 5pm and they don’t come ashore until later so we didn’t see any, but we had a lovely walk through a dense lush fern forest on the way. It had a long suspension bridge over a roaring river and really good trails. We encountered a fearless fantail bird that was catching bugs we were stirring up. Here’s Chris next to a giant fern frond.

[update: added panorama]

We’re really hurting for internet access (and time) to keep up with these posts … We started the day in Cromwell (poor, pathetic Cromwell), got breakfast and got out. Drove into Queenstown through the river gorge that leads to it — beautiful (duh) but a different kind of beautiful … very arid, like eastern Washington State (or so we think), with a big river coursing through it.

Queenstown itself is a very very touristy alpine ski town, in a picturesque setting but still swarming with human beings. Sharon swears that she saw someone wearing a Branson Missouri t-shirt, and not ironically either. Fortunately we knew this going in and only planned to spend an hour or so just poking around. And that’s exactly what we did and then high-tailed it out of there.

Arrowtown was back up the road a bit and we stopped there to visit a Chinese Settlement. Set back from the town center along a little trail, it shows how Chinese immigrants came in the late 1800’s to work the hills for gold. They had several restored stone huts showing how the men lived there for years with the intention of eventually returning to their families after finding their fortune in gold.

Back on the road, we headed to the town of Wanaka, on the shores of Lake Wanaka. Stopped at a Dept of Conservation info center for hiking trail information for the national park that we were about to drive through. We got kebabs froma cranky Turkish lady and sat in the shoreline park and devoured them.

Finally we got back on the road and left Wanaka — and civilization — behind. This would be the last time we even had cell phone coverage for two days. We pulled up in Makarora and camped for the night under a gorgeous starry night.

[update: added dam info and panorama]

Spent the night in Otago at a holiday park and then in the morning went to the Royal Albatross colony at the end of the Otago Penisula. It was interesting to hear all about the alabatross. They’re huge, for starters — their wing span is about 10 feet across. They mate for life, hatch a chick and then the chick gets fed and kept warm for many months and then flies to sea alone. The birds stay at sea, sleeping and eating and will stay at sea for about 5 YEARS. Then they return to breed. The colony is (of course) on a high windblown cliff side. Unfortunately we only got to see an adult one when it was fairly far out at sea, but it was really big and obviously an albatross — they have big wings that barely flap at all and they fly so low they are practically skimming the waves. In this picture at left is a shag colony (sort of a cormorant kind of bird) and the little smudge of white in the lower right is an albatross chick. Really.

This is a shot off the albatross colony cliff. At the bottom is bull kelp, a massive seaweed that washes up on the beaches. We encountered some dried kelp on the first Pacific beach a few days ago (the one with the black pebbles) and that dried kelp is strong as steel.

And then we hit the open road. The next destination was to be Queenstown and the pass west through the mountains to the west coast. As we headed west and slowly gained altitude, we chanced upon the Roxburgh Power Station — billed as “the greatest engineering feat in NZ”, at least in the mid 1950’s when it was completed. That’s Lake Roxburgh (manmade, obviously) piling up to the left there, and that lake stretches back upstream for 20 miles.

We finally encountered a living hedgehog (albeit one-eyed) on the highway! Up until now they’ve all been mashed by cars. As we left the dam (not another soul in sight, by the way), Chris spotted it in the road. We got up close to it and it peeped once and just sat there even after we tried to shoo it out of the road. Darwin at work.

We spent the night in Cromwell about an hour outside of Queenstown. Cromwell is a former gold mining town from the late 1800’s. It’s now been built up a bit with new construction and looks like a Las Vegas ghost town crossed with the weird barrenness of Westworld. To Chris it felt like the subdivision in Poltergeist (“you only moved the tombstones!”). Its current claim to fame is its orchards, apparently (see photo). More fish and chips for dinner.

Potpourri:

Chris is obsessed with the hedgerows that rise with military precision between fields of sheep and/or crops to act as windbreaks. He will taunt his dad with many pictures of them when he gets home.

More funny names: Muttontown, Remarkable Peak, Mount Damfool, Mount Inaccessible.

Gambling on horse and dog racing is legal in NZ, as is prostitution.

We crossed “the longest bridge in New Zealand” somewhere south of Christchurch. The folks here have a very generous definition of “bridge”. A causeway 10 feet above the ground is not a bridge, mates.

The houses here are charmingly small and often have well-tended gardens of roses and dahlias in the front yard. There are also many conifers and eucalyptus; very similar to the coasts of California. We’ve passed lots of orchards down in the south island; plums, cherries, apricots, apples, olives.

Us!

On to Queenstown …

[update: added two panoramas]

Penguin day!

We left Timaru and headed south via the coastline to Oamaru where they have both a little blue penguin colony and a colony of the more endangered yellow eyed penguin. Penguins feed at sea all day long then return to their burrows in the evening to rest. The little blues had only recently (in the ’90s) started nesting in an abandoned quarry on the coastline and a viewing area had sprung up around it.

The blues are the smallest penguins in the world. (There are only 17 kinds and most live in NZ.) This reserve colony has been set up with man-made nesting boxes that are just barely big enough for the blues to get into but too small for predators (e.g. cats, dogs, etc.) to get in easily — at least not with a penguin beak pecking back at them. Every evening the penguins come back from their day at the sea, clamber up the rocky shoreline and head into their little burrows in the field by the coast. And waiting for them is a grandstand full of penguin nerds. It was noon when we got there and the usual flock of penguins would not be arriving back from the sea until 8pm or so, by which time we would be long gone down the coast, so we instead got a look at the three moulting penguins stuck in their nests waiting for their plumage to replenish (takes a few weeks). We could get a look into their nests via a darkened hut that the boxes backed into. Sorry no pictures of live little blues; none allowed. This pic is of two stuffed (~sniff~) guys in a glass box.

As a consolation prize, we walked out on the cliff face along a treacherous path that took us above some shag nesting sites. Actually, we didn’t see them at first, until we noticed one looking up at as, and carefully leaning out we could see that dozens were right there below us.

Around the corner of the bay was a coastline where yellow eyed penguins roost. The yellow eyed penguin is the most endangered penguin in the world. This colony is one without a shop / ticket area; just a viciously windblasted pathway along the top of a cliff to the top of the hill overlooking the bay. There was one lone penguin waaaaay in the distance and one other set of people watching it with binoculars.

We set off for Dunedin a few hours down the road. Dunedin itself seemed perfectly charming, somewhat Scottish looking — apparently it was modeled on Edinburgh but how would we know. We made a brief stop at the Speight’s beer brewery (“Pride of the South”) and then continued out of town to the Otago peninsula, which is where our campground and more wildlife destinations were.

The drive out on the peninsula was spectacular. Breathtaking! Or gut-wrenching, in the case of Sharon peering down at her imminent death on the ultra narrow and twisty roads.

A yellow eyed penguin colony conservation center, aka Penguin Place was set up on the Otago Peninsula. This one has been there for over 20 years. It’s at the base of a steep hillside that ends in a bay. The reserve has set up long, deep trenches that are covered by camoflage and allow visitors to make their way through the penguin nesting grounds without disturbing the penguins. It felt rather like a battlefield, with Chris thinking of WW1 trench warfare and Sharon feeling like she was in Viet Cong tunnels. Tour groups of about 15 can go through this maze of trenches/tunnels to viewing areas (where your peer out at ground level through slots high in the wall) and peer out at the penguins ambling by. As with the little blues, many are entering their annual moulting season where they regrow a new set of feathers. They must sit on land for about 4 weeks without fishing for any food, because the new feathers aren’t waterproof as they come in. They fatten up in the weeks preceeding and then must conserve their energy during the molt. If startled by people they can become so alarmed it uses up their fat stores and they may eventually starve to death before they can finish the moulting. These penguins come ashore off a blustery coast in the midst of seals lounging around and the ever present sheep. The yellow eyes nest in the forest up from the beach.

Special guest blog appearance by a sheep!

Had dinner at the 1908 Cafe in Portobello just down the street from our holiday park. The 1908 is an old residence that has been converted into a assorted things over the years, including a post office. It’s a grand little restaurant with excellent food. We had a bottle of local pinot noir and Chris had venison with mashed roasted vegetables and Sharon had pan-seared cod with passion fruit/chile sauce. Really a fantastic restaurant and our waitress Emily (“Emmalay”) was a doll.

Waking up in Kaikoura, we headed out to Point Kean, where there are seals right there on the rocky beach. Another one had wandered up in the bushes. Then we hiked up to the top of the cliff to overlook the ocean. This was going to be our best chance to see any whales (breaching out on the water) because we decided to skip the whale tour option (by boat or plane) as they are exhorbitantly expensive, and there actually aren’t any whales out there so it would be very dicey to try to see just one. No whales seen from shore, but more stunning views – blah blah blah!

We hit the road for Christchurch, stopping along the way at a lavendar farm that had a gregarious farmer and equally gregarious sheep. Christchurch itself seemed dull and we got back on the road after a pointless hour in the cuty center looking for a break. Sorry Christchurch. We’ll return to catch our flight back to Auckland on Friday.

Timaru was next, and we just overnighted there in a holdiay park. The host (owner) checked us in late and chatted us up about American politics, which a lot of people seem very interested in here. They are all assuming that Obama will be the next president. It’s hard to get them to talk about their own politics though (they have a big election coming up this year too).

Some Odds and Ends:

There are ducks in every holiday park (campground that we park our motorhome in), sheep on every hillside, and sea gulls everywhere we go.

There are no billboards on the highways. Just the occasional handlettered sign pointing off to a farm with eggs or fruit or “vege” for sale.

In addition to the sheep and cows there are some deer farms. Venison is one of the many animals eaten here. Oh, and so are wallabys apparently.

The money here is beautiful. The coins have the Queen on the face and Maori designs on the flip side. The paper money isn’t paper at all, but a soft plasticy bill a bit thicker than a grocery bag. They have transparant elements and are very sturdy.

Here are some funny place names from our NZ atlas: Taylor’s Mistake, Mount Difficulty, more to come.

Internet access is tough here! We rarely have it in the car park, so we have to rush these posts at internet cafes …

Leap day! Here in Wellington they’re celebrating by bungy jumping off a high bridge. Any excuse, I guess.

We headed to the South Island via ferry this morning. The ferry boat is a huge cruiser that has ten decks. The bottom one is for rail cars, the next up for regular vehicles and the rest for passengers. It’s very nice and civilized and takes about three hours to cross over. They have rows of seats lined up like on an airliner, but much more roomy, and swivel seats by the windows. They have a cafeteria, a games room, and even a small theater (showing Atonement, of course). Sharon bought two little bottles of champagne to celebrate our voyage. Chris spent much of the trip on the top deck being blown around while taking far too many pictures as we entered the Marlborough Sounds on the way to docking in Picton.

After getting off the ferry, we drove west a little bit through more twisty mountain roads with gorgeous views of the water to our right and unbelievably verdant tree fern forests to our left. We’re getting tired of twisty mountain roads though. Then we headed south through the wine country of Renwick and Blenheim … guess what, we don’t really care that much about wine country, so we pretty much blew right through that and headed for the Pacific. And an hour later or so we had our first sight of it! (shown here).

We passed a road called “Wharanui Beach Road” and turned around to go back and get our first close-up look at the Pacific. What we found was a remarkable black pebble beach — no sand or even dust, just black pebbles of various sizes, from rice grains up to golf balls. Sharon was quite happy exploring the pebbles!

We continued our drive down the coast, heading towards Kaikoura. We knew that there was a roadside seal colony on the way there, and we weren’t disappointed. Two words: Baby seals. Not just baby seals, but FOUR baby seals all jumping and romping on each other (look closely at this picture). Oh, and a couple dozen adults …

We finally arrived at Kaikoura, checked into another holiday park (yes, with the ubiquitous ducks) and walked down to a nearby restaurant for dinner. We have a confession to make. We’re really bad at seafood . This place is swarming with crayfish (big ones; might be rock lobster) and green mussels. We hate them both. We like fish and some other forms of seafood, but those two (and oysters) just creep us out.

We finished up with an hour of internet access at an internet cafe. We are sooo starved for internet access ….

[update: added three panoramas]

Parking our campervan behemoth in Wellington was probably going to be impossible, so we parked it at the Porirua train station and took the train in from the suburbs. We were quite worried about the safety of the campervan during our absence …

Wellington is a bit like Auckland in landscape, but more “lived in” and less sterile. Lots of business people doing their thing — and government-looking types, since this is the capitol city; here you see the parliamentary buildings, including the “beehive”. We headed down the main shopping drag, and turned into a shopping district called Cuba Street that was much like Little Five Points or Haight Ashbury. We stopped in at Tattoo City where Dan was scheduled to mark up Sharon’s right arm that evening. She looked over drawings and made arrangements to return at 6 pm for the work.

That taken care of, we wandered into the National Tattoo Museum, which varied from underwhelming (poorly lit displays of dusty artifacts) to mildly interesting (mounted printouts of webpages) to embarrassing (modern tattoo artwork). Fortunately we didn’t go too far out of our way or pay too much.

We then headed back down to the bay to the National Museum of New Zealand, aka Te Papa (Maori for “The Museum). Maybe we’re burned out on museums but it wasn’t as impressive as Auckland’s or Rotorua’s (more below, however). We had a tight schedule so we got out of there and took a stroll along the bayside docks (and shot the panorama below).

From there we then walked over to the Lambton Quay area to catch the cable car up to the top of the mountain on that side of town. At the top of the cable car landing was the lovely Botanic Garden with a spectacular view of Wellington city and harbor below.

The gardens are many acres of winding paths that eventually work their way back down to city streets at the bottom of the hill. When in wooded areas we keep hearing the “clapping cicada”, which is a cicada that makes deep clicking noises in addition to the regular cicada sound. In fact, the cicadas were deafening! We worked our way to the bottom of the hill through the gardens (and the obligatory stop at the duck pond) and caught a bus back into the center of downtown and the tattoo parlor.

Sharon and Dan set to work on the arm. The tattoo that Sharon and Dan designed incorporates the Koru, which is the Maori spiral symbol for the life cycle, and the fern, which is the national plant (and one of Sharon’s favorites). This picture shows the tattoo right after it was finished. It’ll be a little different after the swelling goes down and the healing starts. Sharon has two tattoos from two different countries where tattoos are a huge part of the culture. While Sharon was in the chair for 3 hours, Chris went back to the Te Papa museum and was able to spend a full hour in their excellent whales exhibit — a special exhibit on another floor that we’d missed the first time through. Te Papa has been redeemed! Chris also tried to get up to the top of Mount Victoria to get a nighttime view of the city but missed the last bus …

Sharon’s tattoo now finished (apparently with much pain), Dan generously offered to drive us back to Porirua train station to pick up the camper. He lived only 5 minutes away from Porirua and said that that area was gang-infested and dangerous at night and he didn’t want us going there at night, alone. Oh. Well, we pulled into the station parking lot to find our campervan intact and unharmed! At 10pm we pulled back into the Porirua campground — this being the second night there, and the only time this trip that we’ll stay with the campervan overnight in one place twice!

We’ll end with a shot of the campground. Obviously this is a view up the heavily forested hillside; you can see the huge eucalyptus trees, which are native to NZ and seen everywhere, and NOT invasive like in California … If you look close you might see a duck or two in the picture.

We started today by backtracking a little bit to a small river that Chris had spotted on the way to the campground last night. Just a few hundred yards off the main road, we found some rapids of a river that was coming down off the Tongariro range. Lots of boulders to jump around on (and risk ankle injury).

Then we headed briefly up into the mountain village, couldn’t get far, and headed back down and got on the road to Wellington. Stopped at some waterfalls along the way, lots of twisty, difficult driving as we pulled our way through the mountains.

Sharon found more meat-flavored potato chips at a convenience store.

We arrived at the Tasman Sea coast in a small city called Wanganui and headed straight for the beach. Despite appearing to be a real destination, with beachhouse showers and parking and everything, it was essentially deserted — perhaps because of the weird location (we had to drive through an industrial area to get there), perhaps because it was off-season and a Wednesday afternoon. Anyway, it was an incredible unspoiled beach (the first of many, we’re guessing) strewn with various natural detritus all over a sea of coarse black sand. We got into our bathing suits and ran into the water up to our shins … and bolted right back out, shocked from the cold. So then we just sat around in the sun and wind for a bit. Chris wandered up to the top of the dunes and took a few pictures of the surrounding neighborhoods and the bay and coastline in the distance.

Hit the road again, continuing towards Wellington. We arrived in a town named Porirura (basically a suburb north of Wellington) and pulled into Camp Elsdon. It’s a little family run holiday park on a hillside. They have several donkeys, lots of ducks, a sheep and a goat milling about and a cawing peacock. Also lots of campers playing frisbee and dogs romping. We got some takeaway fish and chips and settled in. Tomorrow on to Wellington.

We started out the morning searching for wireless to be able to keep all of you updated on our gripping travels … and ended up at a Starbucks of all places. Then, off to a Kiwi Conservation Center to view a wildlife park and a special conservation center for the endangered (and adorable) kiwi bird. This breeding center takes laid eggs from the wild and raises them up to the age of one year and then releases the bird back into the wild. Once the bird has reached one year it is able to defend itself from predators: dogs, cats, possums, stoats (aka weasels) and such. There used to be millions of kiwis but now there are only thousands left and the population gets smaller all the time. They may live up to 100 years old but none have made it that far yet because of predation and habitat loss. We got to see the incubation system and brooding cages and get right next to three of them in a special nighttime habitat for about a half hour. An adult kiwi is actually quite large, about the size of a large chicken, with a huge back end and a long beak that they poke around for grubs with. It’s extremely doubtful we’ll see one anywhere but a zoo or center like this.

Then we went to a thermal area to see more sulphur pools. This one was a Maori village that had grown around a thermal area that had a large geyser at the center (which blew every 45 minutes or so). The sulphurous stench is quite strong and while you’d think you get used it, you do not. The pools are extremely hot, near boiling 200 deg F at the surface and hotter as they go down. They will hang food into the pool (corn, cauliflower, meat, etc.) to cook it within minutes. The Maori cultural event wasn’t running today (it was kind of a low rent operation) and the village looked … forced. It also didn’t help to have the street urchins working the tourists for scraps (coins, food) and otherwise tearing around the place. Also, once again the Chinese have represented themselves well as repulsive and rude tourists. Yay!

We drove out of Rotorua, arriving at the beautiful Lake Taupo in time for an early afternoon snack. On the lake we could see a sailing class in progress (with about a dozen little sailboats, some not sailing too well and the teachers on motorboats running around helping students) and across the lake in the far distance (about 20-30 miles away) we could see the mountains that were the day’s destinations.

We drove into the Tongariro national park area, which surrounds three huge volcanos. We eventually settled into a holiday park (lodge + huts + tent sites + campervan sites) that advertised views of all three volcanos, and the view didn’t disappoint. Chris was able to take a great series of panoroma shots. One of the mountains, Ngauruho, is also known as Mount Doom in some famous movie about fairies. Our campervan was backed onto a huge meadow fringed in the distance with forest, and we could hear all sort of nefarious natural things going on out there as night fell. Chris was able to get a quick look at the cloudless night sky, seeing the stars of the Southern Hemisphere for the first time, and the Milky Way splashed across the dome. And, believe it or not, Chris thinks that the space station made an appearance! A bright light made its way across the sky, in the right direction and speed for ISS, and having seen it cross over so many times, he’s sure that’s what it was. We just need to confirm it once we have the internet and time to goof off with it …

We had sandwiches and Sauvingon Blanc for dinner. We tucked in with the heater on and lots of blankets.

We’re on really slow internet connections so not a lot of pictures for now. Once we have a better connection, we’ll go back and add more to these.