New Zealand, Part 1
13 Dec 2004
Well, here I am finally starting some mail. I wish I had been able to work on this as we traveled, but it just wasn't possible.
We were extremely busy and generally very tired when the days ended. It was all I could do in the evenings to unload the digital cameras and organize and rename the photographs.
We arrived on Monday 22 Nov after leaving VA at about 3:00 PM on Saturday 20 Nov. Sunday just vanishes with the crossing of the date line. Our flights took us from Richmond to Washington Dulles to SFO to Sydney AU to Christchurch NZ. We would not have done the layover in Sydney if we did not want to spend a few nights there on the way back. (This saved us quite a bit in air fare.) Anyway, it was a lot of flying. The SFO-SYD flight is about 14 hours. However, in spite of all I had heard about how dislocating this might be, I think we did quite well. We both stayed up until very late by our normal clocks, about 3AM, then took a sleeping pill. I slept about 8 hours solid and woke up about 2 hours out of Sydney. We were still sort of weary, but not totally whacked out. The 2 3/4 hour flight to Christchurch was semi-bumpy but dull and we were tired but basically OK when we got through customs and met Roman and Tracey, picked up our rental camper, and we on our way to a hotel for the night. We had time for a bit of walking and dinner. We both felt "on time" and "in place".
Email was difficult. We were camping most of the time, and while the campsites all had internet access of some sort most do not support connecting a computer. For the most part you have to use the facilities provided by the campsite. I brought a wireless card but it's only in the biggest cities that this was even a possibility.
22 Nov 2004
This was our arrival day .. we left Richmond on 20 November and arrived mid afternoon on 22 November. Christchurch is on the south island, about 1/2 way up the east coast. It was warm and sunny, and felt like California. We picked up our camper (we got the 2 person "hightop"), and headed to the hotel, got checked in, ate something, walked around a bit, and were done for the day. It was initially very weird to be driving on the left, but I got used to it fairly quickly. Everything is just flipped from driving in the US. The only exception seems to be the very strange NZ traffic law requiring you to give way to someone that wants to turn right in front of you when you want to turn left into the same traffic lane. In the US this is the opposite. Anyway, now that I have been back a couple of days I am still flicking the windshield wipers on our car on and off when I think I am going for the turn signal. They are on the opposite sides in NZ. I also thought it would he hard to adjust to shifting with the left hand, but this was not a problem either.
Christchurch is the big city on the south island, and I wish we had been able to spend some more time there. As it was we were up and out the next morning.
23 Nov 2004
We left Christchurch in the morning, and drove down NZ 1 to through the Christchurch suburbs, past Timaru, and then to Oameru.
There are two penguin colonies in Oameru and we visited them both.
On the way we passed miles of beautiful NZ beaches and forest, although this is rolling and not mountainous country.
I have to say that at this point I was still attentive to the fact that I was driving on the left and working a stick with my left hand. I definitely had to pay attention, but it was not as gripping an experience as I thought it might be. The traffic circles (what few there are) were easy to deal with and int general driving was not bad. I'll write more about this later.
We passed through several smallish to medium sized towns on the way, Timaru being the largest, and they were striking in several ways. First, NZ is still the land of small shops. No big box stores, no huge department stores. It's like the states was 40-50 years ago. I like it. You can also tell that these towns all developed before car culture. The main road goes right through the heart of town, which although it might only be 7 blocks long and 3 wide, is still the heart of town. The best thing about all of this, and I hope the Kiwis appreciate this and work to maintain it, is that all of these towns are functioning towns with vital town centers. If you want to do business in town, go to town. Your bank, grocer, electronics guru, bookstore, butcher, clothes shop, all of it, they are all downtown. If you live out of town, you drive in, park, and walk to everything. It's wonderful.
The first "colony" of penguins consisted of just a very few Yellow Penguins nesting in the brush high above the beach. These penguins are could be photographed up close so I have a couple of shots:
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That's the mom and a young one to the right. I think the young one is yapping for food and Mom is basically telling him to shut up, it's coming.
The second colony of blue penguins is a more endangered species (I think) and they are said to be much more sensitive to light, so we were not allowed to photograph them. I am not sure I could have got close enough for anything decent anyway. The way we saw these birds was very interesting, to say the least. We were all herded into a grandstand (!) that has been specially built by the penguin observatory. We then proceeded to sit around in the cold and wind and rain (covered though) waiting for the penguins to arrive. Sure enough, just about sunset (9:00 or so) they all show up in groups of 10 to 30 in "rafts", as the groups are known, and swim ashore to sleep for the night in shelters that have been built for them by the volunteers that work for the conservatory. All very interesting and strange.
So no pictures of the blue penguins, since they would not let us, and it was dark and raining by the time they showed up anyway. They were fun to watch however.
24 Nov 2004
We drove from Oamaru to the Moeraki on the 24th, mostly to see the Moeraki Boulders. Before getting to those, I should include this:
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I could include shots like this above for every day we were on the south island, and most that we were on the north. The current sheep census for New Zealand is something like 40 million, and the human population is about 4M. This shot actually doesn't have very many sheep in it compared with many I could locate and send, but I include this now because we started seeing them almost immediately out of Christchurch, and after a while they all look the same (although we were to learn later that there are 19 different varieties). So anyway, we were constantly driving past very green fields and hillsides that were covered with the critters.
The Moeraki boulders are on the east coast south of Oamaru. They are spherical concretions that are being freed by coastal erosion and then slowly rolled into the surf and broken up by wave action and the sand. They are quite spooky looking and there are some that are visible coming out of the low cliffs. I shot some film here both at sunset (the first shot) and sunrise (the second). There were some other people around mid afternoon but they all vanished towards sunset. No one was around at sunrise (about 5AM).
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25 Nov 2004
We camped at the Boulders on the night of the 24th, and on the 25th we headed off inland on NZ 85 towards Alexandria and then Queenstown. Along the way we of course saw about 2 million of the 40M sheep. They really are everywhere. Parts of this drive are quite windy, and grinding up and down the often narrow always two lane roads can be slow. One other feature of New Zealand driving is the one lane bridge, which I will illustrate with a photo later. There are hundreds of these bridges, some of which have hidden sharp curves at one or both entrances. There are always signs indicating which direction has right of way, but you always have to pay attention. And when I say "one lane", that is what I mean. These bridges are barely wide enough for a "heavy goods" truck (an 18 wheeler), and you do see those on all NZ highways, no matter how remote you think you are.
In many places close to the east coast we saw these:
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Some of you will recognize those as "California Poppies", the state flower in CA. I don't know what they call them in NZ.
Queenstown is a beautiful small city in a stunning location. It is on a large lake, Lake Wakatipu, and is surrounded by tall mountains, including the aptly named "The Remarkables". It seemed to me to be a combination of Monterey-Carmel, someplace in Napa county, Truckee, and maybe some small town in Oregon. You can do "wine country" things, ski, any water sport on the very large lake, hike, whatever you'd like to do outside. The mountains are beautiful. I don't know this for a fact, but my guess is that there are a lot of second homes here belonging to Kiwis in Auckland and the (few) other larger (relatively speaking) cities. It's a beautiful place.
On the way into Queensland is the original A J Hackett bungy jump site, the Kawarau Bridge. Sharon has talked about bungy jumping for as long as I have known her, and although it hasn't come up as often in the recent past it was still there. Our friend Roman had also mentioned doing this, and we agreed to "just stop". So we did. For the hour or two prior to arriving Sharon had been knitting away as I drove, and I am sure she did not know where we were when we pulled in. She was surprised, we went out on the span to watch some total nut cases, er, serious fun lovers, take the plunge.. One thing led to another, and Roman and Sharon were vowing to do it together. Since every couple needs one sane person, both Tracey and I declined. We went in, signed them up, got the cameras, and 30 minutes after Sharon dropped her knitting we have this. I think a few of out of the sequence are worth looking at, just for the full effect..
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A lot of bouncing around here .. and then ..
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You can see that they basically bind your ankles and lower legs up with towels and Velcro, attach an enormous rubber band to your legs, and off you go. They can allegedly calibrate your fall so you enter the water as deep as you want, or not at all. Our heroes elected not to get wet. So they were retrieved with what amounts to a grappling hook, put in a raft, undone, and then they hiked back up.
Fun!
So they don't look particularly crazy, do they? Or do they?
This jump is 43 meters, about 140 feet. In Auckland you can jump off the Auckland bay bridge. This is 3 times as high. Fun, eh? Also run by Hackett.
In Queenstown we stayed here, as it was our 10th anniv. The management messed up our booking, so we wound up in the very large suite that is the upper left windows in the photo. Beautiful place overlooking the town. We had a couple of nights here, and two great dinners, here and here. Queenstown is a fine place to spend time. Could have spent a couple of weeks there hiking and taking it all in.
The weather while were there was very mixed. It went from warm and sunny, feeling like summer, so a cold rain and very windy, feeling like winter. In fact one of the nights we were there, making the 15 minute walk from the restaurant back up the very steep hill back to the inn, when the cold rain turned to snow! And this is in what should be summer there. Several people complained to us about the unseasonal cold wet spring.
Many times we would hear comically elaborate weather forecasts .. much of the time it seemed that they amounted to "The weather today will be more or less like yesterday. You know, cloudy, or partly sunny, whichever, unless it isn't; rain, unless of course it is 'fine' (a term of art in Kiwi weather - means 'sunny', or perhaps 'not raining'), or maybe partly cloudy, unless of course it is mostly fine. Which it might be here, where we are, but not where you are, where it will probably be different. Or not. Maybe. And it will be windy, from the north, south, east, or west. Strong and gusty. Probably. Or not. There are gale warnings in effect somewhere."
26 Nov 2004
This was just a day of wandering around Queenstown. Here are a couple of snaps. The first is an amusing T shirt, shot through a window.
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Part of Lake Wakatipu.. this is a very large S shaped lake. You can see only about 1/3 of it here.
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One part of the waterfront.
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27 Nov 2004
On the 27th we left Queenstown for the drive to Milford Sound, a very small town (really just an elaborate boat landing and a few small hotels) at the southeast end of Milford Sound / Popiotahi, a real live sound, or fjord. The southwest corner of the south island is all very mountainous and wet. Most of it is included in Fjordland National Park. Not many people at all live in this corner of NZ. It's cold and wet and remote, but quite beautiful. We had to drive a very elaborate "U" shaped route to get to Milford sound, south on NZ6, west on NZ94, and then north on NZ94 at Te Anu, the last community of any size in this corner of New Zealand.
The goal once here was to take a boat ride out into the sound, spend the night on board, and then visit an underwater observatory the next morning on the way back.
Most of this drive was winding, very green, and beautiful. We had a fabulous sunny day for this, which is not typical. Although the reputation of the Milford Sound area is that of constant rain, this is not quite true. We were told that there are probably 100 days of the year that it does not rain. But we were also told that brilliant sunny days are unusual. That's what we had. The drive was terrific. We stopped at one point north of Te Anu along the Eglington River for a couple of hours. At this point NZ94 runs north south parallel to the river and just to the west the mountains are 60-90 km from east to west and completely free of roads. Very rugged. Lake Te Anu is the endpoint for the river but we did not see much of it.
Here are a couple of shots taken at our stop.
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I believe these are purple lupin. We saw yellow, pink, and sort of orange.
Once to Milford Sound we took an overnight cruise on this. The trip out was beautiful. Sunny, cool, no clouds. Here are a few snaps.
This is the dock itself. You can see that there is a noticeable amount of touring here.. There are helicopter tours as well as flights in from Queenstown and other airports in the south island. We were thinking of flying in since the drive from Queenstown is about 4 to 5 hours, but didn't. It is very possible that you could fly in and not be able to fly out due to weather the following day.
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Once on the boat this is the sort of thing you see for the 10km or so out to the Tasman Sea. That waterfall is over 500 feet tall, so you get some idea of the scale of things here. It's hard to tell exactly what you are looking at and how large it is until you are right on top of it. The cliffs are between 2000 and 3000 feet.
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Here's that waterfall again. I think that for sport the tour boat operators like to nose their boats right into these falls to show their customers the rainbows. One of the side effects of this is that the customers get soaked. Har! (See that band of bare rock right at the water line? That's about 6-8 feet wide.)
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Milford Sound gets over 7 meters (22 feet) of rain every year. It is not unusual to get several inches in a day. When that happens the cliffs come alive with small and large waterfalls. Really vertical streams. And the large waterfalls can simply burst over the cliff sides:
Needless to say I did not take this, although I wish I had been there. This was taken by Craig Potton, who I would call the "staff photographer" for New Zealand. He's been everywhere and taken some very nice shots. I wish I could have done the Antarctic desert book he just finished..
Random Milford Sound view.
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Here are the falls again. Still very hard to tell how big they are.
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This shot of a rainbow under the falls was taken as our driver was attempting to give us a shower. We got to within 20 feet or so of the cliff. What a joker!
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In the evening they put us out (if we wanted to) in kayaks. This was great fun but I wish that the kayaks had been a little better. I did not fit in mine very well. Still, no way I would have not done it. The water is very clear and cold.
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These guys came out to check us out.
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Looking back at the boat. On the way back about 7PM. Pardon the non-level horizon. Hard to shoot and stay in the kayak at the same time ..
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