Crossing the Divide

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Tuesday morning we left our riverside hideout and continued southwards with the aim of getting to Queenstown by Friday, when their annual Winter Festival started.

An early start made sure we saw the scenery at its best, with ferns still coated with frost, some beautiful areas of hanging mist and clouds of steam pouring off the obviously thermal Bruce Bay beach. We stopped at Ship Creek for breakfast, with the cloud really starting to fill in and it looked like the forecast was right for once and bad weather was on its way.

As you travel south down the west coast road there comes a point where you can go no further, as you hit the great mountain ranges of fjordland and are forced inland. These ranges isolate most of the southwest corner of the south island, that is apart from where a few roads have been shoe-horned between mountains and through tunnels, eventually making it to the coast. So at Haast village we turned left, away from the coast and headed east for 30km, passing Thunder Creek Falls before making a 90 degree right turn to take us south again through the Bealey Range over Haast Pass as we cross the Southern Alps.

Originally part of the ‘supercontinent’ of Gondwanaland made up of Africa, Australia, Antarctica, South America and New Zealand, the country essentially sits on two separate continental tectonic plates (the Indo-Australian and the Pacific) that are moving past each other. In NZ’s South island this join has created the spine of mountains that run up the western side to the island and as the Indo-Australian plate moves northwards the shearing action continues to raise the mountain ranges, cause earthquakes, thermal and volcanic activity. Thousands of earthquakes occur every year, most of which are too slight to be felt, but this is not always the case and the threat of a natural disaster is taken very seriously, with radio adverts reminding people to be prepared with sufficient stores of water and food should something big happen.

Driving along the Haast Pass road we saw a number of interesting looking gorges breaking off either side. Picking one at random (Wilson Creek I think), I went exploring and with a bit of paddling found ‘another world’ of carved rocks, waterfalls and icicles only a hundred metres away from the sunny valley. It was pretty creepy being in there on my own, but still amazing and as I didn’t want Lexa to miss out I went back to get her. Now, there was ice on the main road, the rocks were all thick with frost and icicles hung off every wall of the gorge, but none of this prepared Lexa for just how cold the water was. I think years of bare-foot windsurfing in winter had removed a lot of my nerve endings or something, because I didn’t think it was that bad.... Lexa however said she was in agony and that’s about the only one of her comments that I can reproduce here, but apparently she did think it was worth the pain!

Feeling exhilarated by our refreshing dip in the meltwater, we continued on, stopping at the Blue Pool for a quick walk and more frost photos, before continuing past Makarora to Wanaka, one of the South Islands two main centres for skiing.

After checking out Wanaka lake front quickly, we found ourselves at a campsite and enjoying a long awaited shower having been ‘roughing’ it for 4 days since we left Hokitika. Ooooeeuuu!

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