New Zealand -- South Island

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November 21: Today we woke up early and flew from Wellington to Christchurch. Wellington was even windier this morning, with electric bus power lines down and the wind blowing the surf up over the rocks by the shore. The flight down was really beautiful over the east coast of the South Island with pale blue water, hills, and a few snow covered mountains. After we landed, we picked up our campervan and got directly on the road to Kaikoura, up the east coast. We talked ourselves into thinking that whale watching and dolphin swimming sounded like a lot of fun, and then were promptly disappointed when the dolphin swimming was booked up for days and the whale watching company issued a severe sea-sickness warning. We resolved to make another attempt at dolphin swimming later in the trip. We had dinner that night at a nice seafood place, where I had grilled mussels and P had paella. The paella was nice but bore absolutely no resemblance to paella. It was more like gumbo, really.

November 22: Instead of dolphin swimming and whale watching, we went on a nice walk up the coast to sea a seal colony. The trail ran a few kilometers on about 50 meter cliffs with a thin beach below and the Pacific beyond. It was incredibly windy--my hat kept blowing off and we watched the wind make waves through the long grass like it was water. We got to the end of the trail and walked down a path to the beach. Taking advantage of the waterproof boots, I jumped across some rocks to get a little closer to the seal colony, but could still only just see them. As we walked along the beach, we noticed two little black birds (between a pigeon and a sea gull in size) with red beaks that were squawking at us and walking a little closer. Eventually, they took off and started to swoop down at our heads angrily, so we (being more highly evolved) ran away. When we stopped fleeing, we noticed that one of them was sitting on something, so we figured, we must have wandered too close to their eggs. Thank god they don't have bears in New Zealand, eh? After our little walk, we drove out to a sheep farm for a little horse trek. The other folks in the group was a couple consisting of a German woman who was an experienced rider and her French boyfriend who was almost as clueless as us. Our horses were pretty mellow (mine was named Star and P's was a little pony) and mostly wanted to stop all the time to eat the vegetation. They knew where to go (just follow the horse in front) but needed to be reminded occasionally that we were supposed to be walking rather than eating. Anyway, true to form for New Zealand, we rode around for about an hour and passed through teatree forest, sheep paddocks, dry riverbeds, and tussock with snow covered mountains in the background, so it was pretty great. A black and white sheepdog came along, running out ahead and then running back until the horses caught up, and then running ahead again. I imagine that if you're a dog, there probably isn't much that's more fun than running through the woods with a bunch of horses and people. After our ride, we headed off to Blenheim. The road up the coast was really dramatic, with the beach on the right and huge green hills piled up on the left. We got to Blenheim and stopped at a fairly crummy but conveniently located holiday park, ordered some pizzas and had a pretty early night.

November 23: This day we went on a wine tour of the main Marlborough vineyards on bicycles, a tour which is organized by the aptly named Wine Tours by Bike. The key advantage of doing a wine tour by bike is that you don't have to drive a car around. The total distance to cover is probably only 20 km anyway over the course of the day. We got bikes, helmets and a map from the WTB folks and then started making the rounds. We had lovely weather and enjoyed the ride quite a bit. The region focuses on sauvignon blanc, pinot gris, pinot noir, nasty German varietals like gewuertztraminer and riesling, and a little chardonnay and other things. I have to say that of all the places that we visited and all the wines we tried, the only place that really impressed us was Kathy Lynskey Wines, where EVERYTHING was great (and expensive!), including varieties we don't normally like, such as chardonnay. We bought a few bottles there which we slotted into the wine bottles holder helpfully fitted to the back of the back like saddlebags. Patrizia cooked some nice pasta this night.

November 24: This morning we woke up, got diesel and egg McMuffins and checked email before hitting the road to Greymouth. We changed our minds a few times about where to go next, originally planning to spend a few days hiking and maybe kayaking around Abel Tasman National Park, which is supposed to have pretty beachy coastline and woods. However, we figured that we had seen lots of pretty beach over the past few months, but not enough glaciers, so we decided to leave this for next time and head to the west coast. We were originally going to Westport to go caving (or blackwater rafting) but then changed our minds en route and went to Greymouth instead, where a deceptive brochure implied that the caving there was more tame, with no rappelling required and with a bit called the Love Tunnel ("how cute!" I thought). So we called ahead to book a little caving trip in Greymouth and went there instead. Along the way, we stopped at Nelson Lakes National Park on a whim, dropped into the visitors center and picked up a map listing a little nature walk around a lake. The scenery lake was extremely clear and reflected the nearby mountains. We walked for a while along the shore through the fernwoods until we came to a picnic spot where we polished off the pizza from Blenheim. While we were walking, we talked to the folks back in New Orleans (unexpectedly good cell reception in that valley!) and heard the song of a bird that we have named "uccello cellulare" (the cell bird), whose song sounds like a kid doing an impression of the generic Nokia ringtone. We've heard this bird a few more times since then but this forest was full of them. We also stopped at a little roadside picnic spot (nothing special) which had a small crystal clear roaring blue creek out back, and P found a path down to a place where that creek merged with another one. When we arrived in Greymouth, we made a little dinner of refried beans and cheese. Yum!

November 25: This day we woke up and met our tour group for the caving. The group consisted of a French guy named Bruno who is some kind of extreme sports maven (having mastered things like kite-surfing and "multi-sport" whatever that is), a couple of Geordies (i.e. people from Newcastle) and a Chinese-American couple from Cali consisting of a plastic surgeon and his tv anchor wife. (One of my pastimes on the trip was to try to spot where he had improved her.) Our guide was an Australian who had spent 10 years as a jungle guide in the Australian army. Anyway, we put on a bunch of wool and polyprop clothes and then wetsuits and lighted miners hats and wellington boots and hopped in the back of a truck. Then we walked about a mile through the woods along a muddy trail and then into the cave mouth. The cave was called Dragon Cave because the Maori believed that this cave (like all caves) had been created by water serpents. Mitch the guide (getting into the role) pointed out that the Maoris didn't like going into caves for this very reason, and when they had to, they liked to paint themselves with earth before they did. So Mitch illustrated the side of my face (with mud) a shape that's meant to represent growth and prosperity (basically a shape that looks like a fern fiddlehead (for growth) when viewed one way and a fishhook (for prosperity) when viewed the other way). Everybody else put some mud on themselves (P resisted but she got it anyway), except for our tv anchor. Anyway, now we went into the cave, climbing over and around the rocks and sloshing through the freezing water, trying to avoid places where the murky water covered holes much deeper than they appeared. P as usual got over her initial apprehension once thrown into it. After a while, we got pretty far into the cave to a place where there was a slide down some rocks into a circular pool about 6 feet deep. We gave that one a miss and climbed around it (some of the others were in a more bungy-jumping type mood and went for it). Then we got to a place where we climbed onto some innertubes which were piled up in the cave, and went backwards down the cave after switching our lights off. Overhead were thousands of glowworms, lighting up the ceiling with their pale blue points of light. After this point, there was a lot more of the typical cave-type scenery of stalactites and stalagmites, but also lots a globbly ripply formations and waving ridges of calcite hanging off the rocks called bacon rinds. We went down a little further before heading back out a different way, through the Love Tunnel. I haven't the faintest idea why it is so named, because it's basically a narrow, wet and frankly rather terrifying crawlspace culminating wall where there only way though is a hole basically big enough to crawl through only if you're small or if you put one arm through at a time and squeeze. I got pretty claustrophobic during this but only hesitated once at the beginning. It was not as scary as a crawlspace I ran into in a fissure cave outside Austin Texas, because at least here you could see people up ahead with lights, etc. Anyway, Mitch took pictures of us as we crawled through. After this, it was pretty easy getting out. When we got back to the tour company office we had a shower and a little dip in a hottub before having some food, checking email and driving off for Franz Josef. On the way, we did a little of a doubletake as we passed a little settlement (Pukeha) that consisted of a restaurant serving mostly possums and other funny meat and a museum / gift shop with an 8 foot giant sandfly model hanging outside. Anyway, we threw it into reverse and stopped off for some sandfly themed gifts for my favorite entomologist. We got to Franz Josef when it was almost dark walked into town for some pub food. Like in Greymouth, the stars were blazing away, with a few funny things: Milky Way not really visibly, Venus and Mars (or maybe Jupiter) brighter than I have ever seen anything, and Orion's upside down. We also saw a huge number of satellites drifting overhead.

November 26: This day we woke up pretty early to meet a group to go walking on Franz Josef Glacier. We picked up boots, crampons, waterproof jackets and wool gloves and hats and then got a bus out to the glacier. There were 30 people in our group. We got out of the bus and then walked down about 15 minutes through the forest and then out into the glacier valley, where we walked for about 45 minutes. Apparently, a few hundred years ago the glacier went all the way down the valley and beyond, but as we walked through the valley, we could see a partially dry wash running down the center and thin little waterfalls tumbling down the green faces of the valley. The floor of the valley was covered in weathered rocks covered in red lichen, and also the shiny, greasy looking rocks that cleave in flat parallel sheets. Up ahead at the top of the valley was, a big dirty wall of ice with what looked like a river of ice behind it, winding its way up the mountain. Further up, the ice wasn't dirty but instead looked like blue spikes and spires sticking out of the stream. Apparently, Franz Josef (and Fox glacier next door) are among the fastest moving glaciers in the world (up to 1 meter a day). While we were putting our crampons, there was a bit of a crack and a rumble as a piece of ice broke away from the terminal face and tumbled onto the ground. Paul the guide indicated that this piece probably weighed about a tonne. The first 45 minutes of the climb up onto the glacier was probably the worst. Towards the face, there is a lot of dirt and rock mixed in with the ice and it makes the glacier a little ugly. The guides use big two headed pickaxes to cut steps into the ice so we could climb up them, but it's still quite steep and a bit scary when you're just getting used to crampons for the first time. In a lot of places, there were ropes to hold onto while climbing up and in two places we walked across bridges made of stepladders with boards nailed on. These bridges had ropes on the side to hold on to but were still a little scary because they crossed really deep crevasses. I don't know how deep because I made it a point of not looking. After we got onto the glacier and over the moraine (kind of an island of dirt and rock), we were onto a more beautiful section of ice. Paul handed out iceaxes and suggested everyone take them. (Inexplicably, some of the guides prefer that their people not use them. I really don't see how we could have gotten through the day without them...) He showed us how to use the bottom bit for support when walking along and for lateral support when walking through a crevasse and the pick end to help you climb up something. At this point the ice was much bluer (which happens because all the air has been squeezed out by the weight and pressure of the ice on top) and had a lot of really interesting structures in it--tunnels, holes, spires, gullies, tall walls and panels, arches, etc. Also, you could usually hear and see running water as the ice was constantly melting and the water dripping or running down holes toward the liquid water stream that ran through the bottom part of the glacier. This part was pretty straightforward to walk through as long as you had the axe to help you along, except for two bits. The first was a climbdown where you needed to hold onto a hand line to support you as leaned off a platform to reach a foothold (the climbdown was only about two meters high, but it was awkward if you hard short legs). The second was a walk through a crevasse that had filled with liquid slush. There were very small steps cut into the side of the crevasse, but they were hidden under the slush, so you had to lean forward and feel around for them with your feet (getting your boots pretty wet in the process). In order to do this, you really needed the axe to support yourself on the side of the wall or pull yourself up the side, and the group in front of us pretty much all fell in (about waist deep) because none of them had axes. Both of us made it, though P had more trouble because she was trying to follow the girl in front of her's hopeless route of climbing down the crevasse along the wall. Thankfully, Paul stuck his head down and told us the correct way to go and we both made it without incident. Anyway, we saw some great scenery up there.

November 27: This day we left Franz Josef and drove the 21 or so km to Fox Glacier, the next settlement down the coast. We stopped in the settlement for coffee and P copied the map of the trails around Fox from the Conservation Department's visitor center (which was inexplicably closed). Then we drove to the parking lot for the glacier face. The drive was through really beautiful old fern forest, and then pools of bright blue clear water on the valley floor. The Fox Glacier Valley is smaller than Franz Josef but seems much more unstable. There were a couple of stretches where the valley walls were nearly vertical and the rocks making up the wall seemed to have been folded onto their sides by tectonic events in the past. There were lots of rockslides and small waterfalls cascading down the side. The wash had a good sized river of smoky grey water running out of the glacier face, where what looked like a cave entrance had been hollowed out by the river flowing through over time. The front face of Fox was also less dirty than Franz Josef. After a nice lunch, we drove out to Lake Matheson, where there is a 1.5 hour loop walk and really good views of Mt Cook. The walk was quite cool through a fern forest, however the clouds kind of obscured the views of Mt Cook and Mt Tasman. After the walk, we got more diesel and decided to drive on with a view to stopping for the night at one of three government camping grounds on the way to Queenstown. The first was crummy and the second was closed but the third was great.

November 28: This morning we woke up in the campground and enjoyed the lovely views out of the window of the campervan. We couldn't really go outside because of the sandflies, which were pretty fierce. Anyway, we took a few pictures of the scenery and then dove back inside and drove away. The drive down to Queenstown was kind of long but very scenic, through some vineyards, along some bluffs above the Kawarau River and along the cliffs above shores of a beautiful blue lake. We stopped at a viewpoint for some rapids called Roaring Meg at a little hydro plant. We got to Queenstown and I booked some a whitewater sledging trip for the next day. We had been driving past all of these gorgeous blue, crystal clear rivers for the previous few days and I figured this was my opportunity to get into them. Queenstown reminded me a lot of a ski town in Colorado and it's a bit overloaded with rad mondo x-treme sports activity. Bungee jumping was invented here--we saw the bridge where people first jumped off, and still do today. We stopped off at the lakeshore for a while to skip stones and each got personal bests--P got 3 bounces, and I got 6. While we were there we ran into Bruno the French guy we met doing the caves. That night we saw World's Fastest Indian, which is an Anthony Hopkins movie where he plays a New Zealander who set the land speed record for streamlined motorcycles under 1000ccs in the late 1960s. Unlike most people who do this kind of thing, he used a motorcycle from 1920 and tinkered with it for 25 years before going to Bonneville and setting the record. The movie is a bit predictable and consists of Anthony Hopkins getting into scrapes and then charming his way out of it with Kiwi spirit. About half of the movie was filmed in Invercargill in NZ, which is the world's most Southern city, and it got lots of NZ government funding. We had a tasty dinner at a place called Fishbone, including whitebait fritters. Whitebait are basically like minnows, except that they're the juvenile stage of a larger fish. They're translucent and have little black eyes, and you can eat them whole in things like omelets and fritters.

November 29: This day we went to a birdlife park in the morning. We caught a little show where one of the zookeepers was showing off a kea (the world's only Alpine parrot) and a tuatara, among other critters. The kea is apparently really smart but enjoys destroying things like windshield wipers and backpacks if they're left unattended. The tuatara is a reptile that looks kind of like an iguana (but a little more dinosaury), but actually isn't a lizard at all. There are 4 different branches of the reptile family--1) snakes and lizards, 2) crocodiles and their relatives, 3) turtles and 4) the tuatara all by itself. Tuataras have a third eye when they're infants, and the oldest one in captivity (a tuatara named Henry in Christchurch) is 125 years old--apparently, scientists think they could live to be 250 years old or more. They're basically unchanged evolutionarily for about 220 million years--the dinosaurs have been extinct for only about 65 million years. We also finally got to see a kiwi. Because kiwis are nocturnal and a bit shy, practically speaking, you can only see them in the wild if you make a big effort and go to one of the offshore islands where there are lots of them. So we were happy to see them in the kiwihouse at the bird park. They live in a 10m by 5m glass enclosure which is kept dark except that it's lit by a red light like in a darkroom. We went in just as they were being fed, so we saw them walking around and digging in the ground with their beaks. They're pretty big--about the size of a small dog--and are very cute. Kiwis are interesting because they are really more like mammals--they have marrow in their bones (not hollow bones for flying), feathers that are more like fur, tiny vestigial wings, a low body temperature and nostrils on the ends of their beaks. They also lay huge 500gram eggs (compared to a body weight of 2kg), which makes Stephen J Gould think their ancestors were probably several times larger. Oddly, from an evolutionary perspective, they're not particularly closely related to other flightless birds in NZ. After hanging out in the bird park, I went to my river sledging trip. The trip actually left from the same hydro station above Roaring Meg where we had stopped the previous day for a break. We put on wetsuits, fins (for propulsion) and helmets and picked up these hollow plastic sleds with handles that you grab and rest on, with your lower body just hanging in the water. We went down the river through 3 major sets of rapids along the 5km route, then got back on the bus and did the same thing again. It was pretty tiring because you had to kick to go left and right across the river, and going through the rapids was kind of a matter of just trying to hang on as the water tossed you around. In the end, it was pretty manageable and I didn't have any incidents. I did the sledging on the Kawarau River, which is the same river that stood in for the River Anduin some of the time and is where the Argonath were built for the FOTR. When we got back , we booked a big LOTR themed trip with Glenorchy Air for the next day. We spent a long time at the internet cafe and when we finally emerged at 9.20 all the restaurants in town were closed or liked to pull the NZ trick of putting up the closed sign just as you get a few meters from the door (this is the third place this has happened).

November 30: This day we got picked up in the morning by a little shuttle that took us to the Queenstown Airport. The airport is quiet small and we went over to the little desk of Glenorchy Air where we met Robert, the boss and pilot. He explained the route we were going to take on a big map on the wall. Then we went over to the plane, which was a little 4 seat Cessna parked outside. We took off from a grass airstrip and started flying towards our first stop. It was the first time either of us had been on a little plane before, and it's really quite different from the usual commercial aircraft, even the very small ones used by regional companies. Flying in this plane was more like being in a car than a big airplane--in our headphones we could hear the radio conversations between Robert and the air traffic control, and it was really interesting to sit in basically the passenger seat next to the pilot and watch him operate the various controls and try to keep you knees out of the way, etc. We flew over a lake, vineyards and old gold mines before reaching a couple of huge high country sheep farms around Poolburn. Robert looked down at the grass airstrip and saw that there were about a dozen sheep standing around on it, munching away, so he made a low pass over the airstrip to try to scare them off, which was quite an exciting moment. Then we swung around and landed. I found that the landings in the little plane were much softer than in a commercial jet. So we climbed out of the plane at the sheep farm, which has about 100,000 acres and about 30,000 sheep, and immediately saw the resemblance of the country to the Rohan countryside from TTT. As we walked to the first point of interest, Robert explained a little about his role in the filming. His company and one or two others did a fair bit of flying in the Queenstown area for Three Foot Six, in particular taking the producers and location scouts around to look for locations from the air, and transporting actors and production staff and their equipment around. Most of the actual aerial photography was done from helicopters. He tells a lot of good stories about the people and objects he flew and also he happens to know the owners of two of the locations (which is why we were allowed to land on private property). In fact, while we were walking around, the lady who owns the huge sheep farm was driving by in her truck along with her dogs to look in on some of her countless sheep, and stopped by to say hello. The first place we stopped was a gorge where a lot of the Rohan scenes we filmed, including some where the left to right was reversed to get extra mileage out of the spot: Gimli rolling down the hill, Gimli delivering the line about dwarves being natural sprinters, the orcs forcing the orc-draught on Merry, Aragorn finding the elven brooch, etc. I can't wait to see that bit of film again because of all the places we've seen, that one is the one that felt the most familiar standing there. Apparently, the owner of the farm actually pointed the gorge out to Peter Jackson or Barrie Osborne, who were looking for just such a gorge to do some shooting in. We then walked on a while, stopping for a minute where part of the first meeting between Aragorn and Eomer was filmed (I think mostly the bit where Aragorn steps out from behind the rocks and hails the riders). Robert also explained a bit about the natural landscape, which is obviously gently rolling grasslands with big schist boulders every so often. Apparently, the landscape was not formed by glaciers leaving the boulders lying there when they retreated, as I had first supposed, but rather just by the action of the wind grinding the rocks down over the years, in particular when New Zealand was more "Antarctic" and colder and harsher. There's also a particular plant there called tussock, which forms big clumps of tall grass-like blades. They're quite adapted to somewhat arid conditions and have fine hairs which help condense water out of the air. After a while we reached the small lake where the Westfold village was filmed (footage also appeared in the prologue to the FOTR, during the bit about how one by one the people of Middle Earth fell under Sauron's power--there's a guy jumping up and down with an axe in both hands). The only modern structures there were some fisherman's huts, which were covered up with Rohan-brown painted facades during the filming. This place was also quite cool because the natural features are quite distinct and its very easy to imagine the scene taking place there. We even saw a pile of wood with Rohan-brown paint on it, formerly part of the facade and now soon to be firewood. So the we got back in the plane and flew on to the Mount Potts Field Station. As far as I could tell, Robert has a deal with the people who own the local heli-skiing lodge to use the facility as a place to have lunch / toilet / kettle when he takes people up to see the Edoras location on Mount Sunday. Anyway, we landed at the airstrip and ate before taking off again. On the way down and up, we flew over Mt Sunday, which is a lozenge shaped hill of a few hundred meters height a little ways separated from the main hills in this valley. We buzzed around it for a 360 degree view. There were one or two tour groups on top with their vehicles parked down in the valley--the people standing on the hill were useful for understanding the scale of the mountain. Anyway, like the gorge, Mt Sunday is one of the places we saw where you can recognize the location instantly in the movie, and it was a real kick to fly around it, reminiscent of the aerial shots of Edoras in TTT. We also saw the hillface which had been filmed and Helms Deep from a distance digitally inserted. (The Helms Deep set itself was in Wellington, I think.) From there we flew back south over the Southern Alps. We were lucky in that the weather was quite good and there wasn't too much wind, so we were able to fly along the mountains and get pretty close to things. This was pretty terrifying, to be honest, because we were able to fly very close to the snow covered mountains--close enough to see the patterns in the snow as it crumbled away and slid down from the peaks. We were low enough that to cross over the mountains in some places, we had to go over cols or saddles where the mountains were lower and through cloudbanks--so I guess we were flying among or through the Southern Alps rather than over them. We had really great views of Mt Cook, Mt Tasman, and some of the other really amazing peaks. After flying along for a while, we saw the Tasman Glacier, which runs down the east side of the Southern Alps and empties into a lake. After a while, we came to the Pelennor Fields location, which is a field outside of Twizel. This is basically an empty field with great hill and mountain scenery in all directions, and presumably checked for potholes. I understood from Robert that all of the horse-oriented scenes were done there--I don't know about the straight acting bits. There is also an asphalt road running through the field on which they would run trucks with mounted cameras. On one edge, there was a low hill of maybe 5 meters height, where the guys playing the Rohan cavalry lined up before the big charge. Robert told us that the owner of the land had participated in the shooting and described the noise that the 80 or so horses made riding across the field, saying that it made the ground shake. He also said that the extras were meant to try to appear exhausted and scared for that scene. Supposedly for the first few years you could still find little bits of plastic armor and such lying around, but he said it's picked pretty clean now. After we had a look around there, we took off again and flew back to the airport. The landing was pretty amazing because he landed on the grass field at the airport in an extremely short distance. It was pretty surprising how slow a Cessna goes when it's preparing to land.

December 1: This day we spent some time at an internet cafe in Queenstown before driving to Te Anau. The drive was through very sparsely populated country that seemed to be full of sheep stations. After we arrived at Te Anau, we had a very quick look around and then went on a little nature walk around the lake there. We went as far as the trailhead for the Kepler Track, which were the control gates for some kind of locks or dams. Along the way, we heard a huge among of birdsong and passed through woods and meadows. There was also kind of an outdoor aviary with recovering injured birds, enclosures with rareish native birds, and a family of takahe, including one bird described as very elderly on a sign advising you not to try to wake her up if she were sleeping. That night we cooked some pasta and talked a bit to an Israeli guy who was also in the kitchen with us.

December 2: This day we woke up quite early and drove from Te Anau to the nearby town of Manapouri to meet a boat cruise traveling to Doubtful Sound. The logistics of the trip are pretty complicated--from Manapouri they take you on Lake Manapouri (second deepest lake in New Zealand at 400 meters or so) in a catamaran for about 45 minutes to the other side. At that point they hustled us onto coaches for an hour or two as we drove over some very pretty smallish mountains to another little dock, where there was a cruise boat waiting to take us out onto the sound. The bus drivers were quite pleasant and seemed to have quite a routine of stories, facts and jokes to liven up the drive, with particular emphasis on mild anti-Australian humour. The buses themselves have glass tops and are wedge shaped (sloping back) so that people in the back can see just as well as those in the front, presumably. The name of Doubtful Sound comes from Captain Cook, who called it Doubtful Harbor when he passed it on one of his voyages--as he sailed past, he thought that the wind blowing into the sound made it doubtful he could ever sail out again if he went in, which turns out to have been a pretty legitimate concern. In reality, Doubtful Sound is a fjord, which means a valley that was carved by a glacier and then flooded by the ocean. (A proper sound is the same thing except carved by a river instead of a glacier.) Supposedly, because it's lighter than seawater, black tannin-stained freshwater actually sits on top at a depth varies with the season but can be a couple of meters. The sound had very steep sides in places with a few waterfalls coming down, though a lot of the waterfalls are temporary and only happen during and after a rain, which we didn't have. The main highlight of the trip was seeing some wildlife: fur seals sunning on a small rocky island, seeing Fiordland crested penguins (which have yellow stripes where their eyebrows would go) tottering around on some rocks and some bottlenose dolphins cruising around our boat for ten minutes or so. These dolphins seemed to be about several meters long and are apparently much larger than bottlenose dolphins found elsewhere in warmer parts of the world. It seemed to us that there weren't any other tour companies operating boats that day near us, so at one point we pulled over near the cliff and shut off the engines for about 2 or 3 minutes, and it was amazing how much birdsong we could hear. After our cruise, we stopped off for a little visit at the Manapouri Power Station, an underground hydroelectric station which (I think) generates power from the water falling from Lake Te Anau to Lake Manapouri (or perhaps the other way around). The ride down the tunnel was interesting because it curved slightly around as it went downwards--apparently you make a complete turn and a half before you reach the generators. The generator room was quite big but not really on the same scale as hydro turbines I've seen in Tennessee that I've seen that were built as part of the TVA projects in the 30's. Then it was back on the bus and back on the boat across Lake Manapouri. That night had a walk around Te Anau and had dinner at a little cafe called the Olive Tree Cafe.

December 3: This day we went into Te Anau again for another cruise on another Sound with the same company. Incidentally, the company was called Real Journeys (for some reason) and I was pretty impressed with their quality of service and staff. This was more the case on the Doubtful trip than the Milford trip. Anyway, the drive out the Milford is really spectacular. First you have some really beautiful valleys filled with really colorful pastel pink and purple compound flowers, and then you move into forest, and then into mountainous terrain where the tops of the cliffs a hundred meters or more overhead were shrouded in fog. It was raining most of this day and so, unlike on our trip to Doubtful, there were waterfalls crashing down everywhere during our drives to and from the dock, and while we were out on the sound itself. Unfortunately, the person who made our bookings for the cruise in Queenstown put us on the wrong cruise, so we missed the Underwater Observatory, which is a kind of an inside aquarium where the put an observing deck a few dozen meters underwater so you can look out into the wildlife that lives down there. Instead, we ended up on a boat (operating an otherwise identical cruise) catering mostly to Japanese tourists. Most of them spent the whole trip inside, not looking much and not seeing much. The main exception was a pair of very funny ladies in their forties who ran around on the deck, trying to hide under their jackets and photographing everything in sight while giggling maniacally. They also enlisted me and some other folks to take pictures with them in front of all the various bits of natural beauty (waterfall, cliff, dolphin, etc) and then asked to take pictures with me and a few others of the people standing on the deck in raingear. Oddly, we had been specifically warned / advised by a salesperson in Sydney that it always rains in Milford Sound but the view is more interesting if it does, and you can stand on the deck if you're wearing raingear, which we were there shopping for. So we looked a little like fisherman up on the deck but we were able to stand outside and get a good view the whole time. We saw animals on this cruise as well, which was not really expected (normally, you see wildlife in Doubtful, not so much in Milford). We saw Dusky dolphins and seals, actually getting a better view than in Doubtful. After a few hours the cruise was over and we rode back on the bus to Te Anau. One crazy thing we saw on the way back was a waterfall where the water had been plunging through some rocks and hollowing out smooth edged holes down about 20 or so meters. After the cruise, we did a little internet and then set out to drive as far to the east as we could. At this point we weren't sure whether to go to Mt Cook or Wanaka or somewhere else, but we got as far as Queenstown before it got dark and we decided to stop.

December 4: This day we left Queenstown after a little internet time and drove on to Wanaka. On the way we stopped off in Arrowtown for lunch. Arrowtown was a mining town during the New Zealand gold rush (which happened just a little bit after the gold rushes in California and Australia). There were lots of Chinese living in Arrowtown at one point and there was a small historical park / outdoor museum about the lives of the Chinese who lived there. The town and its history is basically what you'd expect if the Wild West had been populated by New Zealanders--pretty heritage listed houses, orderly shopfronts with "The Gold Nugget" signs on them and not much in the way of a bloodstained past. After brunch we kept on driving to Wanaka. We decided to go there because we had found out that the weather in Fiordland was deteriorating and the weather around Mt Cook National Park was really bad, but there were meant to be a couple of nice low-elevation walks around Wanaka and an English guy I had met while sledging in Queenstown had stopped there for quite a few days and really liked it. When we got there we stopped at the DOC for maps and to check on the weather and then headed out to do a three or four hour walk past Diamond Lake and up to the top of a hill called Rocky Mountain. Diamond Lake was kind of ho-hum but the walk up to the top was really scenic. On one side was the large blue lake and Wanaka, a few large mountains on another side, and a skifield (without snow) on another. Once we had broken through the forest out into the treeless area, we stopped quite a bit to look around and take pictures. When we got to the top, it was incredibly windy and there was a cairn with a string of Himalayan-looking flags that I had also seen at the top of Ben Nevis a few years ago. We walked down quickly as it was getting a little dark, and at the bottom in the parking lot there were two lambs that seemed to have gotten through the fence separating them from the nearby flock. On the way back into town, we also had to swerve around a huge cow who was blocking the road.

December 5: This day we decided to drive out past Diamond Lake into Mt Aspiring National Park to do a day hike up from a glacial valley to an alpine meadow where you can see the face of the Rob Roy Glacier. We got on the trail later than we would have liked because we were initially spooked by the signage suggesting only 4WD vehicles should drive the last 6 km to the trailhead. We stopped at a parking lot right before the first ford where the signage was and got out to walk. We had walked a few hundred meters when someone stopped basically to say that the fords were nothing to worry about and just to drive. So we did. We noticed that we got the most jarring vibrations when we drove at about 25kmph but when we went more like 60kmph the ride got a lot smoother. Anyway, up in the park, the weather was rainy and cooler than down below in Wanaka. The first part of the trail was through a valley of sheep pasture with a roaring 25 meter wide river on one side and steep cliffs on the other. After crossing the river on a suspension footbridge, the trail continued uphill through forest along the river up towards the glacier at the head of the valley. At one point the trail passed through a space where all the trees and the inch or two of soil had peeled away in a tree avalanche that spread down about 50 meters about a year or two before. We had seen that from a distance in Milford and Doubtful but it was interesting to see it up close. After a while we reached a lookout point where we could just about make out the blue ice of the glacier over the top of a mountain through the low clouds. Even though it was dry in Wanaka, up in the mountains it was very cloudy and drizzling all day. After another 40 minutes or so we came out into an alpine meadow with no trees around. From there we could see a few waterfalls coming down the cliff face and the bottom of the glacier up in the clouds. The river appeared to be coming out of the front of the glacier in a few places. Every few minute we'd hear a crack and a rumble as the glacier ice was melting and shifting, but we didn't see anything tumbling down while we were there. As we were standing around, a kea flew down out of the bushes and hopped over to us, presumably hoping we'd drop something or hand over some little food, but unfortunately for him there were "don't feed the keas" signs up everywhere. After a while it started to rain ever harder so went back down the trail--a lot faster than we went up.

December 6: This day we packed up the campervan and drove out of Wanaka, stopping briefly for diesel, coffee and internet, the three main fuels of this trip. On our way back east to the coast, we first stopped at a place called the Puzzling World of Stuart Landsborough, which sounds more a like a TV show than a place but turned out to be pretty cool. They only had a few lame things, like large sized holograms which were available commercially for $100 or so in the late 80's and which I was trying desperately to unload at any price at a shop in the Riverwalk while I was in high school. The better stuff included a room where everything was inclined about 5 degrees, so balls rolled uphill, it looked like you were leaning over when you were standing up straight, etc. There was an Ames room in which there are two doors at the back and from the forced perspective of a window on the opposite side of the building, a person stepping out of one door looks much bigger than when stepping out of the other door--i.e. the same forced perspective trick used in a lot of the LOTR hobbit scenes. There was also a room with recessed faces that seemed to follow you across the room when you closed one eye and walked around, and dozens of other bits and pieces everywhere. There is also a good sized maze incorporating about 1.5km of passages. P and I each tried it--she tried to figure it out, while I tried a brute force algorithmic method of always turning right at each junction--basically a man vs machine contest. Anyway, I got to each corner tower and to the exit in 20 minutes and it took her 40, so I guess Deep Blue wins again. After that, we stopped again at the Wanaka airport where they have some planes from WWII that they still maintain and fly. Oddly, alongside a couple of Spitfires and other bits and pieces were about 6 Soviet made aircraft, including a few Polikarpov I-16s and I-153's (which are slightly more advanced version of the I-15). These were the two fighter planes that the Soviets flew in the Spanish Civil War. I wrote my senior essay about in college about the political and personal experiences of Soviet pilots in Spain, so it was quite interesting to finally see the planes themselves. After that, we drove for a while to Lake Tekapo, where we stopped for some dinner and took in some beautiful scenery including hills with mist and a rainbow on them on the other side of the lake. Lake Tekapo and nearby Lake Pukaki have a brilliant turquoise color due to the glacial rock flour suspended in the water. We kept driving, expecting to get to Akaroa by about 9 or 9.30, but we hit a huge amount of fog on the way in so we drove the last 20km or so at less than 25kmph, so we were much later than that in the end.

December 7: Today we had a little walk around Akaroa and then headed over to the wharf to go on our dolphin swimming trip. We put on really thick 6mm wetsuits and our trusty prescription masks and boarded the boat. It didn't take very long for the boat driver (skipper?) to find a pod of the little guys a ways out in the harbor. The tour guides watched the dolphins for a few minutes to make sure they seemed like they were in a curious/playful mood and didn't have any calves with them (they were, and they didn't), and we all jumped in the water. These dolphins were different from the two kinds we saw in Doubtful Sound (bottlenose dolphins) and Milford Sound (Dusky dolphins)--the kind we saw today are called Hector's dolphin or the New Zealand dolphin and are much smaller (about 1.3-1.5 meters--I think the world's smallest) and have big black patches on their dorsal fins. The water was a bright green color and super cold (about 12 degrees C which is 52 degrees F, I think) and it took a few minutes for the wetsuits to warm up and for me to be able to breath normally! After a few minutes, we could see the dolphins swimming and jumping around above the surface and we saw them swimming by below the surface about a meter or two away. We mostly carried on like that for about half an hour, as the guides would shout to us from the boat when one or two were swimming though the group of us out in the water, and we would stick our heads in quickly to watch them swim past. After a while P got really cold and went in for some hot chocolate. In the last ten minutes or so that we were out, I think there were fewer people in the water and maybe the visibility improved when the sun came out, or maybe the dolphins got more curious about us, because they started to come a lot closer to me. On one occasion, two of them came by swimming from my right side and another three from my left side. The groups were actually arranged vertically, so there would be one dolphin right on the surface, and other one swimming directly under that, and so on (we heard from the guides at Doubtful Sound that this called mirroring and is apparently what they do for fun). I turned to the left to follow the group of two and they kept circling around me about a meter away, so I kept turning and followed them around for about three turns or about 20 seconds. I was close enough to touch them, maybe, but I think I wasn't supposed to and in any event didn't want to piss them off. After a while they dove down pretty steeply and swam away. A little later another group of two (or maybe it was the same ones, my Jacque Cousteau-like memory for individual marine mammals having deserted me momentarily) came over and we did more or less the same thing, except for not quite as long and this time they also did little barrel rolls and swam upside down for a moment and I was able to follow them down a very short distance before they swam away. They were close enough that I was able to see the little notches in their dorsal fins from where they bite each other and the scratches and scars on their skins. Anyway, after that it was about time to go so I hopped back on the boat. The dolphins flopped around the boat for a while and as we were sailing away rode the bow waves for a while. This is where the dolphin swims along right under the front of the boat (i.e. you see them by leaning over the front and looking down) while the boat is moving pretty fast, and kind of surfs on the wave that the front of the boat makes as it goes through the water. It looks pretty dangerous to me but I guess if you're a dolphin you know what you're doing (again, this is what they do for fun). After that little excursion we went over to a tasty little cafe (the same where we had lunch) and had some coffee and food to replace all the calories we burned sitting in the freezing water for an hour. We had been staying at a campervan park in Akaroa that, like most campervan parks in New Zealand, has a population of ducks that waddle around everywhere waiting for you to drop something edible.

December 8: This day we left the campervan and arranged for a B&B to stay in near the Christchuch airport that evening. The drive to Christchurch was quite easy and we returned the campervan and went to the city center for a while. The best part of the ride to Christchurch was passing another campervan with some Japanese or Korean folks inside, eschewing the big tour group experience, who had probably just picked up their van in Christchurch and been on the road about 30 minutes. They were obviously having a total blast and (apropos of nothing I could think of other than maybe campervan solidarity) all gave us a burst of spontaneous frantic waving and megawatt smiles from the front compartment. During the hour or two the strongest impression of Christchurch was that it reminded me a lot of little semi-touristy places in England like Cambridge or Bath. We spent a lot of the time trying to figure out what to do in Fiji. For dinner we had some Indian food at a place called Two Fat Indians, which was pretty good except for the chicken which was undercooked.

December 9: This day we woke up at 5 for our flight from Christchuch via Wellington then to Auckland and from there to Nadi in Fiji. At first I was cursing Air New Zealand because they couldn't get their computers to work at the check in desks and it was getting dangerously close to closing check in for our flight, but in the end with a little cajoling they pulled us out of the queue of Japanese tour groups and got us on with a few minutes to spare, even volunteering a creative solution to our excess baggage issue. The rest of the trip was pretty painless. When we got to the airport we did a few administrative tasks and then talked to a travel agent of sorts about where we could go on the islands. We settled spending at least the first few days at a resort in the Mananucas called Walu Beach. It wasn't listed in any guidebook but it was the one place they could still arrange transport to at that time of the late afternoon, so we agreed. We also got a steep discount on the room rate. We had to take a 45 minute or so bus ride to the port, then another 45 minutes on a big catamaran ferry, then another 20 minutes on a speedboat. The resort is actually pretty good. There are fancy hut-style rooms down on the beach (the Fiji term for that is "bure"), a dormitory (probably empty at the moment) and a compromise (that we opted for) which is a lodge consisting of two twin rooms with a shared bath and a double room with an attached one, plus a common living area. The lodge is really spartan but comfortable and (except for the plumbing) seems like the kind of place you could almost build yourself if you had the plans and a month or three of spare time. The lodges are built way up on a hillside (about 40 vertical meters above the beach and maybe 200 meters back) so you get a pretty good view of the sea, and a lot of exercise every time you want to go back there. Anyway, the travel agent (David's Travel Service) was pretty much you'd expect--friendly and semi-honest. They push their own resort in the Yasawa Islands (which gets mixed reviews) and they push Walu Beach in the Mamanucas, I'm sure because it's operating at about 25% capacity and they get a steep commission. There was also some hanky panky regarding some surprise extra charges for transport, which we may yet avoid. That said, it is a good deal in the end, and Walu Beach is apparently much better than rat traps that other travelers we've met have stayed in for an even higher price on other islands, so I won't moan too much.

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Photos

P with innertube in cave
Here is P floating down an underground stream in a cave. Say cheese!

Us squeezing through the Love Tunnel
There was nothing lovely about it.

Vineyard tour
Here we are riding bikes around some vineyards outside Blenheim, expertly judging the qualities of the local wines with our highly trained palates.

Lunch spot at Nelson Lakes
This is near where we stopped for lunch in Nelson Lakes National Park.

Giant Sandfly
The place inside served possum and other questionable meats, so I guess they figured a huge disgusting bug outside would bring in the right clientele!

Franz Josef Glacier
On the left, the glacier about a mile away; on the right, an interesting rock formation a few meters away.

Terminal face of Franz Josef
The people further away, standing on the brown ridge, are about 6 pixels tall.

Warning signs
The warnings don't apply if you have a guide, folks.

Alpinista
P the mountaineer shows us how it's done.

Blue ice cave
The ice is blue because the pressure of being under the glacier for so long has squeezed all the air out of the ice.

Glacier, waterfall and cloud
In a lot of places there were waterfalls plunging off the cliff faces.

Us in a crevasse
It took about 5 minutes for the perfectionist we asked to take this picture to get it exactly the way he wanted it.

P about to go into an ice tunnel
Nothing to worry about...

Us at Franz Josef
Taken from on top of the glacier, looking back up away from the sea toward the neve.

Us at Fox Glacier
Enjoying a much more sedate day of looking at a different glacier from behind the ropes!

Cliff face in Fox Glacier Valley
I wonder whether the schist here has been rotated 90 degrees over time. I'll need to ask a geologist at some point.

Fox Glacier Valley
Taking a break in the Fox Glacier Valley before heading to Queenstown.

Cooking in the campervan
Barbecuing was out because of the fierce biting gnats outside! This is in a DOC campsite we stopped in overnight between Fox and Queenstown.

Leaving the campsite
The place was really pretty but you couldn't really go outside because of the gnats. I lined this one up, took it and ran into the van as fast as possible.

Tuatara
Despite its appearance, not a lizard.

Multipurpose gorge from TT
This gorge was used for a lot of the Rohan shots in TT, including the orc-draught bit, Gimli rolling down the hill, "not idly do the leaves of Lorien fall" and a lot of running.

Westfold village site
This fishing lake is where the Westfold village set was built for TT. The buildings were all camoflauged with brown painted timber. The footage also appears in the prologue to FOTR.

Buzzing Edoras
On our way down to land at Mt Potts, we buzzed past this tour group standing on the top of Mt Sunday, on which the Edoras set was built.

Whitewater sledging
I'm the idiot in the two-tone helmet on the left. Note the bravely closed eyes--I'm so confident, I don't even need to know where I'm going!

P in the Cessna
Nervous? Me? Nah, just terrified.

Southern Alps
Taken out of the window. This is where all of the "lighting of the beacons" helicopter footage was shot for ROTK.

Cavalry charge field
This is the field where all the Pelenor fields horse riding scenes were shot. The ridge is where the Rohan cavalry lined up right before the big charge.

Us with Robert and plane
Just a little snap of us parked with Robert Rutherford, our excellent pilot, and the plane.

Doubtful Sound
The fjord known as Doubtful Sound.

Milford Sound
Another cruise ship sailing off into the murky gloom around Milford Sound.

Us at Milford Sound
We dressed up like fishermen so that we could stand on the deck and photograph everything in sight...

Seals, Milford Sound
Seals chillin' like villains.

Waterfall, Milford Sound
The roar as this waterfall hit the surface of the sound almost drowned out the Japanese language commentary.

Comments

[Jenn]

WOW
Okay, now I am completely jealous. It wasn't as bad before Isaw the pics. Now I am contemplating visiting NZ myself. WOW! Enjoy the rest of your trip.

[CathyBraasch Dean]

Happy Birthday!!!!
Happy Birthday you crazy traveler! Hope you had a good one.