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Kia Ora!
I am currently back in the allegedly more English than England Christchurch for the time being after doing a whistle stop tour of the Southern reaches of the South Island. It was pretty good fun, but it was over far too quickly. I'll try and recap for you here thought, assuming anyone is still reading of course....
You may recall that I wasn't 100% sure what to do next at the end of my previous blog, but I decided to bite the bullet and myself and one of the Chef's from Haast went halves on renting a Campervan for 6 days to drive around and see as much as possible.
Imagine my delight at going to pick it up and seeing the sides of the van adorned with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles - a fact I continually forgot about and was forever perplexed as to why young children were staring as their parents cars overtook us....
Anyway, it was an awesome little camper, with a stove and sleeping area that could convert to a seating area (if you could be bothered working out how to do so) and even had a couple of chairs so you
could sit outside of an evening.
I've done a map here but you may have to some extreme zooming to see some of the coastal stops we made, but I'm sure you can get the general idea of how much we saw just from a distance.
Our first stop was Mount Cook - or Aoraki to give it it's Maori name. I could tell you the story, I'm just feeling a bit too lazy just now - and a wise young man by the name of Greg, decided as we had all the time in the world to drive the hundreds of miles there we may as well go in the opposite direction and head for a small town called Glenorchy to see what that was like.
It was dull.
HOWEVER, if you followed the road you could visit a town called Paradise which seemed to good a photo opportunity to miss, but unfortunately due to the god awful weather the road was closed.
So we headed back northwards driving once again through Queenstown (yet another Kiwi city you always seem to find yourself in) and drove through the rain as the night came slowly in
(we didn't get the camper til mid-afternoon).
Eventually we arrived at Mount Cook and parked up, excited about waking up and looking up at the highest mountain in New Zealand (I believe I may have tagged a photo of it in a previous blog with an exact altitude).
The next morning I imagined I had jumped enthusiastically out of bed to stare at the mountain, as I sleepily rolled over and rubbed my eyes before exhaling loudly, having a scratch and lying there a bit longer, before learning that the weather hadn't cleared at all and we couldn't see anything other than some considerably smaller mountains around us, that were probably technically hills.
Not wanting to have wasted the drive, we stopped into the Sir Edmund Hillary Alpine Centre and checked out the (pitifully tiny) museum there and watched 4 movies in the Planetarium. I'm not 100% sure what Black Holes have to do with Mount Cook but it was very interesting. Turned out we were in the southern most observatory in the world or something.
Which reminds me, I just want to quickly share how much better the stars are here - I think it's because
it's much more sparsely populated and therefore has considerably less light pollution, but I've seen awesome things. I can now identify my own star sign in the sky and regularly gaze up at the actual Milky Way....
After a couple of hours of staying out of the rain, we headed to our next destination, which was the East Coast, where we eventually stopped in Oamaru and once again attempted to cook dinner using a small camper stove and a saucepan in the dark. this time we parked on the edge of a park and the next morning headed to the local swimming pool for a little bit of exercise, which was nice. I admit on arrival we headed to the penguin colony, but I was feeling like too much of a Scrooge to fork out to watch them all come home for the night. I mean, if I have to pay for something like that I want to be allowed to take photos!!
After a visit to a cheese factory we hit the road once again and wound our way south along the coast, stopping twice. The first stop was to check out the Moeraki Boulders and because
I'm lazy (it's 6.45pm and I haven't had dinner yet ok?) more information about them can be found here - en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moeraki_Boulders
Then we stopped again because....well actually because I'm a child and there was no way i was going to ignore any signs for Shag Point.
After checking that out we were back on the road to Dunedin, a place I was very excited about going to and which did not disappoint. I left there feeling very strongly about going back to spend more time there.
Anyway, upon arrival we headed for the cinema to entertain ourselves for the evening when I said (and I believe this is verbatim) "I might just leave the cinema until Iron Man 2 comes out." to which the only response was a huge gasp from my mouth as I stood looking at a poster advertising a midnight screening of the aforementioned movie that very night - of course! It was on general release the following day! So I got tickets and that's exactly how I spent my first ridiculously excited night in Dunedin.
The next day we made a beeline for the Speights Brewery tour, which was very informative and followed
it up with a trip around the Cadbury Factory, whereupon I was constantly given free chocolate and witnessed what 1,000 litres of chocolate looks like as it's dropped from one vat to a recepticle several metres below.
That was nowhere near as exciting as dinner though as we found a small cafe, in which the owner frequently practiced his card tricks. I bloody love magic.
The next morning it was back on the road out of whatever car park we'd found there and heading as far south as possible to the seaside town of Bluff. Once there we made straight for the lookout point so we could see the full panoramic view and Stewart Island (the most southern land mass of New Zealand) and then headed further down the road so that we could get as south as possible and take some silly photos.
Unfortunately, we didn't quite get as far south as humanly possible due to the fact that as we were looking at the sign for the walking track it started to rain. We then made the executive decision to grab a bite in a nearby cafe before carrying on our epic journey to Invercargill and
Sir Edmund
He's actually looking at Mount Cook....honest....yours truly had Oysters for the first time.
I know - I'm doing all sorts of crazy things here...
Sadly upon arriving in Invercargill, we were moved on from the Car Park we'd found and had to ACTUALLY PAY to stay somewhere. Then the heavens truly opened and we couldn't really go exploring and the next morning we had to head back to Queenstown to return the campervan so I can't really say that I've seen Invercargill despite spending a night there 😞
Once we returned the car we took a 6km walk back to town, but unfortunately I'd left my camera in the hostel and totally forgot my phone has a camera...
That night was an exciting night for me as it was the first day of the NZ Music Month and to launch it a small pub in Queenstown was hosting a band called Kids of '88, which I'm sure none of you have heard of (yet) but they are without a doubt my favourite Kiwi band and the concert was free!!!
The next day I fed the adrenaline junkie that has been lying dormant in me for so many years apparently and
decided that I was going to go up the mountain on the gondola and come down via various zipwires.
At least that was my understanding - turned out there was only 4 zipwires and they only went halfway down so I had to walk back up again to go back to town.....Also rather disappointingly there wasn't any system to get any photos so you'll just have to take my word for it when I tell you I did some hardcore upside down action.
Eventually we left Queenstown as I longingly looked at the snow beginning to form at the peaks of the Remarkables (the only mountains to run true north to south) and came all the way back up here to Christchurch.
Nothing's really changed here surprisingly, but I have now FINALLY been to the Antarctic Centre here and seen some interesting things there, including experiencing an Arctic Storm. Well, I say that, they made the room cold and blew some fans out the walls, but you can see from my photo of the screen that it got a bit chilly.
So what next?
Good question, thanks for asking - the only thing I really have
planned at the moment is the TranzAlpine train ride whereby I will traverse the South Island from Christchurch to Greymouth which promises to be full of awesome photo opportunities....
Until next time Amigos.
Greg
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Simon
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I'm still reading Greg ... learnin all the time and enjoyin the phots