Straying Off Course

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So I have finished my three weeks with the conservation volunteers and am now heading around the country on the Stray bus. My last two weeks with the other volunteers were definitely the best I have had since I left home mainly because I was with a massively fun group of people and travelling to different parts of New Zealand. I spent my second week in Punakaiki mainly planting trees and trying to avoid the rain. I did fall/get pushed into a huge mud puddle though, that was reasonably entertaining for all involved. Much of that week was spent in the Punakaiki Tavern which is a wonderful place and they even gave us cheapy whitebait which was sssoooo nice and is incredibly popular on the west coast of New Zealand.

My final week of conserving things was spent at the Sinclair Wetlands which is just as it sounds: a big wet land. In order to get down there we had to endure a massively long drive on a very boring road that seemed to last for ever and ever. We did stop at some pretty cool places though such as the Moreaki Boulders which are basically really round boulders on a beach, I have been reliably informed (by a man in a pub) that when the Maoris came to New Zealand they first came in seven canoes and one of them capsized splilling it's baskets overboard and that is what the boulders are. They must have been some very very big canoes is all I can say on that matter.

The weather at the wetlands was amazing and mainly lead to Johnny, the manager, letting us stop work really early and go to the beach or for an ice cream so not that much work actually got done that week but we had a good time. The stuff that did get done mainly consisted of removing weeds brought over by the English at the end of the nineteenth century and somehow seemed to involve a lot of crawling around on the ground between huge trees and bushes in order to cut them off at the roots. Those were some pretty big weeds though.

So after finally saying at tearful (on the inside) goodbye to CVNZ I joined the Stray bus in Christchurch and managed to meet someone from as far away as Burton-On-Trent who travelled part of the way with me but she has now headed on to Mount Cook. Our first stop was Franz Josef which I have already been to but this time the weather was so much clearer which made all of the difference because the glacier actually looked blue rather than dirty grey. I also went on a glacier walk part of the way up the ice itself. It was one of the most amazing things I have ever done; we walked through crevaces with huge walls of ice either side of us. There was also some tunnel crawling and climbing the steepest steps ever, they did give us spikey things to go on our boots though so I actually managed to go the entire day without falling over once. There was one major disaster though in that my camera broke the day before I went to the glacier so I had to get radical and hunt out a disposable before heading up there so those photos could be interesting.

Our next stop was Queenstown stopping off at Lake Matheson which is a beautiful mirror lake with a reflection of the alps except that we went ridiculously early in the morning (half seven!) so it was cloudy and the reflection was rubbish, I got a postcard of it though so I know what it should look like :D We also paused at the worlds first bungy site so that some crazy people could go and throw themselves off a bridge, safe to say that it's something that I will not be doing. Queenstown is apparently the adrenaline capital of the world (or maybe just New Zealand, I can't remember) and it's really easy to see why, it is surrounded by canyons and mountains and full of posters trying to convince you to do crazy things. I have settled for jet-boating which I did earlier and had such a good time, and tomorrow I head off the Milford Sound.

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Comments

[A Joan]

Greetings from snowy Aultgowrie
What an amazing time you are having, Helen, the spiky things for boots are called crampons, and I have just taken off a pair after walking Paco in the ice around here!