Advertisement
Published: October 22nd 2007
Lighthouse on the Hill
The Waipapa Point Lighthouse.Being the highly dedicated and passionate blog writer that I am, I have cleverly postponed posting (and indeed writing) the last of the blogs from my RTW trip until many months after I have returned home. Indeed it is only through a sense of wanting to "round off" the chronicles of my year away that I have eventually tied myself to the chair and forced myself to sit down and type out the following witty, enticing and salivating prose. So without further ado onwards....
When last we met our intrepid adventurers (me and some friends), we had just set off from Queenstown after a week of snowboarding and partying in the snowboarding and partying capital of NZ,
Road Trippin' NZ Style: Top of the South Island and Snowboarding in Queenstown. The very last night I had managed to get the van towed which was a slight problem as the vans were where we slept, I had to pick it up late that night from the guy who towed it and then the next morning pay the fine to the Neanderthal that was being employed by the local council. A great last night. My only saving grace was that Madan also had his van towed 😊
We set off on our drive
and passed through some absolutely stunning scenery between
Te Anau and
Milford Sound. The drive took a while as we were constantly stopping for photo opportunities and to generally muck about. Along the way was one of the dodgiest tunnels I have ever been through, there was water pouring into it which had frozen creating long, thick stalactites from the ceiling to the floor, as a civil engineer in training I don't think the water would have helped the structural integrity much. Never the less we survived and made it on to Milford, which consisted of a caravan site, a car park, the pub and the jetties. We spent most of the night at the pub and then crashed before our Milford Sound cruise.
Of course we were nearly late the following morning and the boat set sail as soon as we jumped on to the stares of the crew. Now Milford Sound is promoted as one of the
must do's in NZ and while no doubt it is a spectacular place I felt a little under-whelmed at the rather quick cruise, maybe I was just tired! Afterwards we set off to the very south on our way to
the
Catlins National Park, we found in the guide book that there was a system of caves along the way and of course being lead driver I took the democratic decision to stop because I wanted to. Reading the little info sign at the entrance to the caves it could be read that everyone should have at least two and preferably 3 sources of light each, throwing caution and common sense to the wind we entered with a grand total of 10 people, two torches, a couple of phones and one Nintendo DS hand held game console!
Most people only got so far but three of us, Joel, Elena and myself forged on in an attempt to come out the other side. We lost track of time and it took us a good while to get through the whole system. It was awesome though and we all got dirty and muddy squeezing our way over, under and around boulders in what can only be described as miles below the surface but in all likelihood was probably only 20-30 metres. We got in a little trouble for taking so long especially since we then missed the sunset over the ocean
Mountains Made of Shade
On the road to Milford Sound. further along the road but it was all worth it and as driver I had veto power in decisions such as this 😊
We later stopped at Ivercargill (the town that the eighties forgot) for dinner but left pretty quick and spent the night at a place called
Waipapa Point where there is a lighthouse. The stars were amazing and everyone got a little boozy before calling it a night. Joel and I slept on the roof of the vans to look at the stars and see the sunrise but we woke up after dawn and soaked to the bone by dew!
The next day we cruised through the
Catlins stopping at loads of little places including
Slope Point, the southernmost point on the South Island,
Curio Bay, where we could have seen dolphins but didn't and
Nugget Point, a spectacular spur of land on which rests another light house surrounded by steep cliffs and big surf, later that night we pulled into Dunedin and found ourselves a campsite. We amused ourselves for the rest of the evening by annoying a rather stuck up school teacher who was in charge of a group of kids on an excursion.
We then got a taxi into town and had one of the lamest nights out ever due to it being a Sunday. Elena drank herself silly and we had a great time taking the piss out of her.
We rose late and went for a driving tour around the
Otago Peninsula, we stopped at a few little places but generally whiled away the morning not doing much. Katrin wasn't too interested in seeing the glaciers on the west coast so we dropped her off at a hostel in Dunedin and then took off with the aim of getting to
Wanaka, another skiing town a couple hours north of Queenstown. The drive in the fading light was absolutely stunning, it was a crystal clear night with not a cloud in sight, the setting sun turned the sky a deep blue and the mountains stood out in brilliant splendour. It was brilliant. While driving along (probably around 100km/h), I sprayed the windscreen to clean it off and the water instantly froze into a thin sheet of ice, I had to brake rather suddenly and pull over to scrape it all off! A quick lesson in safety when driving in sub-zero temps,
needless to say I didn't do that again. We spent the night in a little campsite somewhere beside a lake and left again at first light.
On a little aside you may be wondering how our diets were going at this point in the trip what with all the driving and seemingly spending endless days in the back roads on NZ. Well we were only surviving on a strict regime of vegemite and cheese on bread which had become known as
Tiger Claw. It kept us going but we were all getting a little sick of it 😊
We eventually made it to
Fox Glacier, walked up to the end of the path way and promptly ignored all the warning signs and walked up to the face of the glacier. It was eerily cool, up close the ice was full of tiny air bubbles and if you kept quiet you could hear the ice creaking and groaning as it moved. We spent some time mucking around and eventually moved on in the fading light to
Franz Joseph Glacier. We didn't go up to the face here but instead climbed a little hill and got some cool views of
the mountains and glacier in the distance. Next we found a campsite and crashed for the night, my last with the group.
The next morning we did a small hike to see some panoramic views of the snow-capped mountains and the lagoon and then moved on. At the next major intersection I left the group as Ziggy and I had earlier flights to catch than the rest. We drove clear across the South Island in one afternoon and night up through some amazing mountain passes and through some really appalling weather. We found a spot near the airport to sleep and then I got up again at 4.30am to drop Ziggy off at the airport.
I generally killed time on my last day away from home, I dropped the van off and wandered around
Christchurch doing nothing. In the evening I got chatting to a few of the guys in my room and they twisted my arm and I headed out with them.
I woke up feeling pretty average, got dressed and headed out to the airport, one short flight up to
Auckland and then a slightly longer one home to
Perth and I was soon hugging
my loving family and sitting in the car on the way home almost a year to the day since I left.
What a fantastic, amazing, awesome, stupendous, cool year.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.104s; Tpl: 0.015s; cc: 11; qc: 23; dbt: 0.0447s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb
deleted_15735
deleted_15735
This blog makes you sound like a road-wise Totalitarian Dictator.
"... and the mountains stood out in brilliant splendour. It was brilliant." - Wow. That's wit for you.