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Published: February 27th 2008
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New Zealand (miniature Canada) is a dreamy playground for mountain lovers like me. Unfortunately I was not met with the warmest welcome. Arriving in the airport I was selected for a random bomb search with a full pat down, when I picked up my bag from luggage claim the K9 team (a tiny beagle) got me pulled over and I lost a bag of dried emu meat, and I spent a good hour in quarentine where my bag was pulled end from end and all of my shoes were cleaned, no complaints though, this pristine country was well worth the hastle. Everything here reminds me of Canada. The first city I visited, Christchurch, is like a European version of Victoria. It has the feeling of a small town but it's a big city. There are massive cathedrals with intricately carved moldings and old artifacts. The museum of Maori culture was shockingly similar to the Royal Alberta Museums exhibit on Native North-Americans. I also walked past the prestigious boys college which was used for the modelling of Harry Potters Hogwarts, it didn't look too inviting. On the first day of the Contiki tour we headed south to Lake Tekapo, a glacial lake
that looks just like Maligne Lake. While everyone else was going snap-happy with their cameras I was trying to figure out how I'd gotten on the wrong flight back to Canada. The lakes are a beautiful deep tourquise due to all of the glacial silt, and even though it was cloudy the colours were still bright enough to make a good photograph. We headed on through the counrtyside to Lake Ohau, a large glacial lake at one of the south island's ski fields (though the skiing doesn't quite compare to the Rockies). The lake was gorgeous and after dinner myself and two other girls from the tour (Michelle - Ontario, and Joanna - Auckland) attempted to hike up one of the foothills beside our lodge, unfortunately people aren't too big on trails in this country and we were soon bushwacking in the dark and eventually had to give up and go back. We spent the night enjoying the "spas" (tiny hot tubs with no bubbles) and looking at the stars which were the brightest I've seen since leaving home.
The next day we started the morning with a visit to a huge fruit stand on the side of the road.
The fruit was delicious, I've never had cherries so sweet in my life. After gorging on peaches and apricots we made our way across the rolling hills and through the Homer Tunnel to the Milford Fiord (incorrectly named the Milford sound) where we hopped onto a little boat for the night. The fiord is cut deep and steep, the walls of the surrounding hills seem to fall straight into the ocean and I have no idea how the few trees and shrubs hang on. It rained all night and the next morning the fiord walls were littered with hundreds of waterfalls. The area is call the vallley of a thousand falls due to all of these temporary waterfalls. As we headed out to the open ocean we had a chance to catch some fur seals sunning themselves on the rocks (I have no idea how though, it was cloudy all day long). The sea was rough and tilted the boat back and forth like a little toy, I was glad when we returned to the fiord. After docking we continued on our way to Queenstown where every night is a Saturday night and every morning is a Sunday morning. The
average age in Queenstown couldn't be more than 25 and about 3/4 of the population is transient backpackers. Days are spent trying to achieve adrenaline overloads by any means possible (bungy jumping, skydiving, canyon swings, whitewater rafting, body boarding, hang-gliding, the list goes on...) and nights are spent partying until the first rays of sunlight peak over the mountains. Queenstown is like Jasper on steroids. We had bad weather everyday we were there so skydiving and hang-gliding were cancelled. I really wanted to hang-glide but that'll have to wait for another day. Instead I squeezed into a wetsuit and hopped in a raft to navigate the Shotover river. The drive to the river was about as exhilerating as the rafting trip with steep clifs, haipin turns and crumbling roads. The Shotover river is the second largest gold producing (by volume of recovered gold) river in the world next to the Yukon, and 25% of the gold is still in the river system. On the way to Queenstown we stopped at Arrowtown, one of the original gold rush settlements where I searched out the largest gold nugget in NZ history. There was one the size of my fist from 2003, and
another slightly smaller from 1997, I think it's time I became a prospector...Rafting the Shotover was tonnes of fun, except the guy infront of me, who later was nicknamed "backpaddle" didn't seem to know left from right and we had some awkward runs through the rapids.
After everyone had satisfied their adrenaline fix we continued on to Fox glacier. Being a tropical glacier there was this huge river of ice alongside lush ferns and deep green forests, nothing at all like the Athabasca glacier. The Fox glacier is one of a small handfull of advancing glaciers in the world and it's growing at an alarming rate, both in length and depth. The glacier itself appeared to be bursting at the seams. I was the only one in the group who had been on a glacier before so no one understood why I laughed at the "crevasses" of Fox, they were hardly wrinkles in the ice. One of the guys in the group also singled me out to be the rock jock for the day and everytime we passed a pebble he's say "what's this Amber?" I just said that everything was slate, which it usually was. The town of Franz-Joseph
is about a ten minute walk from end to end and about half of the buildings are pubs. We took a midnight walk through the forest to see the glow worms which were suprisngly bright considering they apparently turn off their lights when they're disturbed. The next morning it was back to Christchurch to drop off a few of our crew and stay the night in the sleepy city. It really only takes one day to see Christchurch, so I was at a loss for things to do. Early the next morning we said our good-byes and drove up the kaikoura coastline to the interisland ferry. Along the way we passed a couple of seal colonies and a lot of spectacular ocean views. Soon enough we were on the four hour ferry ride, and I spent the entire time sleeping on the floor in a pile of luggage (all of the benches were taken, and I'm not picky). Immediately off the ferry we were in Wellington, the cultural capital of New Zealand and the gateway to the north.
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