Raspberry Rocket Road Trip

---

This part of the trip was one I had been looking forward to since the travel idea's inception. New Zealand. Aotearoa, Land of the Long White Cloud. I will start this blog by saying that cutting my Australian experience short by 3 weeks to come to the South Island was one of the best decisions I've made on this journey! I've had such a great time already and it's only been 2 weeks!

I landed in Christchurch in the middle of the night (the sacrifice of taking a cheaper flight) and therefore had to sleep in the airport's arrival lounge until a more reasonable hour of the day, when I could get a bus into the city, and to my hostel. This was the plan anyway. Instead I was rudely awoken by the cleaner at 05:30 wanting to vacuum the whole hall, and was promptly chucked out, along with the other backpackers, into the very cold Kiwi morning.

Luckily the departure lounge was open which provided me with hot coffee for as long as I could make it last...

I eventually arrived at my hostel, Haka Lodge, after a small fiasco on the bus involving me going to and from the airport twice.. The owners were really nice and let me hang out in the lounge until the dorms had all been cleaned etc. The place is one of the best hostels I have stayed in over the last 11 months, basically just a normal house converted to accommodate 4 guest bedrooms and a 7-bed dorm room in the attic, and the downstairs common areas were all of a standard you'd be happy with in your own house! Walking around Christchurch is one of the strangest experiences I've had in a city. 80%!o(MISSING)f the city centre is closed off to the public and this has had a significant impact on the remaining open areas. I often found myself walking down a street devoid of people, cars and life. It felt like the movie 28 Days Later. You can peer through the fences at the abandoned offices, shops and restaurants, each of them sprawled with spray paint to declare whether they've been checked for people and whether they're secure to enter. From what I was told, most of the closed off area will be demolished and rebuilt and that this could take years. It was a really melancholy feeling to be there. The one bright light trying to break this cloud of misery is the Re:Start Mall in the south of the centre, where the ingenious Kiwi's have installed and converted shipping containers into shops and cafes and created a space for people to meet and socialise. It was somewhat inspiring and uplifting to see the sense of community that remains in Christchurch following the devastation of the earthquake a year ago and the ones that followed in December. I felt a few tremors (4.0 on the Richter Scale) whilst here which I'll admit has always been something I was keen to experience, but then I felt slightly guilty for having this on my bucket list as it is part of the citizens every day life and they live in fear to a degree that another big one could happen at any time.

I ended up staying in the city for 3 nights whilst I got my plans in order to travel around the South Island...

Before I left Australia I had been in contact with a guy from Germany about hiring a car or campervan for 2 weeks and driving around the island together. But 2 days before I left for NZ he emailed me changing his plans leaving me somewhat disorganised. So I put an ad online for a travel partner and had a couple of responses but they didn't fit in with my plans very well. At the same time I kept looking for other people's adverts and responded to one from an Austrian girl named Verena who was coming across from Wellington in a couple of day's time and looking for people to share the ride in her car down the West Coast to Queenstown stopping at several places along the way. So we emailed and spoke on the phone and arranged to meet at the ferry terminal in Picton. This meant me finding things to do for a few days but I managed this with ease

I got the train up to Picton which is supposed to be a beautiful ride along the coastline but the weather had another idea, blocking any potential views out to the ocean or inland across the hills and valleys. Anyway, typically once I arrived in Picton and checked into my hostel opposite the local cemetery (It was called Tombstone Backpackers!), the sun decided to come out, so I went for a stroll along to a viewpoint that looks out across Malborough Sound which was beautiful and worth the effort. The next day I booked myself onto a winery tour of the Malborough wine region, famous the world over for it's Sauvignon Blanc, which also happens to be my favourite wine. It was a really good day with only 2 other people on the tour which meant we got to go to a lot more wineries than usual including my absolute favourite, Brancott Estate. A combination of temptation and having many, many samples meant I ended up buying a couple of bottles but it could have been so many more!

A good night's sleep later and it was time to meet up with Verena. Within 2 minutes of driving way from the hostel we stopped and picked up a hitch-hiker, a French guy named Jean-Francois. Hitch-hiking is very popular in New Zealand and is one of the few places left in the world where it is 'safe' to do so, and from what I've been told a hiker never waits more than around half an hour before someone picks them up! It's tempting as a cheap way to get around but i'm still not convinced/I'm a chicken, so I think I will use more conventional methods of travel. Anyway, the three of us travelled to Nelson to stay there for the night and for me and Verena to plan our 4-day trip into Abel Tasman National Park. As you can imagine for a country this blessed with scenery, outdoor activities are very popular and brilliantly managed by the Dept of Conservation (DOC). There are iSites in most towns full of information, the DOC has huts and campsites set up all along every trail in NZ along with a plethora of maps and guides to make sure you know everything there is to know! But due to the popularity of being outside, the huts get booked up quite quickly and we were limited to booking huts starting two days later so we had to hang around Nelson for an extra day before driving up the road to Marahao, the entrance to the park, and staying the night at Old Macdonald's Farm (ee ai ee ai oh!). Here we managed to hire stuff to enable us to cook (Abel Tasman is the only major hike where the huts don't have gas stoves in the huts! Typical) before getting an early night as we had a 20km walk ahead of us the next day..

Abel Tasman is the most beautiful place I have ever been to. There I said it. I can't remember if I've said this before about somewhere else in the world but I'm replacing wherever that was with this place. From the very first morning we were greeted with astonishing views across estuaries, over golden sand beaches with the sublimely blue Tasman Sea lapping at it's feet. We trailed through ancient rainforests, up and over hills, around sheer cliff edges, spied on a colony of Fur Seals and got eaten alive by sandflies, and the sun blazing across a cloudless sky for the whole time we were there. Paradise should come here for inspiration! Each night, the huts we stayed in had sublime views from the front porch, and especially the second night which is probably the most beautiful place I'll ever spend a night, gazing out across a huge estuary with a backdrop of tree covered mountains on one side and seabird covered beaches on the other. There was a really good atmosphere in the huts, everybody chatting away to each other about the day, sharing stories, swapping phone numbers with backpackers, and addresses with locals with an offer of a bed should we need it, and just general comradery. One of the best experiences I've had on this trip!!

We returned to the real world (or is it the artificial?) and sneaked a shower at the farm, had a very refreshing beer and then hit the road heading South down along the West coast, one of the world's great drives according to the Lonely Planet! We weren't sure how far we could get before sundown so we held off booking a hostel until we got nearer the time, but eventually settled on a small town called Punakaiki, the home of the Pancake Rocks. The next morning we went and investigated; the Pancake Rocks are limestone rocks that have been built up with layers of mudstone separating them, much to the bemusement of scientists who have no idea how this happened, which I like. If we knew how everything was made then it wouldn't be nearly as interesting! Contained within these rock formations are small caverns, which at high tide produce huge spurts of water due to the air displacement inside the cavern. Quite the sight apparently, as we didn't see them... Onwards!

On our way further South to Franz-Josef, the township nearby to the glacier of the same name, we picked up a hiker named Michael from Germany and we got on with him really well straight away. So much so that we ended up 'keeping' him for the rest of the time that I stayed with Verena! We had such a good laugh on our giant road trip and the hours of driving never felt that long. Keeping ourselves amused with silly yes-no games and mysteries that Michael gave us to solve using only yes-no answers. I think the, admittedly tiny, language barrier (they both spoke excellent English) added to the hilarity when there was misunderstandings! We had a really great group harmony and it ended up being one of my favourite weeks over the last 11 months! The twisting, undulating drive itself is warranting of it's title from the LP; blue seas on your right and a huge mountain wall on the left, I was constantly staring out of the window in amazement at this Panorama of the Gods.

We left the hostel the next morning with the intentions of doing an 8 hour hike in the forest surrounding the Franz-Josef glacier but due to the rain we ended up only walking up to the face of it. Still impressive, and the only place in the world where glacier, rainforest and ocean occur within such proximity to each other and effectively function as one ecosystem. It was a bit strange to look upon, you don't expect to see a massive block of snow and ice brushed up alongside lush greenery. There is a twin glacier up the road called Fox, which we also visited and were able to get much closer to. You can go on guided hikes on both these glaciers but they're not, how shall I say this, 'within a backpacker's budget', which just means I'll have to come back one day!

From here we headed to the adventure capital of New Zealand if not the world, Queenstown. It's a beautiful setting for a town and you can do everything you can possibly imagine but, and I hate to keep using this as an excuse, it's really expensive to do the crazy stuff! So instead, we played Frisbee Golf! Which was so much fun! Exactly the same as normal golf except with a frisbee and a basket to aim for. Due to our amateur status we took an hour and a half to finish a round and Michael won. To quote Gary Lineker 'You play for 90 minutes and then Germany wins'. We played again and he won again. On the final hole. And then he beat me at pool as well. I am not coming home for fear of being mobbed for my dis-service to my nation. We spent 4 days in Queenstown which included a 1 night trip to Milford Sound which was cool. A water phenomenon where fresh water from the glacier runs into the saltwater of the Sound (it's actually a fjord) and creates a double layer of water where the fresh water is less dense than the salt water. The fjord supports a wide array of creatures from dolphins and seals to creatures that would normally be living at more than 200m below the sea, thanks to the uniqueness of the ecosystem. Not as impressive as the hype made it out to be but maybe the terrible weather that we had on the day played a part in that?
We had a great time in Queenstown, going out with new friends, eating Fergburgers (I could write a whole blog on how good these burgers are!!) and staring out across the lake and mountains but my time in the South Island was coming to an end. Our last road trip took us to Dunedin, the city that is more than loosely based upon Edinburgh. The name is Celtic for Edinbugh! And we happened to turn up on the first Saturday of the new student year, and it would be rude not to join in the partying! the next morning we said our goodbyes as I jumped on the bus nursing a sore head. It has been an awesome experience travelling with these two guys and we already have plans to meet up again in the next couple of years!
New Zealand is Immense!!

---