New Zealand - South Island

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Just getting over to the South Island is an experience in itself as you take the ferry across from Wellington and make your way through the Marlborough Sounds into Picton. It takes about three and a half hours and the first impressions suggested that those people who insisted that the South Island was prettier than the North might not be exaggerating! We were meeting Whebo and Pelley in Christchurch and travelling around most of the island in a campervan which was an exciting prospect, but we had around a week and a half until then.

After a couple of quiet days in Picton we headed to Blenheim where we were staying at an AirBnB and properly landed on our feet with our hosts! As we were trying to figure out how we were going to spend the days that we weren’t going to go wine tasting, Jeanette mentioned that her husband Tony was looking for someone to go out on his boat fishing with him and we were more than happy to assist. It was an amazing experience being out on the boat in the Marlborough Sounds, the water was flat, the scenery was incredible, we saw seals and all that was before we started fishing. Neither of us had ever done any fishing before and I couldn’t believe how much you could feel the fish biting at the bait at the end of your line. I raced into the lead and caught two Blue Cod large enough to keep whilst Julia was wasting her time catching pointless little fish that she had to throw back. I think Tony must have then felt a bit sorry for her because he moved positions and she went on a streak catching three that we could keep and I got nothing. To complete the morning we then cooked up one of the fish we’d caught and it was probably the freshest, nicest fish I’d ever eaten and Tony filleted the other two that we’d caught and we had that for dinner the following night as well. The following day we hired a couple of bikes and went around the vineyards around the Renwick area where all you can see for miles are rows upon rows of grapes. We went to five vineyards in total and all of the wine was incredible, I think if we’d gone to anymore then we might not have made it back on the bikes in one piece! Our time in Blenheim was definitely made by Jeanette and Tony who were great hosts and the morning out on the boat will be something that I’ll never forget.

From Blenheim we headed down to Kaikoura where the weather wasn’t great so we used the time to chill out a bit and we experienced our first ever earthquake! When we got to New Zealand Dad and my Auntie Kate had both told me about how my great grandparents had spent some time in New Zealand back in 1925 and the only story that came back was that Queenie didn’t like the ornaments falling off the shelves because of all the tremors and here we were nearly a hundred years on experiencing the same thing! It measured 4.7 on the Richter scale and it woke me up but at first I thought I’d just banged my head on the wardrobe behind the bed, thought nothing of it and went back to sleep! It wasn’t until I spoke to a Swiss lady whilst making coffee the next morning and she asked me if I’d felt the hostel shaking in the middle of the night and checked the local news on Google did the penny drop that we’d experienced a quake! In the grand scheme of things it was a small one and when we got to Christchurch we saw a city that was still rebuilding from the pair of big earthquakes that they had recently. Visiting Quake City was a real eye opener to the damage that the quakes caused and it was quite moving to hear some of the people’s accounts that were caught up in it all. We were unsure what to expect from Christchurch as a lot of what we’d heard hadn’t been promising but we really enjoyed our five days there. The day we arrived it was Julia’s birthday so we went to a place called Adrenaline Forest, which for people back home is like Go Ape, and spent the afternoon swinging around very ungracefully in the treetops! We spent the Saturday watching England comprehensively stuff The Blackcaps in the final ODI before spending Sunday being tourists, walking around the city and enjoying our first roast dinner for 6 months! There was an atmosphere around the city that we really liked and you really got the sense that people were pulling together to rebuild and make it a vibrant place once again. There was lots of murals on old buildings and organisations such as Gap Filler who create temporary projects, installations in empty spaces that were once occupied by structures that have now been demolished because of the damage caused by the quake.

After meeting Whebo & Pelley and being introduced to Molly our home for the next 10 days we set off on our whistle stop tour of the rest of the South Island. We made it round eight destinations and covered around 1,300 miles which was a fair old effort and great fun at the same time. The views as I was sat in the back of the campervan looking out the window were as I’ve come to expect pretty special and I did find that I was trying to cast my mind back to my GCSE Geography lessons to see if I could remember why certain things appear as they are. Our loop started off in Mount Cook where we walked the Hooker Valley Trail and took in the views of the Southern Alps and then we moved onto Te Anau for a night on our way to Milford Sounds where we went on a cruise. The cruise was amazing and we got to see a pod of maybe 30 or 40 dolphins swimming around and playing near the boat whilst the seals were being far more casual and chilling on the rocks. Towards the end of the cruise you are taking to the Lady Bowen Falls which is a 162 metres high and the boat slowly edges it’s way so you’re perhaps a metre or so away from the bottom of the fall which was an incredible but freezing cold and wet experience! On the way to Queenstown we stopped off and walked up to Lake Marian which was a really good walk ending up at an amazing setting and when we finally got to Queenstown we put away a few Guinness to celebrate St Patrick’s Day. We’d covered a lot of ground by this point and Whebo & Pelley weren’t happy with a grinding noise coming from the brakes of the van so we took Molly to a mechanic in Wanaka who declared that the technical term for the state they were in was “F*!CKED!” and we shouldn’t go any further until they were sorted! In Bangkok Julia and I had got chatting to a girl who told us about how she had flown a plane in Wanaka so we had looked into that and booked it. We weren’t really sure how much control we would have but it turned out that we would be in control of everything under the guidance of an experienced co-pilot, from moving the plane on the ground pushing pedals with your feet to pulling the controls in and out to make the plane go up and down. We flew out over Lakes Wanaka and Hawea, Julia going first as I sat in the passenger seat and then vice versa. We both agreed that when we were the passenger things didn’t feel as stable as when you were in the driving seat. The Franz Josef Glacier was a great spectacle and we got really lucky with the weather as we got to the viewing point there was an incredible view of it but by the time we got back to the car park it had been completely covered by a thick blanket of rain and cloud. Unfortunately it was pretty wet for the rest of our time in the campervan which made drying out quite difficult and because of the weather we didn’t get to see as much of the Abel Tasman National Park as we would have liked but you could tell it would have been even more stunning with a sunny backdrop. I guess it just gives us one more reason to come back and explore it further. We got dropped off in Nelson where we would then make our own way back to Picton and then take the ferry back to the North Island before taking the bus back to Auckland. It was quite sad to see the guys driving off in Molly when they dropped us off but it was great to see them and we are very grateful for them doing all the driving.

It’s pretty exhausting just looking back on everything we’ve done in the last few weeks so by the time we got up to Auckland it was nice to have a few slower days to relax. We met up with a couple that we met in Chiang Mai who live here, Roseleigh and Jackson, and just got back from their travels in Europe. So we had lunch with them and shared stories about the different things that had happened since we met them a couple of months ago. They also kindly drove us to the airport and sent us to Fiji with full bellies after making us breakfast.

Our two months in New Zealand really has been everything and more than we had possibly hoped for before coming here. We’ve done so many different things, seen so much and met a lot of great people along the way that if anything means we’re a little bit sad we have to leave! It’s also somewhere where I think you could easily spend another couple of months and not get bored of it and I definitely wouldn’t rule out coming back at some point in the future.

We move onto Fiji next for a week, before spending three nights in Los Angeles and then onto Colombia where we will be joined by Bruce, Charlie, Fluff and their girlfriends for what I’m sure will be a couple of peaceful and relaxing two weeks to kick off our time in South America!

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Comments

[Kate]

Hello
Just caught up with you - it's like buses - nothing happens then three come along together! Glad that all is going well. You are certainly packing a lot in. I'm sure there are even more adventures that don't hit the blog! so there will still be tails to tell when you get back... Keep safe and enjoy South America Love Kate & Mark