Note to NZ: Invest in Guardrails!!!

Not that I needed any guardrails. If the road wasn't straight, I was going sloooowww. So yes, Ipicked up my awesome campervan in Christchurch and headed for the mountains. Operation maximize time in nature has commenced!

Except that it didn't start out with lots of nature; I stopped at Countdown since the campervan rental guy said they'd give me a coupon for petrol. I was taking my time to make sure I was buying lots of local products, and they decided to have a fire drill. Someday I'll send out the photos of their firetrucks that I took on my phone. So I was far behind my planned departure time, and I still had to fill up the tank and go to Warehouse, the NZ version of Walmart, and this was the Extra Warehouse, comparable to Super Walmart, except they don't sell ice. After getting a citronella candle, an extra fleece sweater, and a book, the Whale Warriors, I set off in the direction of Lake Tekapo. As it was getting dark and I was getting sleepy, I pulled off short of my destination into the Fairlie Holiday Park. Not much there so I sampled some of the Monkey Bay Rose I picked up at Countdown (delicious) and posted my first blog the next morning.

And since I was off to an awesome start, I thought I would make it better by going off 45 minutes in the wrong direction the next morning to Timaru instead of towards Aoraki Mt Cook National Park. Once I got back on track and muttered the phrase 'screw you Timaru' to myself quite a few times, I found myself at the lovely Lake Tekapo and had my first (of many) PB+J sandwiches. I played with the color of the photo since the lake was so blue, I like that the blue is really drawn out and you get a glimpse of another campervan-there are lots of them everywhere you go!

This is the real color of Lake Tekapo:



With car and tummy refueled, I made the journey up to my first Department of Conservation (DOC) sites, the White Horse Hill camping area, and got the upclose access to nature that for which I had been very much anticipating. This is the antiquified version of the view of Mt. Sefton from my van:

I also had immediate access for my tramp the next morning to the Hooker Valley trail which led to the duh, duh, DUH... Hooker Glacier! You can see the terminal face of the glacier at the other side of the lake under Mt. Cook. The entire glacier has a layer of dirt on top which apparently helps prevent excessive melting.



After trying the NZ version of Vegemite, Marmite, as it was recommended by campervan rental guy, (it was really gross-the marmite, not the guy), I headed to Queenstown. Stopped at a lovely fruit stand, but was more about the peach ginger jelly and chocolate covered honeycomb than the fruit.



I was driving next to this amazing gorge for a good portion of the trip, but I rolled into town, set up at the Creeksyde Holiday Park and booked some activities for the next few days.



First thing the next morning, I went to the gondola for the first paragliding run of the day. Literally, you run straight for the edge until you lift off. Wild! And I had a great realization while up in the air. All of those times on the swings at Hershey Park did prepare me for something in life. Paragliding! :) Except the views were a wee bit higher up and didn't include the Comet. :)

After such an exhilarating experience, it was hard to walk back to the campervan, but I pulled myself together and checked out the underwater observatory at the lake and walked around the city's gardens. I was still pretty enthralled by my paragliding experience that morning, so I chilled out over a Speights lager and wrote some postcards and went to Winnie's for a pumpkin, pine nut, and havarti pizza. yeah. that's right. uber deliciousness.

Since I was on a mission to save some cash, I stayed at another DOC site, this one at Moke Lake about 6km outside of Queenstown. Another amazing spot:

I left super early the next morning to make sure I made it to my pickup point at the holiday park for my day trip to Milford Sound. Taking the eco-bus was pretty awesome. The bus gave some insider info about the area, and stopped at a place I would have never found to see some rare birds, pukeko and mountain parrots. We also stopped in Te Anau where I had an amazing veggie pie which consisted of potatoes, carrots, and some magically delicious goo in a pastry pie shell. I had it with a long black coffee, the closest thing to a regular cup of joe, which is a shot of espresso with a lot of hot water added.

I took over 600 photos in less than 48 hours, so I'm having a hard time deciding what to post at this point. We stopped at some cool spots along the way, but we were driving with a ridiculous amount of waterfalls all around us since there was a lot of rain, and then there was the actual milford sound! so i'm just going to post a few of my favs from the day trip:

I stayed another night at the Creeksyde and made an awesome red wine tomato sauce with green squash over (what else) macaroni noodles. Yum! And the next morning as I was getting ready to roll out of town, finishing my egg, tomato, and avocado on Mackenzie Country multigrain bread (seriously when did i become a decent chef?), I ran into who other than, Melbourne dude from the Hooker Valley tramp 3 days ago. The campervan circuit is a very small world. He aparently made a really quick loop further south to Dunedin, Ivancargill, then back up to Queenstown, whereas I went directly to Queenstown. He was also on a Milford Sound cruise 2 hours before mine. So we chatted for a bit, and hopefully I'll have a tour guide in Melbourne!

Off I went to Wanaka hoping to avoid the impending doom of massive amounts of rainfall, but I had not left soon enough. I wasn't able to get in any more tramps, I mean hikes, I mean tramps. Oh dear. Anyway it was ugly outside, so I thought it best to keep driving and start planning a route to get out of the rain and potentially flooded West Coast and head east. I passed through Wanaka and eventually found a place to park for the night in Haast Pass, a small DOC site called Pleasant Flat, which was supposed to have nice views of Mt. Cook and Mt. Aspiring. Well as much as I aspired to see these peaks, it was not to happen. I did have a good sleep though with the sound of rain on the campervan roof.

I was hopeful for some penguins in Jackson Bay the next day, but the colony had gone to their unknown winter location already, so I kept on the road to Fox Glacier. I did stop for a quick nature loop tramp and just as I was pulling out of the car park, I saw some pukeko, some of the rare NZ birds I saw in the Te Anau Wilderness Reserve.

Again I had hoped for some outdoor activites, but the massive amounts of rain were causing flooding on the glacier access roads. Not cool! I parked at the Fox Glacier Holiday Park rather than continuing on to Franz Josef Glacier since it was much cheaper. I think this is around the time that I started reading The Whale Warriors or maybe I finished Chamber of Secrets. Either way I was planning to get to Hokitika the next day so I could have a few indoor activity options. It worked out pretty well. Picked up some jade scraps. Went to a wilderness center. Saw a kiwi, not a person, the bird. Fed some eels. I was pretty freaked out by this. They stick their heads (and necks? whatever) up out of the water and have some serious teeth, start waving their heads about since they know there's food somewhere. Oh man, thinking about it is giving me chills. Don't watch the Princess Bride if you plan on doing this anytime soon.

Also enjoyed the proximity to the beach of the Shining Star Holiday Park. Checked out the glow worm dell across the street. I went at dusk and there was no sign of glow worms, then all of a sudden there were little shimmers of light coming from under the shrubs. Couldn't really take a picture though since it was so dark and their lights were dim. But it was like a consellation on the earth at night under the leaves. Seriously cool.

Since I was getting grossed out by the weather and tired of hearing of how sunny it was on the east coast, I decided to make a break for it instead of checking out Pancake Rocks and Hanmer Springs further north. I made my way through Arthur's Pass and had some interaction with the keas, aka mountain parrots. Very cheeky fellows. I know they wanted me to feed them, but I held out on them, that is until they started attacking the tires on my campervan! I really didn't want to be stranded at the top of the this pass with a flat/eaten tire, so I threw my apple core away from the van. Success! I ran back into the van and hurried off before they could get at the tires again. At my next stop there was a big sign about not feeding the kea. They are endangered and need to rely on their regular food sources to survive. Yikes! But they were eating my tires!!! Pretty smart if you ask me. I hope I didn't do any damage though. At least it was an apple. Another guy was feeding them pringles.

Next stop: Arthur's Pass, the town, not the actual mountain pass. And guess what? MORE RAIN! I contemplated a 1.5 hour tramp to a waterfall, but I was tired of being damp and therefore cold, so I opted instead to fill up my water bottles and start searching for a camp site. I found some great places, but they were a little too close to the rising rivers for my taste. I ended up at a nice little place by Lake Pearson. It was just me and a hippy camper (seriously that's the campervan rental company name). Turns out there's a major wildlife sanctuary for lots of birds there. I got to see more diving ducks, regular (mallard?) ducks, and some rare geese like birds.

I found it hard to sleep without the sound of rain at night, but still got up with the sun to drive back through Christchurch to Akaroa on the Banks Penninsula. Ferry dude man said it was one of the best places to see Hector's dolphins, the smallest dolphin on the planet (about 4 ft long), which also happened to be endangered. So I got to see lots of them! Plus a seal colony, albatross, and two penguins (from far away). Hooray! And some cool volancanic rock formations and caves.

I hung out at the Akaroa Holiday Park and had another dinner of macaroni pasta with red wine sauce, this time with avocado and havarti and looked out over the harbor and watched the sunset over the hills. Not that I needed convincing but this settled it, campervaning is the bomb diggity.

I took off in the morning for the scenic drive around the peninsula, but it was very curvy with huge trucks going to pick up sheep or cattle. I don't know how they drive so fast but I was going super slow. I didn't want to miss my turn off for a few last tramps or accidently turn off the road! Super steep, and I think I saw 3 very short guardrails during all of my travels. I drove down off the scenic road and into Oakins Bay. Gorgeous. I guess I've been saying that a lot. But when you drive through the pine trees and end up on a beach, it's amazing. And I was the only one on the beach! I couldn't believe it. It was just me, some cows and sheep on the hills, and a few birds on the beach. I found a few purplish pink snails later. This might be as close as it gets to feeling like Dr. Dolittle.

It's not the first time I thought about Dr. Dolittle, considering there was a huge butterfly on my van and many great views of the moon (okay to follow the story accurately it's supposed to be a moth, but still). And now here I was with some large pink snail shells (their shells weren't nearly big enough for me to crawl into, but the largest I'd ever seen.) I sat on the beach to keep reading my Whale Warrior book. I was hoping to finish it before having to pack it for the flight to Melbourne (no luck there), but its a very intense book and highly recommended. So that's really it for the campervan portion of my travels. I drove back to Christchurch, made sure I had everything packed up and cleaned out the van, and hopped into a taxi to the Christchurch airport. I'm going to miss my awesome orange butterfly van. It took me lots of amazing places where I met some pretty cool people. Got to see the beauty of New Zealand up close including some serious wildlife. Dr. Doolittle wasn't there, and I didn't end up on the moon, but it was pretty close to being that awesome.

I'm writing a lot more than I thought I would. I seriously thought I'd just put up some photos to let everyone know that I hadn't fallen off the face of the earth, but I've been pleasantly surprised with my Kiwi adventures and definitely wouldn't mind coming back someday. An amazing place for sure. But now I'm looking to Australia as a place where I might get even closer to wildlife, especially those elusive penguins and get some more time to relax and downshift from perpetual tourist mode. I'm also going to work on remembering names, so as to not refer to people by their nationalities or vague titles such as dude man. Be posting hopefully from Adelaide before taking off to Tasmania on May 15th. Cheers!

I'm in Auckland and heading to the South Island ASAP!

Arrival in Auckland

After about 24 hours in the air and timewarping from April 14th to the 16th, I finally arrived in Auckland. The flights weren't so bad, and Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone helped me pass a huge amount of time in LAX. The flight was pretty swanky; Qantas Air is the way to go. Amazing food and snacks, plus hearing the accents, helped me prepare for the new world I was about to encounter. I must say that the steward went above and beyond his job duties by guiding me around the airport to make sure I got vegetarian options on my return Qantas flight from Sydney to LAX, and believe me it was a very nice gesture because I was not a pretty sight.

With my hiking boots cleared through biosecurity, I headed to the center city, which was much bigger and much more commercial than expected. I guess I thought that I would be dropped into semi wilderness adventure from the get-go, but Auckland is very modern and fashionable, but with a touch of the hippy surfer vibe. I headed X Base hostel, got cleaned up, wrote some emails home to the parents to let them know that my plane wasn't diverted by any volcanic ash and that yes, I arrived safely.

I had hoped to catch a bus or train out to Piha Beach, famous for black sand and The Piano, but it was a good distance away, and there really wasn't a feasible public transit route. Since I would be in the area for less than 24 hours I thought it too much of a hassle to rent the car and possibly get lost on my own before I got my bearings. I opted for a walking tour suggested by my Lonely Planet guidebook (thank you very much!), and familiarized myself with some sites much closer to the hostel. I got some refreshments at the Kiwi version of 7-Eleven, and checked out Suffragette Square (not really a square, more like tiny plaza with lots of modern art exhibitions), University of Auckland, Albert Park as in (Queen Victoria's Albert), a foaming fountain, and an asian food market, Food Alley. Props to New Zealand for being the first country to give women the right to vote in 1893. And I walked past the Food Alley building a few times thinking it was under construction or condemned, but it was a nice food court on the inside, and I was fixed up with some tasty, cheap Pad Thai.

At this point, I'd been walking around the downtown area for a while, and I was really aware of the difference in traffic patterns. Even though I was a pedestrian, I have the habit of looking left and stepping off the curb, which is not good when the traffic is coming from the right! Not that I've had any close calls, but I was definitely out of sorts at every intersection. I tried to check out the traffic signs and road markings to get familiar with them, so I'll hopefully be prepared for driving the campervan in a few days.

Train, Ferry, Train

Since I am writing this post with a few days to reflect, and I'm really glad that I set up a train to Wellington, a ferry to Picton, and another train to Christchurch even though it was a total of 17 hours aboard trains and 3 hours on the ferry. These three travel legs over two days made it optimal for sight seeing without the added time of stopping, paying for tours, wandering about and getting lost and found again. On the Auckland to Wellington Overlander (which covers almost the entire length of the North Island), I got to see the Auckland suburbs a bit, headed through Franklin County and Kings Country both of which had lots of farm animals, especially sheep, lots and lots of sheep, so I was reminded of Lancaster County scenery. The train made it around the railroad engineering awesomeness of the Raurimu Spiral which took us through many tunnels around the hilly landscape in two rotations. Shortly thereafter the train made a lunch stop in Mordor, by which I mean the Tongariro National Park, the second park in the world to be established after Yellowstone. I took a few photos of Mt. Doom, which wasn't so gloomy, and normally goes by the name Mt. Ruapehu.

After some more snaps of the countryside and seeing a huge display of windmills (240+), the sun set, and the train eventually rolled into Wellington.

I'm pretty happy with the inclusion of train travel in the beginning of my travels. Since they still have wood ties, I was reminded of the sway of the train from my old commuter route from Lancaster to Harrisburg a few years back, but it looks as if the railroad is switching over to cement ties, so getting thrown out of your seat or looking like a drunkard as you fall all over the place walking through the train cars will soon be a thing of the past here. I'm not complaining about the ride though, it was very classy to be in old-school train cars and have a cafe on board with lots of New Zealand treats (the spinach and egg sammie was all local products and delicious). I also think it'll be good to bookend my travels with long train trips since I'm still planning on going via rail from Montreal to Philly in early July. I feel like I'm making some environmentally conscious decisions (trains are better than planes, right?), and the long rides are less stressful and provide more time for guidebook reading and unwinding.

I checked into a retro hostel in Wellington, which used to be a bees knees hotel back in the day. I thought that I would prep myself for another early start since I was getting the run around for the ferry departure time (there's a big difference between 8:30am and 10:15am), but my Chinese roommate, Serena, convinced me that I would only be in Wellington once and should get a drink with her. She seemed a bit self-conscious of her English skills, so I thought I could be her wing girl as she was on the lookout for a Kiwi boyfriend while waiting for her Australian visa to be approved. Plus I wasn't going to turn down another night to try to some local wine and check out the scene. Well, apparently all the bars are closed in downtown Wellington by 11pm, so we went to Waterloo, the bar on the ground floor (which equates to the first floor in the U.S.) of the hostel. It worked out for the best because there was a rugby league team (comparable I'm guessing to intramurals) celebrating a win and a bartender from Atlanta who appreciated hearing a familiar accent and relayed some helpful tips about local wine.

I didn't go wild the previous night, but had some fun with the rugby guys who were very into karaoke. Awesome! This is my kinda place! But I was grateful I made it an early night since I was very ready to get some awesome pics of the harbor at sunrise and sort out the ferry departure time, it was 10:15! Boo! But it didn't matter much because I boarded early and watched Q+A, a TV program similar to Meet the Press, and got my dose of Sunday morning political talk and learned that Kiwis share many of the same concerns: student loan debt, climate crisis, and the Bernie Maddoffs of the world.

During the 3 hour ferry ride, I met a few locals who chatted me up about the best travel route, rabbit hunting (yeah, really), and cars (they might be an even bigger deal here than in the U.S. Imagine that!). I got some awesome pics once the sun decided to make an appearance, saw a huge school (?) of dolphins swimming by the ferry, and wondered about the luxurious vessel. It was pretty much a 3 hour cruise! There was even an option for a movie theater, but I figured Sherlock Holmes can be Netflix-ed when I get home, and I've already seen Up. This ferry would be far superior to flying any day!

Upon arriving in Picton, I walked over to my train connection and settled into my second train ride seat. And I should mention that seating is key. I had a single seat (rare) by a door, so I could go to the viewing platform easily without disrupting anyone, and was on the left side of the train (optimal for looking at the amazing coastline along the north of the south island). So I was blessed with great seating. I also had a window seat from Auckland to Wellie, so that worked out well too. It was a pretty non-eventful ride, but pleasant and gave me lots of time to incorporate the recent travel advice into my campervan plans. I had hoped for a whale siting, but I'll have to settle for some sealions chillin on the rocks. I wasn't ready with my camera for the dolphins or the sea lions, so I need to work out my camera battery charging issues and get some wildlife snaps!

I made it to my hostel without too many issues, but the taxi fees are accumulating. I need to work on finding cheaper transport alternatives. I worked on some more campervan details like if I can plug in my battery charger (yes!), where to buy groceries, long johns, and bug spray, plus I prepped for this blog posting! Yay!

So that's it. My first post from New Zealand. I wanted to post something before picking up the campervan, but have already gotten it and am posting from Fairlie on my way to Mt. Cook. I'm going to keep journaling and taking photographs, but it might be a while before I post again. The next posting should include some more great scenery and possibly shots of me paragliding! I wasn't too pleased with the photos from the train since I was using the moving image function, so they should improve as I make my way over to Mt. Cook, into Otago, and down to Fijordland.

Hope all is well where ever you are! Cheers!