Dunedin to Akaroa

Feb. 27-28

The Morekai boulders

Our first stop north from Dunedin was the Morekai Boulders.  These round boulders apparently formed in an ancient sea and appear as the cliff erodes. The Maori have a different story about their origin. They are quite the tourist attraction to Jake’s mystification.  But any excuse for a driving break. 

3rd prize wool

Second stop was the A&P show in Omarau.  The Agriculture and Pastoral show is the kiwi equivalent of a county fair.  This was the North Otago A&P.  There were displays of talent in singing and dancing by children (talent was questionable in some cases).  A huge number of giant tractors and farm equipment as well as cars, utes (pickup trucks) and ATVs.  The sheep judging was going on (who knew there were so many sheep breeds?) and we saw the results of the wool judging with score sheets.  The pony jumping was also going on as we arrived. 

We checked out all the farming equipment displays and food options and settled on scallop sandwiches with an iced coffee for me.  The scallops in NZ (and maybe most countries except the US) are served whole with the roe.  Why they take the row off in the US is a total mystery to me because it is delicious.  I thought I’d lost a scallop from my sandwich only to discover it 10 minutes later balanced on my sunglasses’ lens which were slung around my neck. Other options were steamed green lipped mussels, whitebait patties (see the West Coast), bacon butties (like a bacon sandwich), spiraled fried potatoes and sweet potatoes, and the usual hotdogs and hamburgers and kebabs.    

Grand prize sheep

Why do goat tenders wear white?

Towards the end of the parade

We checked out the home production entries of jams, jellies, scones, and cakes, knitted items, vegetables and flowers.  Very similar to county fairs.  The grand parade at 1pm was led by a group of bagpipers in full regalia and followed by groupings of the prize winning animals at the show.  The grand prize sheep was in a pen in the back of a pickup truck, all the other sheep and animals had to walk. 

Our last camp site

From Omarau we headed north and stopped for the evening at the holiday camp in Temuka.  The campground is on the town domain, public park like area, so before you get to it you pass the public mini golf course, skateboard park and pool.  The holiday camp was privately run and very nice.  It wasn’t particularly crowded so we had a whole section to ourselves not far from the “amenities” block (toilets, showers, and kitchen).  I took a walk into town to buy some breakfast items.  All the stores had closed at noon except for a few convenience stores.  There’s not a lot in Temuka, but it is pleasant enough.  We walked back into town a little later to have dinner at the Jolly Potter, recommended by the I-Site lady in Timaru.  It was an Irish Pub with Guinness and Murphy’s on tap as well as other local beers and a decent selection of wines by the glass.  We ordered the typical pub fare of chicken satay and Cajun chicken.  Decently cooked, not great.  Maybe fish and chips would have been better?  The rhubarb crumble was not what we expected being more like some rhubarb jam on a very moist cake, but it was tasty.

This was our last night of camping, so in the morning we deposited our entire set of camping gear in the donation bin of the Op Shop, supporting the local SPCA.

The drive north from there was really flat and pretty dull.  After an hour and half or so we got to the outskirts of Christchurch and branched off to the east for the Akaroa peninsula.  We stopped in Lincoln for breakfast (we had just had a yogurt and banana back at the campground) at the Rustic Bakery.  Really good muffins!  From there the drive gets much more interesting as you go along the coast and up through the hills to Akaroa.

Dunedin

From Te Anau we headed south and east across rolling hills of sheep and cow pastures to Dunedin (pronounced Dun EE din) on the east coast.  It was raining the whole day, so we didn’t stop to do any sightseeing along the way.  Lunch was at a café in a small town (Café Lola, maybe in Milford) that had good coffee, the food was okay but not particularly memorable. 

From the history of brewing

Dunedin is perched on a steep hill overlooking a well-protected harbor.  Two of the major industries are located right in town, the Cadbury chocolate company and Speight’s Brewery.  We opted for the brewery tour.  Our guide was very entertaining and took our group through a display on the history of brewing, through the raw materials rooms where you could sniff toasted barley and fresh hops (related to cannabis but no you cannot brew beer using cannabis nor would smoking hops give you a high).  They source both their hops and barley in NZ.  The water comes from their own deep well within the building complex.  There is a tap outside where you can fill your own water containers for free.  You go through some rooms of equipment that was in use up until fairly recently and then finish in their brand new brewing area with its stainless steel containers.  There is a second brewery in Auckland that does all the bottled and canned beer.  This one does only kegs for the south island.  And it provides a byproduct of the brewing process to make Marmite!

New vats at Speight's

Old copper vats at Speight's

Since it was my birthday we went out for a nice dinner at Bacchus, second floor overlooking the Octagon in the middle of town.  They had a good by the glass wine selection and what I guess could be described as modern kiwi food.  Jake got the pea and mint risotto appetizer and a double portion of a tuna tartare appetizer, both very good and prettily presented.  I got lamb chops coated with a sundried tomato olive paste that was tasty but almost overwhelmed the lamb flavor.  For dessert we split a chocolate brownie with vanilla ice cream that came with a candle on top.  And a leafy garnish of angelica, something I hadn’t seen as a garnish before or tasted. It has a slightly sweet flavor with maybe a hint of fennel, but the leaves are a little hairy for eating.

A royal albatross

The next day we had blueberry muffins and good coffee at a coffee shop across the street from the hotel. We took the car and explored the Otago Peninsula which runs about 30 km west of Dunedin.  It took us a couple 2 tries to get out of the city, but once we got going the right way around the harbor it was pretty easy.  The road though is a very narrow windy road that hugs the coastline.  We went to the far end of the peninsula first to the Albatross center.  Sure enough there were a number of Royal Albatross circling overhead and a huge number of gulls.  I didn’t do the albatross tour which takes you to see the nesting area but the center does have some educational displays on albatross and other sea life.  Albatross spend most of their life at sea.  These particular ones fly from NZ to as far away as the tip of South America.   We walked down to the public beach where fur seals lazed on the rocks within spitting distance.  We split a slice of spinach tart at the café there before heading a short way back down the peninsula to Penguin Place. 

Yellow-eyed penguins in the penguin hospital

Jake opted to sit on the beach while I did the penguin tour.  There were only 3 of us plus our guide on the tour.  The other two were a mother daughter from England.  The daughter has been teaching science to middle schoolers in Auckland for the last 10 years.  She was about my age.  Our guide was a recent environmental management graduate from the North Island.  He was saving money to travel to southern China before settling into a full time job.  We got a background lecture on the yellow-eyed penguin’s life cycle.  They are not doing well and seem somewhat evolutionarily unfit for the modern world.  They are fairly solitary penguins and have only one chick a year I think.  Mom and dad feed the chicks until they fledge, then the chicks are completely on their own.  They waddle down to the ocean, jump in, and have to learn to fish and avoid predators by themselves.  Once a year the adults stay ashore for a month without eating while they molt.  If they haven’t gotten fat enough before molting they die of starvation.  If it gets too hot while the adults are molting (or while the chicks are young) they die from overheating.  They will abandon their nests if disturbed by people.  They nest under trees and shrubs and will not nest within visual distance of another penguin, so with deforestation their territories get bigger and bigger or they don’t have enough shade too keep themselves cool.  Because of overfishing, there aren’t enough fish in the sea and this year in particular they’ve taken in a lot of penguins that are starving.  Apparently there are several large Ukrainian trawlers that go up and down the coast between Akaroa and Dunedin. 

So there are about 2000 yellow-eyed penguins in the world (they only occur in NZ) and at this particular reserve there are usually about 200 penguins.  This year there were only 3 nests, and 2 were successful.  A bunch of penguins from this beach got eaten by an endangered sea lion last year.  The farm controls rabbits that eat the native tree and shrub species and stoats and rats that might eat penguin eggs.

Blue penguin in a nest box

Male bachelor fur seals chest bump

Yellow eyed molting penguin in the reserve

penguin nest boxes

cage for young penguins who will self-release soon

After the lecture we visited the penguin hospital.  They were looking after about 8 yellow eyed penguins, 1 fiordland penguin, and 1 other species.  I think they were all there because they were molting and starving.  They’ll all be released once their new feathers grow in.  From there, we took a van over the farm to the southern coastline.  They are reforesting this area and there is a beach where yellow eyed and blue penguins come ashore.  They also have lots of nesting boxes for both species.  We walked around and could see 2 adult molting yellow-eyed penguins and numerous molting blue penguins in their nest boxes.  There were also three young penguins who were in a self-releasing pen so they could head down to the ocean when they felt able.

I picked Jake back up and we headed back to town.  We walked down to see the very ornamental train station and then decided to go see “Lady in the Van” at the movie theatre.  It was not crowded, fairly comfortable seats.  We went to a busy Japanese restaurant on Princes St. for a light dinner of a sushi roll and salad.  Okay, inexpensive.  We stayed at a self-catering hotel on Princes St. called Scenic (it’s a chain).  Very well located, nice lobby/restaurant area.  The room had great views over the city and a balcony, not inexpensive.

stainglass window in the Dunedin train station

On Saturday morning the city was pretty quiet and our coffee shop from the day before not open yet, so we went to Perc just off the Octagon instead.  Also very good baked goods and coffee.

Milford Sound

Feb. 23-24 Leaving early from our campground we gassed up in Queenstown and headed south and west to Te Anau, the jumping off point so to speak for Milford Sound.  We got to Te Anau in time for lunch and got great hamburgers at Bailez on the main street.  Te Anau seems pretty prosperous, numerous restaurants and shops and built on a curve in the lake.  After browsing a little and picking up breakfast provisions he headed northwest on the road to Milford Sound to our lodging about 30 km in, the Fiordland National Park Lodge.  It is not affiliated with the park, I think it just has that name because it borders the park.  It was an adequate lodge but we were glad we’d had a big lunch because it turned out the restaurant was not operating.  We made do with snacks from our supply.  I took a walk down to the lake and across the street around part of Mistletoe Lake.  It is a small lake surrounded by marshy areas and beech forest.  The beech forests here seemed fairly dry, not dripping with moss as on the wetter west coast.  But when you step off the compacted path the ground is very soft, like walking on thick sponges.

The next morning we set off under cloudy skies for Milford Sound at 7:45 am.  The drive is fairly easy following a pretty valley for the first 60 km or so and then narrows as it goes up and over the divide to Milford Sound.  An ambitious entrepreneur built a long tunnel through the last saddle blocking the way to the Sound.  It’s a one way tunnel and the center is very rough cut.  They do have traffic lights at either end.  All the way through the mountains the rain got heavier and waterfalls cascaded down the sides of cliffs. 

Milford Sound in the rain

Approaching a waterfall

There’s a big car park when you get to the sound and one large café.  From there you walk a few minutes to the boat terminal.  We were booked on the 9:45 am Southern Discoveries nature cruise.  The boat holds maybe a hundred people and they handed us a bunch of plastic cards for our various activities.  The boat has a covered outdoor area in back on 2 decks and you can go around to the bow as well.  The indoor areas have big windows and comfortable seats.  We sat next to an Australian couple from Adelaide and chatted about heat waves and droughts in between jumping up to go outside for the view through the rain.

The smaller specks are little fish and the blob at the front a bigger fish.  The ferny things are the corals.

The boat can go very close to the edges of the fiord and puts its bow under a couple waterfalls.  We saw fur seals and a few birds but no dolphins.  The boat turns around just a little way into the much choppier Tasman Sea and docks 20 minutes later at the Underwater Discovery Center.  This building floats and has a cylindrical room underneath 60 steps deep with very thick plexiglass windows.  Outside are floating gardens with mostly naturally colonized animals that have been developing over the last 30 years.  They did transplant some black coral (which look like white ferny corals while they are alive).  It was amazing the number of fish swimming around out there just under the surface.  From tiny wrasses to larger 12 – 18” fish.  We also saw big starfish with fat legs, tube worms, and anemones.

From here you have the option to go kayaking, but as the rain was pouring down we decided to take the next boat back to the terminal instead. 

The Chasm

On the way back to Te Anau we stopped at The Chasm, a very cool area where a stream has carved its way through granite and created lots of smooth edge holes in the rocks.  You walk through a very mossy beech forest on the way to the stream.

Jake helping himself to snacks in the Te Anau Lodge library

Back in Te Anau we checked into one of our nicer lodgings, the Te Anau Lodge a few km from downtown in sort of a suburban neighborhood.  The building was moved to the site from about 100 km away and had been a convent for the Sisters of Mercy.  It was originally built in 1937 and has a lot of beautiful woodwork.  The area around it is being developed as a nice garden.  We drove downtown for dinner and a lot of the better restaurants were completely booked.  We ended up eating at the Olive Tree Café, moving inside from the pleasant patio when it started to rain.  Jake had a very good smoked salmon dish.  My seafood salad was okay but not great.  The pinot gris we tried was oddly sweet although not bad with the seafood. The lodge serves breakfast in the former Rectory room.  A nice array of continental breakfast options and/or eggs and bacon.

Action! Glenorchy and Queenstown

The drive over the southern alps from Haast to Queenstown wasn’t too bad.  It was raining until we got over the pass but the road followed the Haast River valley and was not as winding as I thought it might be.  There were great views of waterfalls cascading down the mountainsides. We stopped to see Fantail Falls, not a very high waterfall, but pretty. 

The Haast river comes from the glaciers and has very cloudy water and a very broad pebbly floodplain. Soon after the pass the vegetation changes dramatically from mossy forests to windswept plains and the rain pretty much stopped too. We stopped in Makarora after 90 km for a cup of coffee, a bacon and egg pie and a warm berry muffin.  We then drove along 2 long lakes bordered by rocky pastures for sheep, cows and deer.  Another rainbow harkened clearer skies this time.

South of Wanaka we passed by vineyards and orchards until following the Kawarau River through a deep gorge over to Queenstown. Queenstown was very busy with tour buses, campervans, and people.  It’s the adventure capital of New Zealand and so far nearly everyone we’ve met has gone through or is planning to go through Queenstown.  We parked in a parking garage and found our way to an I-Site to collect maps.  Then we wandered around town to get our bearings. We’ve been trying to find an audiobook with CDs to listen to in the car because we can’t seem to download one and play it from our devices without wireless.  However, so far no bookstores have carried audiobooks. 

We had lunch at a Thai restaurant overlooking the busy lakefront area where the jetboats and steamboat dock.  Jake’s Tom ka gai soup was really good.  My chicken with chilis and basil mediocre. 

Parasailing and steamer in Queenstown

View from the Glenorchy wharf

I had booked a room at the Lodge in Glenorchy thinking that it was on the other side of Queenstown and would make our drive shorter, but it is a 45 minute drive up the lake from Queenstown on a curvy road with lots of one way bridges.  It’s a very small town but peaceful and with several lodging and dining options.  I think even Jake is glad to be here instead of in Queenstown.

We took a walk from town around and through the lagoon at the end of the lake.  The town recently finished a really nice walking path with long boardwalks through the lagoon. 

Boardwalk through the lagoon in Glenorchy

Lagoon plants and clouds

We dined in the informal café at our lodge, a nice piece of salmon for Jake and fried blue cod for me with salads. And a very good glass of pinot noir (it was their good wine, as opposed to the house wine). The salads in NZ are really tasty in general – very fresh lettuces and assorted other veggies with good vinaigrettes.  I don’t think we’ve had a bad salad yet!

After a good egg and ciabatta toast breakfast at our café, we drove out of town and across the Dart River to do a morning hike around Sylvan Lake.  The walk starts going across a suspended bridge over a river and through an old beech forest.  There was intermittent sun lighting up the mosses, lichens and ferns.  It was such a green forest from treetops to ground level.  Definitely a place for wood sprites or hobbits.

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Sylvan Lake

possum trap baited with an egg

beech woods near Sylvan Lake

By the time we reached the lake the surrounding mountains were shrouded in clouds.  We walked around the edge of the lake up to the far end through more beautiful beech forest then backtracked back to the car.  It was almost 2pm by the time we got back to Glenorchy and raining hard.  We are wiling away the afternoon first attempting to get internet access in the café over a cup of tea and a warm slice of very good apple strudel (we skipped lunch), and reading.  Tomorrow we have booked a 5 hour horseback ride and another night here since I already know that a hot shower will be necessary to relieve aching muscles.  Monday we’ll find a camp site in the morning and do a rafting trip on the Shotover river in the afternoon. 

Sunday horseback ride

We did our horseback ride through High Country Horses, located on the road to Kinloch past Glenorchy.  The ride was the “river deep mountain high” ride, from 9am to 4:30pm.  Jake and I could barely walk afterwards but it was a splendid ride (I’m sure Jake would have liked one of those CO mountain highs afterwards). I rode a pretty honey-colored station breed horse named Paddy and Jake rode Doobie.  Both were pretty well behaved except for the usual problem of wanting to stop and eat.  Paddy knew exactly what to do so I gave him his head most of the time. We started out going up the river floodplain crisscrossing lots of channels of the river.  The deepest crossing was probably about 3 ft. deep.  We walked most of the time excepting a few short trots and canters along more open, less rocky parts of paths.  The floodplains were covered in lupines, evidently a favorite horse food. Eventually we went uphill into part of Mt. Aspiring National Park through an old beech forest along the edge of the river.  This part of the ride had lots of relatively steep up and down sections. 

Adele picking blackberries

Our guide, Adele, from France, had chosen a stubborn younger horse who she had to eventually get off and lead at a few points. She’s here on a work-holiday visa. The other riders were a young couple from Denmark who were pretty good riders, and me and Jake.  Eventually we returned to the river and stopped for lunch under some young beech trees. Jake and I were a little sore at lunch, but could still walk around easily.  A nice thick sandwich of ham and veggies, a big cookie, and a crisp NZ apple revived us.  You could refill your water bottle from the stream, although we declined to do so just not being able to get over my distrust of stream water.  The Danish couple took dozens of photos of themselves along the way and at lunch time using their selfie stick and with her fluffing out her long blond hair.  I think I'm past the age of caring much about how glamorous my selfies look.  

We crossed the river and rode part way back along a gravel road that led past the Invincible gold mine and sheep pastures.  Then we went into a willow forest with a small clear stream running through.  The horses walked up the shallow stream with the willows forming a green tunnel overhead.  So much for clean, clear water.  Both Jake and I were feeling pretty bad at this point with muscle aches from the waist down but we soldiered on.  There were more stream crossings, but I forewent any more cantering opportunities in deference to some small hip muscle that kept seizing up.  Anyway, it was a huge relief when the barn hove into view!

We had dinner across the street at the Glenorchy Hotel’s restaurant.  We split an order of garlic bread and venison medallions served with steamed vegetables and some potatos.  Quite nice, accompanied by Kiko Bay Pinot Noir.

Monday

After breakfast we left Glenorchy and set up our tent down the lake at the 12 Mile Delta DOC campground.  A lot of people were leaving as we were setting up and we got a decent site with at least a little space between us and the other campers.  Come nightfall the campground was pretty full with a few last campers driving around looking for spots.  We drove into Queenstown, got a pie for a light lunch (they are small pies), took a short walk over to the Queenstown Garden (nice, more park than garden) and checked in for our Queenstown Rafting trip on the Shotover River. 

The rafting company runs two trips, one on the Shotover River with grade 3 and 4 rapids and a calmer “family” trip on another river.  All rafting participants are bussed to their headquarters about 10 minutes outside of town where you change into wetsuits and get a helmet and life jacket. The Shotover bus then takes you about 40 minutes upriver.  It isn’t that far but the road is a very narrow gravel road.  We applauded our driver at the end of the ride.  There are some wicked curves barely wide enough for the bus to get around as it is towing rafts, and the road has very steep cliffs with no guard rails. Sit on the left if you don’t like heights!  The road follows the route that goldminers took to get from the river and their claims into Queenstown.  One of the guides gives a running commentary on the history and landscape.

Once at the river we got our safety instruction and were divided into groups.  Our group consisted of a Texan who had recently rafted the Zambesi River and was recently laid off from a job in the oil industry, 2 Oklahomans, one retired and the other in the wine business who were on their 4^th rafting trip in NZ on this visit, and a woman radiologist from Scotland on her first rafting trip.  The guide, Keith, had grown up in the area and his grandfather had worked mining scheelite near Glenorchy (tungsten is extracted from scheelite). He and his grandfather used to pan for gold in the Shotover and his grandfather accumulated enough to melt and make into a gold bracelet for his wife he and his wife’s 50^th anniversary.  Apparently a farming family discovered gold in the river in the 1860s when their dog jumped in and emerged flecked with gold.  The hills were mined and later the river was dredged for gold.

It was a lovely day, sunny and warm, and river was running well with recent rains.  The water was a little cloudy because of the rain, but sort of a light blue color.  The surrounding hills are fairly bare with glittery mica schist rock in thin layers.  The rock is unstable and landslides change the flow of the river and sometimes create new rapids.   The first big rapid was the Rock Garden and although our raft got through fine, every other raft got hung up in the hole behind a big rock.  Our guide through a rope to one raft and pulled it out with help.  Others got out on their own.  There were some fun chutes of water in narrow parts of the river.  Towards the end you go through a tunnel an ambitious miner built in an attempt to divert the river.  He wanted to mine the dry riverbed but the tunnel size was wrong and only half of the river went through the tunnel.  Right after the tunnel was an exciting rocky waterfall of sorts and then you are almost back to the headquarters.  We took a hot shower at the base and caught the bus back into town.  

We didn’t find this rafting trip to be as thrilling as the one in Argentina near Mendoza, but it was beautiful and some of the rapids were definitely challenging.  They also do that section of the river in winter helicoptering you in.

We had a nice dinner on the lakefront in Queenstown at the BathHouse, which probably was the original bathhouse for the beach.  We ordered the seafood platter to share which took forever to arrive, but was very tasty.  There was a piece of cooked cod, some grilled squid and shrimp, smoked salmon, mussels in a barbecue-like sauce, some fish dip, breads and crackers, capers and pickles, and fresh fruit.  Accompanied by a glass of Kopiko Bay sauvignon blanc.

Steamer returns from its sunset cruise

So much for our nice quiet campsite by the lake.  A group of German youth are playing loud music accompanied by singing to the repeated lyric, VODKA!  Some Russian hard rock music I think.  Interesting, while lying on the beach in Wellington some German youth were playing music that was some sort of rap music to the tune of “It’s a Hard Knock Life” from the musical Annie.  I am not developing a high opinion of German youth who are vacationing in NZ!  PS The music went on intermittently until 2 am.  Intermittent because they were asked several times to turn it off, including by Jake around midnight and after that by a Kiwi or Australian yelling “Fucking turn that shit off” which led Jake to stay awake wondering how one would parse that sentence.  We plotted revenge but did not act on our schemes.

The West Coast

Jake at our first stop on the Tasman Sea

2-17. We headed south and west from Motueka on Jake’s birthday along the Motueka River valley where there were orchards of apples, kiwis and hops and up into the hills to Murchison, a goldmining town turned now to tourism because of its good rafting and trout fishing.  The Buller River cuts deep gorges through the hills at it drains towards the Tasman Sea.  We stopped for a coffee and slice of carrot cake at a café just off the main drag.  We reached the sea just south of Westport an hour later and stopped to admire the crashing, foaming waves against a grey sky backdrop.  Further south we stopped in Punakaiki, famous for its pancake limestone rocks and blowholes.  The tide was out so the blowholes weren’t blowing much, but the pancake rocks were fascinating.  There’s a big visitor’s center with a nice café where we had a chicken pie and brie, bacon and pesto sandwich.  Across the street a paved path winds through palms, flax, rata and other wind sculpted trees to views over the rocks.  Apparently geologists are not quite sure how the pancake rocks formed and they seem to mainly occur in that one area along the coast.  We also drove through Greymouth, a larger town with a working harbor.  We stopped at a fish store and Jake bought a small piece of smoked Ling to try.  The cashier pointed out Ling on a fish poster and it looks sort of like a mackerel.

We continued on to Hokitiki, another beachfront town famed for its jade or greenstone carvings. We went into a couple stores where you can watch people carving the stones using air tools and polishing wheels.  Most of the designs are traditional Maori designs.  We hunted for little pieces of greenstone on the pebble beach, but I’m not sure we really found any.  The beach has numerous driftwood sculptures I guess constantly made and remade by locals and tourists.  After our appetizer of smoked ling (not very remarkable), we had dinner at the Oceanfront Beach Resort a few blocks from our motel (the Jade Motel).  I got a seared piece of bluenose fish and Jake tried the west coast’s famous whitebait patties.  These appear to be the West Coast’s equivalent of Maryland’s eastern shore crab cake – available as an appetizer or main course at nearly every restaurant.  Whitebait are tiny little fish about an inch long and the width of a fettucine noodle. The patty has hundreds of little fish bound together with an egg and a little flour maybe.  I tried an Esk Valley sauvignon blanc that had a lot of flavor and for once did not taste overwhelmingly of grapefruit.  Jake’s chardonnay was kind of average.  For dessert we ordered what was described as a baked chocolate delight, but came out as a cold chocolate pudding sort of thing with whip cream.  Oh well, at least it was chocolate.

2-18 A rainbow formed over Ianthe Lake as we passed by, but it was not a precursor of drier conditions. We continued down route 6 150 km to the Franz Josef and Fox Glaciers.  I think these are the largest glaciers in the temperate region. The road stays fairly close to the coast, but has to go up and down around some steep headlands.  The road banks are covered with ferns and moss and more ferns.  Every now and then a small stand of dark trunk beech trees towers above the low shrubs and tree ferns. It was raining pretty steadily by the time we reached the Franz Josef village.  We got coffee and day old pastries at the coffee shop and studied the map of the glacier paths.  You drive up a narrow road about 5 km to the parking area for each glacier.  The roads are well maintained but have a lot of one way bridges on them.  At both glaciers the paths to get close to the glaciers were closed because of flooding and unstable ground. At the Fox glacier the road runs alongside a raging glacial river and between that and the rain sheeting across the road it felt like a bit of an adventure.  But the DOC lawn mower/brush trimmer was going, so I suppose it was just an average day for them.  We were a little disappointed at not being able to see the glaciers, but we have each seen glaciers on 2 continents before so it wasn’t top of our list of activities.  We continued another 120 km south to Haast where we are spending tonight at the Heritage Motor Lodge.  After a nap and more downpours we took a short drive to the Haast beach.  It’s a wild and lonely beach with not much sign of human presence.  Haast is the gateway to the southern alps and has been designated as a UNESCO World Heritage site.  I hope we’ll see tomorrow why it deserves that designation.  For now a rainbow shines in front of the invisible alps.

Our view of the Franz Josef glacial valley

End of the road at the Fox glacier

Ice floating in the river from the Fox glacier

Windblown vegetation at Hasst beach

In the evening we walked up the street to the Hard Antler Bar and Café (the rafters were lined with deer antlers).  It was pretty crowded and you couldn’t order your food until you had a table to sit at.  A German trio invited us to join them and there was also a Danish couple at their table.  All were fairly recent retirees and well-travelled.  The Germans had come via Singapore and Dubai on UAE Airlines.  Jake asked about the recent immigration to Europe and both groups felt there were just too many immigrants to deal with, although the Germans did think their country needed younger people and seemed to hope it would all work out.  The Danish woman used an example of integration problems that was interesting – apparently there is a big pork industry in Denmark (4 x as many pigs as people) and if there are Muslim kindergarteners in a school then the school cannot serve pork at lunch time.  She seemed to feel this was a threat to Danish culture.  We also learned that although there is free college education and free health care in Denmark, taxes on some items can be shockingly high.  They had recently bought a 4 year old Audi 500s for $40,000 and paid $80,000 in taxes! I hope they’ve also got some kick-ass public transportation.  Anyway, a band started to play towards the end of dinner making conversation difficult.  They were pretty good although not my favorite musical style.  It was sort of endless jazz songs meets rap and reggae with an 8 member band that had a lot of brass instruments.  They were on a tour of the South Island to promote a new CD.

A note on motels:

We have stayed at motels the last three nights.  They are going downhill in quality steadily.  The Equestrian in Motueka was very nice – 3 rooms, full tiny kitchen, good wifi – 1GB free.  The Jade Motel in Hokitiki  had 3 rooms but smelled some of dampness and cigarettes and just seemed a little frayed.  We had 500 MB of internet but couldn’t get reception in our room. The Heritage in Haast has one room, no stove, pretty darn basic. 100 MB of internet, good reception, but we used up our allotment in about ½ hour.   The last two we booked at the last minute and there hasn’t been much choice of places left.  I think I probably could have found better places at a better price booking ahead, but we had hoped to camp.  Too wet for that the last couple days!

Abel Tasman National Park

We had hoped to go standby on the 2:45 pm ferry, but this was not to be.  So we parked in the shade of an overpass at the ferry terminal and read until cars started lining up for the 5pm ferry at 3:30 pm.  It’s a big ferry boat and they seemed to have a pretty careful loading system with 4 lanes of cars channeled on and crew to direct you to your exact parking spot on one of 2 car decks.  The ride over was quite comfortable and we saw some dolphins leaping in front of the boat about an hour into the 3 hour ride.  We got some dinner at the café, a piece of lasagna that was pretty decent.  You get to the Queen Charlotte Islands that form a fringe around the north central part of the South Island about an hour before arriving in Picton, on the South Island.  From there we drove 2 hours to Nelson.  The roads were pretty empty and the driving was easy until you get about a ½ hour from Nelson when they get narrow curvy.  And then when we got to Nelson suddenly there was a ton of traffic.  Jake asked someone in the opposite lane what event had just let out and the guy said it was the outdoor opera.  You can only imagine how Jake felt about the opera letting out slowing our already long day!  Our hotel had left the door open for us literally and bed was very welcome.

We didn’t get to see much of Nelson except for walking a few blocks into town for breakfast.  The hotel recommended The Lambretti, named after the Italian motor scooter.  It was a nice casual place with the standard assortment of breakfast menu items and good coffee.  A little Sunday outdoor market was going on with a motley assortment of second hand items, plants, foods, and some vegetables. 

Wilson Kayaks had left bags for us at the hotel desk, so we sorted out what we would take on our three day hiking/kayaking trip.  Then we drove about 45 minutes to Motueka further up the coast.  We were the first of our group to arrive, the rest were picked up by a shuttle bus.  We all did some further luggage/backpack sorting and picked up a bag lunch.  There were 7 couples in our group, but 4 were only going to be hiking.  Besides us there were two other American couples, one couple more or less our age from Ashland, OR who work as nurses and one younger couple who were in the process of moving from Boston to Denver.  Three of the other couples were British retirees and the last was a couple from Auckland who work for an Australian airline.  Our guides were John, a New Zealander who has worked around the park for 40+ years, and Squid, a young Brit who has worked as a guide seasonally for 3 years.  He and his wife came on a work-holiday visa for 2 years and now they have a temporary work visa as “essential workers” because I guess there aren’t enough experienced NZ guides.

Day one we took a boat ¾ of the way up the park’s coastline and it let us out at Tonga Quarry.  From the quarry we walked 7 km north to Meadowbank Homestead, a lodge on Awaroa Bay.  The walks take you over headlands and along beautiful golden sand beaches. John knows all the plants and showed me a parasitic orchid, the horned orchid that mimics its wasp pollinator, and lots of trees and vines.  He also talked about the effort to control yellow jackets using fipronil bait and control of gorse using introduced mites. The DOC is also killing pines in some areas to encourage regrowth of the native vegetation.  Goats are controlled as well as stoats. 

Meadowbank Homestead had been rebuilt from the original. It is run on solar power and seemed to try to be very eco-friendly.  The land was owned by a family that had settled and tried farming in the 1860s.  After having 9 children the wife tired of living in such an isolated location and she moved into town with the kids and started running a boarding house.  She fell in love with one of the boarders, married him, and had 2 more kids.  But he was a ne’er do well and a drunk.  One day he shot her to death.  Her first husband took in one of her last 2 kids but the other was adopted by another family.  Eventually he found his sister and half siblings again and was accepted by them.  Soap operas are nothing new.  (This was all relayed in a video of vintage still photos after dinner).  Before dinner we took a quick swim in the shallow estuary in front of the house.

Dinner was a communal affair.  You could choose a main course and dessert and everyone got the same side dishes and appetizer (or entrée as they are called here).  The first night was a choice between fish skewers and rack of lamb (the lamb was excellent, served in a rose wine sauce, the fish was overcooked).  Dessert was a very good slice of blue cheese with fruit chutney and crackers decorated with a nasturtium flower, or an apricot tart with a thick shortbread crust.  There were enough side dishes to satisfy vegetarians who don’t eat fish.   In the middle of the night we both woke up and went outside to look at the stars.  The sky was very dark and the stars looked so close.  The milky way was so full of stars it seemed hard to pick out any constellations unless they were at the edge of the sky.

The dead tree that appears on the first map of Torrent Bay

The estuary to be crossed

John demonstrating how palm fronds can be used as sleds

Fall River estuary

Day 2 we were served breakfast around 7:30 am, our choice of continental or cooked breakfast. They had set up snacks and sandwich makings that we could fix and bag for our lunch.  We crossed the wide estuary at low tide around 8:15 am wearing our sandals or water shoes, then changed into our hiking shoes for another 7 km walk to Totaranui.  This walked was similar to the previous day but passed through some examples of more mature foredune forest. At Totaranui we caught the ferry boat back down to Tonga Quarry.  Here the walking group separated from the kayak group.  Us kayakers did a quick walk to another nearby beach where our kayaks awaited us. After eating some of our bagged lunch we got safety and paddling instruction and then set off south for about an 8 km kayak to Torrent Bay.  We paddled in and out of a couple beautiful estuaries during the high tide and stopped for a snack on a sand spit.  The wind picked up as the afternoon went on and we were very happy to get around the last headland into Torrent Bay around 5pm. 

Sunset at Torrent Bay lodge

Sunset view at Torrent Bay

Nursing seal pup

Inquisitive south island robin

Split apple rock

The lodge on Torrent Bay is a little simpler but still very nice.  There was another group of 7 people at the end of a 5 day trip at the lodge as well as a young guy who was just spending one night there and not doing any hiking or kayaking.  He had dinner at our table and had been in Wellington for a week volunteering at a conference that his company had sent him too.  They had encouraged him to spend a few extra days vacationing.  He was from Ohio and now lives in South Carolina working for some sort of software company.  He seemed to be at that post college all knowing, eager, confident age.  Dinner choices were salmon or steak, both very good.  Dessert was a cheese plate or pavlova (meringue and cream) with slices of fresh kiwi. 

Sailing the last stretch

Day 3 dawned cloudy and we would be kayaking all day, about 12 km.  We launched as the tide was going out onto calm waters.  We started out across the “mad mile” which was pretty calm but a very rocky shoreline.  From there we went across a short channel to Adele Island, a bird sanctuary that has been cleared of stoats, rats and goats.  We watched 8 week old fur seals play on the rocks as the moms lolled about doing as little as possible (apparently at this stage they are pregnant again, so they are conserving energy between feeding the youngsters and getting ready for the next ones).  We landed at a small beach for a tea break.  Squid set up an umbrella since it was raining and brewed some kanuka leaf tea from leaves he had collected around the lodge.  It’s a very nice tea and apparently loaded with vitamins (no caffeine).  Capt. Cook reportedly favored it over Indian tea after trying it.    From the beach we crossed back over the channel to Apple Tree bay (someone had tried to grow an orchard there but there are no longer any apple trees left) and met up with the hikers for lunch.  We didn’t spend too long over lunch but the couple from Auckland caught the ferry back from there to catch their flight home and the couple from OR decided they had had enough kayaking and also caught the ferry back to Kaiteriteri where they would wait for us.  So it was down to the Denver couple and us and Squid.  We set off across the wide Marahau Bay and around the headland to Kaiteriteri.  The wind started to pick up as we reached the final headland, so we rafted up on either side of Squid’s kayak in the rolling sea and he got out a big square sale.  2 corners were tied with ropes to Jake and Johnnie’s paddles and Katie and I held onto the front corner straps.  It made a very effective sail and we made good time all the way into the Bay.  Katie got soaked though being on the windward side and I guess it was quite an effort to hold the paddles upright with the pressure on the sail. 

In Kaiteriteri (which means food very rapidly in Maori) we had time to change clothes and get a cup of coffee at a café before the bus picked us up to take us back to our car and the office.  We repacked and said our final farewells to our companions).  Jake and I didn’t have far to go as we were staying in Motueka at the Equestrian Lodge Motel for the night.  It was a nice place and our accommodation actually had 3 rooms.  So we could spread out our luggage, use the washer and dryer, and repack in comfort.  We had a nice dinner of fried fish and salad and NZ pinot gris for me at Elevation a few blocks away and restocked for breakfast at the New World supermarket