Rained Out

I think that I left off at our arrival onto South Island in New Zealand. It's kind of shocking to me that the islands have such simple names, but I guess that it doesn't get any more straightforward than that. I mean, if they had named the two islands after different queens or something, would that have made any ones lives easier? Probably not.

The weather was windy, a little foggy, and certainly wet in a misty windy kind of way soon after we got off of the ferry. We only started touring the town when I got this one picture of the harbor. I think that the early morning wake up call to reach the ferry combined with a successful night of beers (the ONLY night of beers in NZ) made us a little timid in the face of such weather and we thought hat we'd wait it out in the cute port town of Picton for the rest of the day. In my mind, the two things that I wanted to do in the North of the South Island were hiking along the coast and touring the many wineries, both of which would suffer from such weather to some degree.

Anyways, we opted to avoid the DOC camp sites and paid extra to stay at a franchise camper van park that had an indoor cooking area and hot showers on hand. Besides the grocery shopping and an hour or two wandering around the mostly deserted seaside tourist town, we waited out the cold weather and high winds in the warm and secure kitchen of the camp and watched some Australian soaps. I'm not a fan.

The next morning, we went to the Picton library and I finished up the previous post. I had plenty of time to type it out the day before but I needed the free wifi of the library to get the pictures put up. Your see, free wifi is truly rare in NZ, and most places that offer anything, have a paid service that ends up costing about $7 an hour. It's crazy. All the libraries block torrents too and I hate to have so many things half downloaded. Oh well, we had a late start on the day because of the library.

After that we decided to head out to wine country first and went to the city of Blenheim, known for its chardonnays. The land around here looks exactly like Napa Valley... kind of gentle rolling grassy valleys, spiked with imported Californian Redwood trees, and wine touring vans crowding the roads between the abundant wineries. We strolled about town, marveled at the cold windy weather, and didn't do too much other than shopping for food and locating a pretty great used clothing store to get some desperately needed extra warm clothes. I had no idea that NZ's weather would be so temperamental in the summer.

The day was still cold, and the clouds looked menacing, so we checked into another non-DOC camping area for use of their kitchen and hot showers. Most DOC ones have no showers, and those that do are cold. One strange feature of this site was it's small river that ran through it where a family of eels rested under the shade of a large weeping willow. We were invited to feed them, but never found a good moment to do so since it was so bloody cold outside. Really it was just 60 degrees or so, but that feels pretty cold when you're sleeping in your car and don't have any non-cotton apparel. In the evening we stumbled into a country pub and I tried some of the local brown ales.

In the morning, we chastised ourselves for accomplishing so little the days before, and went to one of my top picks for the area, the WWI aircraft museum. There aren't too many places dedicated to teaching about the Great War, and even fewer that are so heavily funded and produced by Peter Jackson's special effects company and I had to see the result. it was nothing short of amazing. Most of the planes int the museum were hobbyist built replicas, though one was an original, and almost every one of them really flew as was evidenced by the engine oil pans on the floor.

Most of them were set up in dramatic scenes like one German birdlike aircraft that had a couple smaller models between it and a wall sized photograph creating the illusion of a real dogfight with rifles. Another illustrated an exciting story about a pilot whose controls were shot and found that he could control his plane for a landing if he stood on the wind outside the cockpit and balanced his weight to steer the craft.

A small but dense part of the museum had artifacts, clothing, documents, and medals from pilots of different countries and a good amount of well written text telling not just history, but stories. Pilots were a new thing back then, and no matter what country they fought for, they were all part of an exclusive brotherhood that bred respect and a shared love of adventure. It was a good kind of war, if you don't consider the appallingly high mortality rate. Finally an exhibit showed the Red Barron's crashed plane in a field and a group of Aussie footmen plundering it's canvas insignias and taking his fur covered boots as trophies. One of the original wing insignias from that red plane was on display in this museum. How do such artifacts wind up in tiny towns on the far side of the planet... without EBay getting involved?

As much as I loved the first part of the day, the rest was pretty fine too. We went driving about the countryside and stopped off at 3 different wineries, chatting up some locals and enjoying the free drinks. I pushed some of the extra drinks onto Diane since I was driving and at the last stop of the day we bought a great bottle of Riesling that wasn't carbonated and generally rocked. We made our way to a remote beach side DOC camp and chatted up two German travelers as we cooked dinner in the drizzle. They had spent the last year working in Australia and were touring a little before going home. Nice guys, but the cold forced an early evening.

The morning started with a light but steady rain and we packed up and left as fast as possible, not stopping to cook breakfast. Still the German guys waved at us as we left and we ended up running into them at a market a couple hours later after we drove on to Kaikoura. It's a small but attractive beach town that's famous for it aquatic allure to whales and dolphins. Unfortunately the tours to see either of them start at $120 and we weren't feeling like spending that kind of money. A walk around the tiny downtown strip was free though, but the constant drizzle sapped our resolve and in the early afternoon we drove on to another holiday park to make our lunch and waste the day away until dinner time. How dull. We took our time with dinner at least and made a big one.

Finally, the next morning, the sun shone strong. It had been about a week of bad weather in the middle of summer so I guess I should be more expectant than thankful for the sun, but I was thankful none the less. We backtracked to Kaikoura to get a better view of the peninsula. The main street there stretches outside of town and onto an attractive and grassy stretch of land jutting out into the sea. Along the side of the road there were a few seafood shacks pitching the local 'crayfish' which turns out to be a large lobster without claws. I can't afford that, but I did have a whitebait sandwich. That's a kind of tiny white fish that's caught in NZ streams and is a local delicacy. They fried it up with egg to hold them all together and Diane got a scallop salad. Great stuff. We already had breakfast, so we fed a fair bit of the bread to the cute and small seagulls that have the run of this country. Now and again you see one of our larger ones looking out of place amongst them.

At the end of the peninsula there was a small colony of seals crowded around by many many more tourists. I was blown away by the combination of sea, wind, clouds, and snowy peaks in the distance. Unfortunately we also had a lot of miles to put down that day so we headed South with some speed and sailed on through Christchurch (my ending point) to try and get as close to Mt Cook as possible. After an examination of our schedule and some guesses about how long we'd spend in each place, we decided that we had to skip both the very NW and SE of the South Island in order to meet our deadlines. Oh well, there's plenty left. That night we stayed in a very remote park tucked into one of the few strands of virgin forest on the island. Most of NZ looks like rolling grassy hills, but that's mostly because people have cut down over 95% of the forests in this country. What forest exists, is almost exclusively replanted monocultures. It's a damn shame. The locals complain of the Red Opossum (cute thing, unlike ours) destroying the forests, but there's not so much left to destroy at any rate.

We had fine weather once more in the morning, and we set out early after I cooked the usual breakfast. I make the same thing every day... Birds in a Nest. I first got the recipe from that movie V For Vendetta. How strange is that? After crossing many rolling hills of wheat we got to the high country town of Lake Tekapo. There's only 300 people living there and the most prominent feature of the town is a cluster of observatories atop Mt James overlooking the town. It's such a remote corner of the earth with an unusually clear sky (most of the time) that it's said to be among the best places on earth to view the stars from.

Well, we hiked up that mountain and had a cup of coffee and a slice of carrot cake at the peak. This country has excellent pastries, in the English tradition, and I haven't mentioned half of them I've tried, like the sausage roll, savory pies, and the nutty afghan chocolate biscuits. Awesome! From the top we could see the range of mountains that contains Mt Cook and I'm pretty sure that we saw the peak itself. That's the tallest mountain in New Zealand and a hell of a looker. Most of the rain on the South Island comes from the West, loses its load on those mountains, and the East is relatively dry. That's why Mt James has such clear sky, while on the West coast there's supposed to be a town that got 15 meters of rain in a year. Those poor people must be miserable. We should send them some rain jackets. I'd send mine, but I might need it when I visit Milford Sound in a week which is prone to such weather.

The town had a really cute church on the shore of the lake that's supposed to be popular with Asian honeymooners. There's a lot of random sites that are like that. I guess it's highlighted in their copy of Lonely Planet. As small as it is, between it and a bronze statue of an English Setter there must have been 4 tour buses and many more smaller vehicles in attendance.

The drive out to the base of Mt Cook was super spectacular. I thought the range reminded me of the cascades because they're so very sharp and snowy in the summer. As we drove around the edge of Lake Pukaki, Mt Cook was framed in our view as we drove ever towards it. Certainly it was among the most scenic roads that I've ever been on. Also, the roads are in great condition and would be a blast to drive something more nimble on. The worst thing about NZ roads are the naggy warning signs that accompany them. Every 10 kilometers or so will be a large sign telling you that drink driving will kill, sleepy drivers should nap, and that it's better to slow down and lose a moment than your life. They're creative and match the over the top and rather gory safety ads that are on television here. What a nanny state.

There was a bit of time left in the day before we could retire to our camp, so we made a side trip to see the Tasman Glacier. It's the largest in New Zealand and is much longer than we could see from our vantage point as it curves around a few mountains in its path. At its base lies a 'terminal lake' with several glacial icebergs floating around in it. Did you know that compacted glacial ice melts 30 times slower than regular ice cubes if put in your drink? That's what the visitor center claimed. It seems hard to believe. The glacier is covered in rocks and looks completely dirty from our vantage point as it's retreating in size and the stuff it's carrying is being exposed by melt. I've been told that the water is the 'purest in the world' to drink since so much of it froze before the industrial revolution, but the cloudy color of the water shows all the 'rock flour' that floats around in it. How can that be pure?

Later that night at our camp site, after we finished dinner, we took a stroll about and enjoyed the ample light at 8 pm. It gets dark pretty late down here. Anyways, we heard a rumble in the mountains above us and saw a stream of snow rush off a cliff out of the cloud cover. That's my first avalanche sighting, but I guess that we didn't see the bulk of it. I liked this wild Foxglove we saw. I've noticed some other trees out here that we've got at home... they may just be NZ natives.

A storm moved in that night an howled away rocking the van. In the morning, fog and rain had settled into the valley and the visitor center claims that it'll take a whole day to clear up. So, we'll just sit out the rain today in a hostel's living room and tomorrow we'll do the hikes that promise all the good views. $10 bought me a whole day of internet access and I intend to use the hell out of it, even though my download speed seems capped at 60kBs. This soggy parkinglot is all I can see out my window today.