Gorgeous Wilderness

Day 10 - We're on the road again early following the scenic route to get from Manapouri to Queenstown. What a contrast! Where Manapouri is quiet and natural, sleeping against it's beautiful lake, Queenstown is robust and packed with entertainment. It is the "activity capital" of New Zealand. Paragliding, jet boating, rock climbing, hiking, bungy jumping (first bungy - ever - was in Queenstown), kayaking, helicopter tours, horseback tours - you get the picture, Everything! There are shops, restaurants and bars and hordes of tourists. It is amazing! No camper food today, we have lunch out and dinner out and check out the night scene. Whew, full day.

 

Day 11 - Enough "over civilization", we are off to catch more of the back country beauty. First we stop in the little gold mining town of Arrowtown. There is a restored Chinese community from the gold strike days of the late 1800's. The town is purely a tourist attraction now and has fashioned all of it's new buildings along an old streetscape style, with a few "real" oldies tucked in between. Now we are back in the central part of the south island, only 40 km west of Cromwell and since we don't want to travel any road twice, we choose to go up over the Crown Range on our way to Lake Wanaka. What a splendid choice this proved to be. Initially, the road climbs steeply uphill and begins very sharp, steep, switchbacks to gain the rapid ascent required to get onto the top of the range. The views back over our trail are jaw dropping as we can see as far away as Queenstown and Lake Wakatipu that it sits beside. The pass tops out at 1076 m above sea level, which I know is not Rocky Mountain standards, but still very impressive because it is straight up and over. This track used to be a sheep herding trail. Speaking of sheep herding, on our descent, what do we run into but about 4000 sheep being herded along the highway to their next grazing ground. They have the right of way and there don't seem to be any people around, they just keep running up the road, bordered by the guard rail on one side (a sharp drop into the river below) and the rock cliff on the other.  The traffic squeezes along the road in between gobs of sheep. Finally bringing up the absolute end is a single guy and a dog! Crazy! We are entering some of NZ's best snow skiing country now - no snow right now of course - they do have some very lovely hills/mountains though. Lake Wanaka and the same named town are our stopping point tonight. After a quick buzz around the town and a beer at a local pub, we head further up the road to a quiet bay on the lake where we find a spot backing onto the lake to park up. Real nice. The sun has come out, the wind has calmed and it feels like a day at the lake should.

 

Day 12 - Today we are headed right out to the west coast. Our road takes us beside beautiful lakes, over another mountain pass, by blue rivers (glacier fed), more regal mountains and inviting rolling hills, out to the wild wind swept west coast and the Tasman Sea. We stop at a couple of natural sites of interest - blue pools and some view locations. The best stop was a hike through the rain forest out to Monro Beach, about 1.5 km. Just a pebbled beach surrounded by steep rocky cliffs with a creek mouth empting into the ocean. But it is wild and beautiful. The sea is actually very calm (as far as seas go). There is a colony of crested penguins that breed and nest here, but now is not the season, so we don't see any. We imagine that the small moving things we see on the jutting rocks further out to sea are penguins, but its probably just seals. Our rest time is spent picking up round, smooth, stones off of the beach. We are like a couple of crows giving each other the beautiful stones we have picked to admire. New Zealand is a walker's/hiker's/mountain biker's paradise. They have trails for public access, everywhere. I mean everywhere! Short distances (which we like) and long distances - many day treks. They've invested a lot of money into making their beautiful country visible and accessible to everyone by installing gravel paths, board walks and hanging bridges. It really makes us wish we had more time to spend here. So many walks, so little time. Fox Glacier is our stopping town tonight and we choose a Top Ten Motor Park to stay in. It has no scenery, but it does have brand new shower blocks and it's time for a little luxury.

 

Doubtful Sound and More

Day 8 - Manapouri is mountainous and there is a big lake here that is prime for fishing, boating and if you are brave - swimming (cold!). It is also the entrance point for tours out to Doubtful Sound. So we are here for three nights. Exploring the town takes all of an hour as it is a couple of streets with predominantly accommodation buildings of all sorts. This is a big tourist area. There are a couple of restaurants and that's it. So we head up the road to Te Anau, which is the entrance point for tours of Milford Sound, and an even bigger tourist area. More accommodation places and lots of restaurants. This is first class New Zealand wilderness. The mountains are great ski areas in the winter and the lakes and rivers and forests are great draws in the summer months. International tourists from everywhere come here by the bus load to soak up NZ's beauty. I think I'm getting visual overload. It is getting pretty hard to describe everything as the same adjectives keep coming to the forefront - stunning, awesome, beautiful, etc. - repeat, repeat, repeat. It is also my opinion that if you squashed all of the good things about Canada into a place 1/2 the size of Alberta you would create New Zealand. Glen disagrees, saying that they don't have prairies here - I say they do… they are only very small! So now we have buzzed around both towns and on our way back to Manapouri we wing off the main road and arrive shortly at a staging area for a portion of the famed "Kepler Track". This is a much traveled, rugged, 5 day hike, over hill and through dale fording rivers and scaling mountains. But since we have started mid way, it turns out to be an easy part and we have a great afternoon tromping through the forest, over a couple of swinging bridges, around a swamp, up to Lake Manapouri and back to the camper again. 8 K in not time flat! Our camp site is probably the nicest to date and we enjoy the evening cooking outdoors and chatting with our neighbor (because we are too "walked out" to walk into town - a couple of blocks - for dinner).

 

Day 9 - Our first paid tour! We get up early, pack our new backpack with food, bug spray (sand flies are ferocious here), sun screen (incase the sun decides to shine) and umbrellas (because it will most definitely rain). The boat ramp is a short jaunt through the woods from our camp site and we are away. The tour is a full day, first exploring Lake Manapouri by boat, then hoping a bus to the big power station - here we travel 2 km into the mountain, 200 m below the surface - then on to another bigger boat for the trip down Doubtful sound and out into the Tasman Sea (the body of water between NZ and Australia) and then everything in reverse to get back to the start. The scenery is gorgeous, it is windy and very cold though, but luckily the boats are all covered in. The lake is surrounded by mountains covered in an evergreen forest and the sound is banked with even bigger mountains with multitudes of waterfalls cascading down, fed by the continuous rain. This is "Fiordland" and it is truly majestic. One arm of the sound has recorded rainfall of 16 m (55 ft) in a single year, no wonder the place is covered in rainforest and waterfalls. Deer are an introduced species to NZ and particularly this area. Initially for sporting purposes, but there are no natural predators here so of course they multiplied like rabbits (rabbits were introduced here too! Duh!). So there was an open cull on the deer until somebody discovered a market in Europe for the meat, now they are captured and farmed for this. The "cowboys" that did first the hunting and then the capturing overcame the rough terrain by using helicopters and it is a long but interesting story.

Catlins of NZ - Wonderful Suprise!

Day 6 - This area is called the Catlins Coast and a good portion of it is scenic reserves. When Europeans first came to NZ, they cut down every tree in site, so all of the forest reserves are replanted and now protected as it seems the bent of even modern day NZers is to clear everything and raise dairy cows or sheep. The Catlins had/now has a lot of rain forest and it is lovely to drive through. Today, we catch every tourist site we can along our road. We start with a walk on the estuary beach to see the sea lions. It is a lovely hard sand beach stretching for a mile between steep rocky cliffs. We are not disappointed, there are two bulls sunning themselves (and not paying any attention to us) and further down the beach we find a female, her pup and a younger female. These guys are playing just at the edge of the surf, the little guy antagonizing his mother. Our next stop is a blow hole, but it is unique in that it is inland from the beach/cliffs by about 200 meters. You walk along a path that meanders along the beach, then up the rugged coastal cliffs to a stunning lookout and then out into the middle of a flat grassy sheep pasture.  "Poof" there it is, this great big hole in the ground, roughly 2000 sq.ft. in area and probably 50 feet deep.  The ocean surf is pounding in the bottom and the sheer rocky sides warn you to stand back as escape would be impossible. The tide was low when we visited so now big plumes, but when the tide is high and the surge is strong the waters will crash up and out of the hole. That would be an awe inspiring site. It is raining again by mid day, which is fitting for our hike into a "rain forest" to view the MacLean water falls. It is a nice walk and the falls are worth the effort. We also want to see the Cathedral caves, but the tide is too high by the time we get there and they are submerged. Oh well, we will imagine them from our guide book pictures. Our stopping point tonight is Curios Bay. The camp site is on a cliff, jutting out into the ocean, quite exposed to all of the elements. Each camper spot is surrounded by huge spikey leafed plants (6 ft tall) that are call "flax". They look like giant aloe vera plants. This is a neat change in itself. It is 5:30pm now and pouring rain, with a sideways wind, not nice. This is the time of day that the little yellow eyed penguins come home from fishing all day to feed their young that are hidden in the trees and rocks along the shore. So off we go umbrellas in hand and we are rewarded for our touristiness by witnessing these little guys in their wild environment, up close and personal. Trudging in from the open ocean like someone coming home from an exhausting day at work. This is also the site of a Jurassic age petrified forest that you can see at low tide and the specimens are truly well preserved. It makes you feel pretty young to line up against one of those ancient specimens. This has been a great day. The Catlins are a superbly different and unique piece of the world. This is also the southern most part of NZ's South Island. The south winds that blow here are from the Antarctic!

 

Day 7 - We pass through Niagara (NZ) on our travels today and believe it or not, they even have Niagara Falls there too! Sadly we didn't have time for a photo op. We head for Invercargill, the home of Burt Munro - the world's fastest Indian (motorcycle). Burt (now deceased) still holds the land record for speed, in his motorcycle class, on the salt flats of Utah. We even get to see "the" motorcycle. Invercargill has the widest streets of any city we have ever been in; more cities should pattern themselves after this place. It has managed to maintain a whole downtown of heritage (150 yrs old) buildings. We have lunch here and walk around the city centre then head on our way. We travel the southern scenic route so we are always touching the ocean on our left and grazing lands or forest to our right. A stop along the way at a souvenir shop is always a must as it gives us an excuse to stretch our legs and a chance to yak with somebody local which allows for rapid intake of area history/news. The trees along this coast grow sideways, like they have been blown on for every moment of their growth, but in reality it because of the salt spray that they occasionally get that causes them to grow crooked. Humm…who knew? Again we find our travel distance is shorter than we estimated and we stop for the day at Manapouri, in the heart of Fiordland, a day ahead of ourselves.

 

South Island NZ continued

Day 3 - Peel Forest to Cromwell - Today we see rolling hills and valleys with rivers and a canal that joins one lake to another.  There are dams on every piece of moving water in this region.  In the canal they have salmon farms setup - ingenious! So the feature today was to be Lake Tekapo - very much hyped to us by many people. It is set in the mountains here, fed by the Tasman Glacier. Mt. Cook, the tallest mountain in NZ is near here (3754 m).  Well, it was nice, but it wasn't the highlight of the day (maybe because it was overcast and dull out). Cromwell was the surprise! And nobody talks about it. It is a town in a semi mountainous area, desert like and rocky, but with grass, a major river running through it, large valleys with acres and acres of vineyards. This is the Central Otago Region, producer of wines the rest of the world will soon be asking for. It is raining tonight so we fry our steaks on the stove in the camper.

 

Day 4 - We are exploring Cromwell and area today, most notably the wineries. The doors open at 10:00am and we are not late. The day proves to be a lot of fun.  We stop at 5 vintner's doors and accumulate 4 cases of yummy Pinot Noir, Pinot Gris and a shockingly excellent White Port. Lunch is at a boutique winery called Mr. Difficulty and it is the most interesting combination of tastes and textures as they are show casing their wines with the food. The day is sunny and warm; the scenery is unusual and stunning. This would be a place, we both agree, that we could happily live.  Kamloops x Okanagan x Phoenix. Our little caravan happily rumbles down the road to Clyde for the night.

 

Day 5 - Clyde is a cute place, on a hydro lake, but is tiny and only a stop over. Our destination is back to the east coast from the center, to a place called Owaka. We traverse the most remarkable country side today, hills like our foothills covered with massive boulders, strewn about like a herd of grazing elephants, rugged rivers and blue lakes, forest and rolling pasture land. Tiny towns tucked in all the right places with a fruit stand here and a "petrol" station there. Honey is a big item in NZ so I have begun a collection of little pots of honey. My favorite so far is Manuka. When we get to Owaka, the camp grounds are actually out on the coast at a place called Pounawea, which is right on the beach of an estuary. But it is raining again tonight, so we just get a short wander around the resort cottages. It sure rains a lot in this country!

Adventures of the Mystery "Campervan"

The South Island Exploration Begins

 

Bright and early on the morning of Feb 1/11, you find Glen and I waiting at the top of the dock for our taxi to take us to the Auckland airport where we will be whisked off, by Jet Star Air, down to Christchurch on the south island of New Zealand, about 1/3 of the way down the east coast. We are met by the Tui Camper Rental people (we rented our camper from them) and after a briefing on the operation of our new mode of transportation/accommodation, we are on our way. Groceries are the first order, then finding our first camp site. Happily the GPS unit Glen received for Christmas works like magic and we don't even get lost a little bit! The camp site is "right on the beach" (20 min walk) and pretty devoid of trees (think open sports field), but the grass is green and we are there early in the day so a walk to the beach is a good use of time. We've rented a four person sleeper, with toilet/shower, kitchen/dinette so it is pretty spacious, but the bathroom is going to be more trouble than good, so we use the public facilities - toilets and showers - and will continue to do so for the balance of our trip. One thing NZ camp grounds have is very nice facilities as camping is "the" thing to do here. We've also splurged and rented a BBQ for our time out and it is quite the contraption - basically a frying pan screwed on to the top of a propane bottle. So "fried" steak is our first meal on the road and it is not too bad!

 

Now we probably should have taken a spin around down town Christchurch, but the rental gals said it was still quite a mess from the earth quake/s and not being "demolition gawkers" we decided to give it a pass. So that puts us two days ahead of schedule already. As we head out the next day we find that the distances are not really so vast as we were imagining (Canadian Prairies type!) and by days end, we are actually another day ahead of ourselves. But that's O.K. there will probably be somewhere down here that we are going to really appreciate the fact that we have a time buffer as we will want to stay longer. Now the question becomes…..How much info do I bore you all with, the details (that I will need in order to remember our wonderful time) or the summary (so you don't fall off your chairs - asleep - and hurt yourselves)? Compromise!

 

Day 2 - Christchurch to Peel Forest - Man it is windy along the coast, has to be blowing 40 kts (glad we aren't on the boat), Glen has a fun time keeping the house on the road. Oh yeah, they drive on the left side of the road here and this unit is a standard! Take a moment and imagine having to learn how to shift gears and work the clutch left footed!!!!! Glen is a pro - I need not say more. Anyway, lots of lovely flat farm land filled with either sheep or dairy cows and fenced by these lovely tall rows of trees ('cause it's so flippin' windy the cows would blow off the field if it was barbed wire!). Peel Forest is inland and kind of their foothills. Our camp site is lovely, with nice trees and posh facilities and a couple of nature walks. We chose a walk of 30 min (our kind of exercise) and head off to enjoy the forest. No nasty creatures in NZ, no snakes, bears, poison ivy - nothing scary at all (unless you have a bunny phobia!). We fry chicken on the BBQ - life is good.

Boat Work and People Play

 

I can't believe how quickly time goes by when you are busy (and having fun). Here we are at the end of January and I have only written our adventures down once. Guess I'm just getting lazy, but also, how exciting can it be for anyone else to read about polishing a boat's hull, having the teak re-done and so on? But we have been taking weekends off. We contacted Mike and Karen our "big" boat friends and were invited out to Gulf Harbor where they are tied up for an over-nighter (a chance to live like the rich and famous). This is about an hour away from our marina, so we hopped into our tiny (super tiny) "Marsh" by Nissan (should be Marshmallow, but the name would be too long to fit on the tail gate and for $29.00 NZ a day - who's complaining?) and scooted off. Karen being a certified Chef fed us in fine style and Mike entertained us with his outback stories from South Africa. He also plied us heavily with good wine. We were joined by David and Marian off of Kilkea (a sail boat out of Vancouver). So there was lots of sail boat - power boat rivalry going on. David owns a 48' power boat back in Canada, so the jousting was all symbolic. The next weekend just happened to be the annual Sea Food Festival at the Viaduct Harbor in downtown Auckland (where we are tied up) in honor of Auckland's Anniversary.  Being berth holders, we were issued weekend passes which allowed us to enjoy the scores of sea food kiosks - prawns, oysters, green lip muscles, whitebait etc. done any way you can think of and a 100 ways you don't know of yet. We also got to sample (all of this is on a purchase basis of course - this is New Zealand!) wines from a multitude of the fine wineries that they have in NZ and likewise, from a gazillion micro breweries - the finest brews. All of these are scattered about entertainment pavilions with blues, rock, pop, classical, anything you wish - they play it, music. It was a fun (expensive) but very fun weekend. In between all of this, (guess we take more than weekends off) sailboat Jackster, with David and Jackie on board tied up in the slip beside us and we spent a couple of nights carousing with them. So much visiting to do when you only meet up every two months. And No, the boat work still isn't done, but the guys doing it will still have a few more days, before we have to depart, to get it done.

 

Now for those of you who pay attention to the international news/weather. Yes, New Zealand has been hit by a couple of cyclones.  Yes, on the north island where we are. No, we were not impacted. There were high winds and flooding reported in and around Auckland, but we were very sheltered where we are docked, so other than a bit of "rope strain", Mystery Ship suffered no ill effects.  The weather down here has been less than great for what is the height of their summer - rainy, cool, overcast and always, always windy. This may be a blessing as the sunshine down here is reportedly the worst thing in the whole world for you as there is "NO" ozone! Anyway, we should all be praying for the people of Queensland in Australia as they just got smacked by Cyclone "Yasi", category 4, as if they didn't have enough mud on their plates already.

 

Our next adventure is the South Island of New Zealand. I'll send some news soon.

Happy New Year 2011 - New Zealand

Happy New Year to Everybody!
We are back in New Zealand again after spending a lovely December visiting family and friends in Calgary and enjoying a "white Christmas" with our daughters. When you are a Canadian child from the prairies, there is no other way to have Christmas, but "white". By Jan 5/2011, the novelty of "snow and cold" wore off and we are now quite happy to be back to this country's summer climate, sunny and a nice 27 degrees C.

For the most part, things weren't overly exciting for the first week or so back as we are living in a marina at the heart of Auckland, which is basically like life in any city around the world. It is very nice, don't get me wrong, it's just.... well.... normal. Our boat came out of the water at Oram's Marine Services on Jan 10 for some maintenance work. We had the bottom cleaned and painted with anti-fouling, the props got the same treatment, we did some teak work, upholstery renewal and other boaty things that nobody but us cares about, but that make the Mystery Ship our happy home away from home. During the time the boat was on the "hard", we had the thrill of living like a "Kiwi" in a cute little apartment in down town Auckland. It was a sweet change, but our boat has more space! So we ate out a lot, which I will never complain about, even if it is bad food, which it wasn't, but you know what I mean - I didn't have to cook or clean up!

With all of that hard work (we did do some ourselves), once the boat was back in a slip at the Viaduct Marina, we decided that we needed a "Holiday", so we pointed our cheeky little car (can't be choosy for $29.00 a day) south and drove 3 hrs to Rotorua for a few days. Rotorua has long been a tourist area because of it's intense thermal activity. The early Maori people fought battles over the possession of the land as because of the underground heat, they could have warm floors in their homes, boiling water in nearby ponds to cook their food and bathing never had to be in cold water. All very handy during a cold New Zealand winter. We learned all of this by doing a 4 km hike through Waimangu Volcanic Valley which was originally the site of the "world famous" White and Pink Mineral Spring Terraces. From historic picture records these were stunningly beautiful, but all of that changed on June 10, 1886 when Mt. Tarawera erupted and left instead a series of hot water lakes, geysers and steaming hills. So we got to oooh and aaah at a modern day Jurassic Park as we marched along. After so much exercise, we were understandably thirsty and hungry. The "Pig and Whistle" in Rotorua solved the thirsty part and we were recommended to the "Indian Star" for food. The "Indian Star" is just that, a STAR, this restaurant serves the best, bar none, Indian food we have ever tasted! Our next day of checking out the sites had us screaming down a river (can't pronounce the name so can't remember it) on a high powered river boat, enjoying the sights along the way to a very hidden hot spring waterfall. This place is called the Squeeze as you literally squeeze your way along a waist high water way, between rock faces that have been worn through over centuries of erosion from this hot water fall. The distance is about 1/2 km away from the main river. Then, poof! there you are, this little private hot water jet tub and natural fall, carved out of the volcanic rock, perfect for about 8 people, which we had in our group. The water temp is about 30 degrees C, so very comfortable and relaxing. Cool stuff. The return trip on the river boat involved lots of "hot dogging" something that is a huge hit out here and that we can relate too as well, only it is usually Glen doing the hot dogging! Our afternoon was spent going through the original "Bath House" in main Rotorua, where all the rich and famous of the early 1900's used to come for "healing waters" and "mineral baths". Pretty fancy stuff! Another good day all around.

Today we are back in Auckland on the boat and there is a cyclone passing over the area tonight, so not so idyllic weather. There will be rain and high winds, hopefully we will be sheltered from the brunt of things by being in the marina. It is still warm though, so not missing winter yet!