For several weeks Scruffy E. and I had been repeatedly saying, "hey, we should really sit down sometime and figure out what we're gonna do on our semester break adventure." Which invariably caused the other to say, "ohhh, yea bro, we gotta do that soon." Well, no-so-surprisingly, it got to be Wednesday night before break and we had yet to even open a book, pull up a website, or even seriously consider what things we could legitimately fit into a week+ of traveling around the South Island. We had decided several weeks previous that while Kiwi Justin was off in Sydney getting his tan on and cruisin' around the big city, Ethan and I would take a little tour of the more distant parts of the South Island. Partially out of a hope that the incorporation of Football Jacob would mean that he would use his get-up-and-go enthusiasm to help up get off the ground with planning, but mostly because we wanted someone else to split gas money with, and not at all because he's a good friend of ours, Scruffy E. and I added Jacob to the crew which made a dynamic crew for our upcoming adventure of epic awesomeness... now to actually plan what to do...
[I have never done this before, but after careful consideration over the course of the trip - knowing that I would end up blogging about everything - I have decided to rename one of my characters. Football Jacob will henceforth be known as All-American Jacob. He's probably the most stereotypical, just "All American" kind of guy I have ever met, and that will help you, as the reader, get a better insight into his personality that his previous name, which I have already forgotten. I apologize in advance for any confusion this might cause.]
So, it got to be Wednesday night before break's beginning on Friday and Ethan and I finally got our acts together and sat down to plan some things out. We had a general idea of what we wanted to do, and we knew that we had 8 days to make it all happen. While break actually began Thursday night (no classes Friday due to it being Good Friday), we would not be leaving until Sunday morning. All-American Jacob's brother and sister had come to visit and wouldn't be leaving until Sunday morning, so we had to push back our departure until he no longer had that obligation on his back. So anyways, Ethan were sharing a couch, him with his computer, I with a tour book, and we started planning stuff out. We knew that we wanted to see the glaciers, kayak the Abel Tasman, and see Queenstown's lesser-known twin, Wanaka. There were other things on the list, but since we didn't end up doing them, I'm not gonna mention them. We figured it made the most sense to head West first, pass through Wanaka, hit up the Glaciers on our way North, spend a couple days kayaking, and then book it all the way back down South. While I make this decision process sound easy, it was the product of several hours spent "planning." The fact that we actually ended up doing just about everything else on the internet BUT plan probably had something to do with our productivity... or lack thereof. The pinnacle of the trip, a three day kayaking tour through the Abel Tasman National Park, proved to take a little more planning than just us making the decision to go. With the recent surge in tourism in NZed, the DOC (Department of Conservation) has chosen to regulate the number of people camping in different places around New Zealand. Several hikes are now designated as "Great Walks," which means that one has to book and pay for campsites along these trails (which are not necessarily "walks") in advance. During peak season one would probably have to schedule well in advance, but since it is now almost Winter in New Zealand and well out of tourist season, we were able to get a couple spots at sites with only a week notice.
At this point, I think it would probably be helpful to include a map of New Zealand which the reader can refer back to as I talk about our adventures. So here it is:
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| The red line marks our route, with dots where we spent a night or more. |
Saturday night before the trip began, Scruffy E. and I attended Ethan's kiwihost Toni's birthday party. While turning 21 in New Zealand does not carry with it the legal-privileges it does in the states, people still go pretty crazy for their 21st. For her event, Toni's friends had planned a surprise party and her parents had rented out one of the bars in town. While all in attendance had a grand time, partying the night before made our departure in the morning somewhat delayed. When we finally did get on the road around 11:00 AM, a couple hours after we had hoped to leave Dunedin, Ethan and I elected to take first shifts of not-driving.
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| one of the many river crossings on the road to Wanaka |
Our first stop was Wanaka. Around 75 kilometers Northwest of Queenstown, Wanaka sits at the Southern end of beautiful Lake Wanaka. We arrived in Wanaka at 3:00 PM. All American Jacob, who had just been to Wanaka with his family a couple days previous elected to fish while sending Scruffy E. and I on a "little hike," up Roy's Peak track. This wee little jaunt up a mountainside was a rather ambitious undertaking considering the late hour (it gets dark around 5:30 or 6:00 by this time of year), and the fact that we had been in a car all day and our legs were rather used to being sedentary. Nevertheless, with water and cameras in our daypacks, Ethan and I took off up the 4km track which switched back and forth through acres and acres of sheep and cow territory. Immediately as we left the parking lot, the track took a sharp upward slope. (Upon return several hours later, we took a look at the map and learned that over the 4km trek up, the trail gains over 1200 meters, so, for those not-so-mathematically-inclined, thats over a meter of rise over every four meters of run. Which in American units equates to...VERY STEEP. After a grueling three hour trek up to the summit of Roys Peak, it was getting very close to dark and Scruffy E and I, both from fear of hiking in the dark, and hunger, remained on the gusty top for only long enough to snap a few photos and share a Crunchie (honey comb covered in chocolate) before we turned around and made the knee-pounding walk back down, through overabundance of evidence of sheep and cow activity. Within only a few minutes of leaving the top it was completely dark and we were glad we had brought our flashlights with us. While walking by headlamp did make the going much slower, I'm not sure my knees could have taken it any faster.
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| Roy's Peak from the base |
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| view over Wanaka |
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| a little ridge near the top (Scruffy E in the distance) |
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| the long-sought Peak |
Upon returning to the parking lot at the head of the trail, we met back up with Jacob who drove us all into Wanaka where we (thankfully) located a hearty meal rather easily at a Kabob place. It might have been one of the best things I've ever tasted. We found the backpackers that All American J had stayed at with his family. While I was completely ready to crawl into bed with my book, Ethan and Jacob convinced me to play some gin rummy with them in the common room/kitchen of the backpackers. It was all well and good (getting out of bed and not falling asleep before 8pm was probably a good idea) right up until a particularly chatty fellow from Ireland happened into the common room. While we didn't keep close track, we're pretty sure he didn't stop talking for about three hours. Although we tried to tune him out as much as we could, we did get part of a story about him rock climbing somewhere with a group of "new-age travelers," who "kept perfect rhythm on the bongos all night long," which created "an epic scene with lights, and climbing, and bongos, and a fire." These were phrases which we quoted endlessly, particularly the new-age travelers part. And the bongos part. At last, we were driven out of the common room and into our beds.
MONDAY:
Up early-ish we packed up our things and headed out of the backpackers. I took a turn at driving and immediately made the American-in-a-British-colony mistake of driving on the wrong side of the road. Luckily it was early and we were in a residential street, so Jacob, riding shotgun pointed out my error before we ran headfirst into oncoming traffic. We got back on the 6 (there are only a handful of "highways" in New Zealand, so the single-digit ones are referred to as The __. These "highways" however would be a stretch of the US's definition of State Route) and headed for the West Coast. Crossing the Southern Alps proved a rather difficult task for our beloved Baby Bey. While I had subconsciously realized this in the past, only during this particular driving session did I realize that she only has three engine notes: grumble, rumble, and roar. Roar, being the gear most-frequented while climbing the roads of up to 11% grade, is a volume which pierces right through the headphones I was wearing in order to provide myself with some distraction while driving. Another shortfall of Bey is her lack of stereo system.
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| The Southern Alps cut by one of the many rivers we crossed |
Once on the West Coast and in view of the Tasman Sea which separates Australia from NZed, our route took a turn North towards the Fox and Franz Joseph glaciers. Making frequent stops along the road North slowed our progress, but the views of the coast and the Tasman Sea were so marvelous we couldn't help but pull over every half hour or so. Additionally, being from Dunedin, we hadn't seen the sun in a couple weeks, so that also required appreciation.
We arrived at the Fox Glacier, got out, took a little walk which we assumed would take us to look at the glacier, but in fact took us to see some "historic bridge." The historical significance was not explained, but it was clearly very old and therefore must have something in its past that makes it historical... I guess. Upon returning to the car we determined that the road that designated "Fox Glacier" was not actually the one we wanted to take, so we drove the couple kilometers back to the highway, and took our next right which lead us up the other side of the river we had just driven by. This road did take us to the correct place and we were able to do a quick little hike to the glacier. We we're actually able to get to the glacier though, the trail stops a couple hundred meters short of it. There were a number of strange signs posted along the 15 minute hike to the glacier including this one, which we can only interpret as, "don't fall in the water or a big wave will come and crush you." Its a dangerous looking brook, er, river.
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| big waves in this stream |
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| the rocks must fall out of the air, the path gets nowhere close to any cliffs |
Back on the road we headed North to the Franz Joseph glacier. Reportedly "better" than the Fox, we had decided earlier that we wanted to do a somewhat longer trek around the Franz Joseph; a more significant hike than the 15 minute one we did at the Fox. The glaciers are only a couple kilometers apart and we were soon pulling into a road that would lead us to the parking lot and trail heads. Almost immediately off the highway we stopped to pick up a hitchhiker. Kristina, the Taiwanese hitchhiker would prove to be one of the oddest people we encountered during our trip. After asking us if we had been to Queenstown or Wanaka, she reported that a town that we couldn't make out through her accent was "way better." She also inquired if we were going heli-hiking, a several thousand dollar adventure that college students probably have absolutely no business doing. I'm not sure she understood that we don't have money trees in America. When we arrived at the parking lot we all got out of the van, and while All American Jacob and Scruffy Ethan and I were putting cameras and water bottles in our backpacks, Kristina was getting out her hazmat mask. We advised her that she prroobbably didn't need that here. She looked skeptical, but we didn't see her wearing it after that.
Surprisingly, or maybe not-so, the Franz Joseph was very similar to the Fox. I guess big chunks of ice flowing slowly out of the mountains all look more or less the same: cold, whitish-grayish-blue, and have a river coming out of their base. Still a beautiful sight though, and one I had definitely never seen before in person.
We found a backpackers that advertised a "free spa," so naturally we felt compelled to spend our night in the town of Franz Joseph appreciating the warm bubbly water. We pulled into the Rainforest Backpackers, and after some difficulty finding the main office, we booked ourselves a tent site. The kindly woman who checked us in advised us to go scope out the spa soon because there were some foxy ladies there, but we found it more necessary to eat first. We set up our tent in the designated area, which happened to be in rather close proximity to the kid's playground equipment. We didn't really notice it then, but when Ethan and Jacob were awakened bright and early the next morning by children not-so-quietly at play, we figured that was probably a bad place to set up. After dinner we decided to check out "spa," which turned out to be nothing more than a massive hot tub, but still very nice on the ol' bones. After a good soak I chose to sleep in the van, opting to not cram all three of us into the tent unnecessarily...p articularly when there is a tempur-pedic bed in the van.
TUESDAY:
We drove farther North, up the coast, before cutting inland. On our way North we stopped in a small old mining town called Ross which claims to have the largest gold nugget ever discovered in New Zealand. Well, it doesn't in fact actually have the nugget, it has a replica... so that was a let down. But the town provided a good break to get out and stretch our legs. Our next stop was Greymouth where we attempted to find some lunch. I wandered over to a chinese takeaway place for fish, chips, and a curry rice roll. Scruffy and All American chose to play it a little safer with some good old KFC (called K-Fry by Kiwis). This plan, however, completely backfired. They split the "Dinner for Two" which included chicken, mashed potatoes and gravy, cole slaw, and a drink. The only edible part turned out to be the drink. I can't explain it, because I didn't eat it, but Jacob and Ethan have sworn they will never eat NZed K-Fry ever again.
We headed back up the coast and stopped at a place called Pancake Rocks. A very touristy spot, the only "hike" was a paved walk over and through the rocks. Overcrowded, but pretty cool to see. Our progress North was slow due to our inability to drive for more than 30 minutes without finding a reason to pull over and admire the sights.
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| Mountains barely visible in the distance on the horizon |
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| a beach where we stopped for a little beach baseball. (Notice Jacob and Ethan's matching shirts, how cute) |
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| Pancake rocks... obviously named. |
WEDNESDAY:
We awoke to rain...not a good sign for those people trying to hire kayaks for three days. Nonetheless, we packed all our gear (its incredible how one can be 90% ready to do something in 10 minutes, and then the remaining 10% takes 30 minutes) into Baby Bey and drove down to the kayak rental place. When we arrived we were greeted with some not-so-good news: all trips had been canceled for the day due to four meter swells along the coast. The guy behind the desk told us that the weather was supposed to improve by Thursday and that we could leave then on our adventure if we so desired. We stayed committed to a three-day paddle, but said we would be back tomorrow to try again with a final answer.
Not to be controlled by something as trivial as weather, the three new-age travelers decided that we would do a hike in the Abel Tasman National Park to get an idea of what we wouldn't be doing for the next three days. We found a good walk leading up into the hills of the park overlooking the coast which then circled back and followed the coast back to the trail head. We drove to the parking lot and unloaded all our carefully packed food and clothing only to fill our bags with rain gear, water, and lunch items. We took off on the trail which begins as a raised path through a swampy area and almost immediately ran into one of Chillin' Matt's flatmates, Levi. Levi explained that he and Matt had just happened upon the parking lot the night before, had spent the night in their hired van, and in the morning Levi had decided to get out and see where they were. The absurdity and goofiness of this series of events was not at all surprising to those of us who know Matt. It is totally reasonable that he would find his way to the parking lot of the Abel Tasman National Park (a good 45 minutes from the nearest town/highway) in the middle of the night, decide to sleep there, and then not have gotten out of his van to figure out where he was by 10:00 AM.
After a gradual start, the "Inland Track" took a turn directly UP. Unlike the Mount Roy track, this trail had no switchbacks, it was just straight up, and very tiring. Repeated stops to "enjoy the view," were taken and made the hiking more doable. We finally reached a clearing we had been told about where there was a hut with two beds and a picnic table. We took a long lunch before heading down. Once again, my knees were killing me by the time we reached the flat of the "Coastal Track" for a surprisingly long 12 km walk back to the van.
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| lunch spot... gray skies much? |
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| the coast the we would be paddling the next couple days. |
THURSDAY:
SUN! We woke up, and once again packed our supplies for the paddle trip into our bags and headed for the rental place. Unlike the day before, the sun shone brilliantly and we were very optimistic that we would be allowed to start our adventure. When we arrived at the rental place we were directed to take our van around back to start unloading our gear into our kayaks. We were given two kayaks, a double and a single. Scruffy E., being the most experienced of the three of us elected to take the single for the first day. Kayaks were loaded with gear, and then loaded onto a trailer, and we headed off to the put-in spot near where we had started our day hike the day before. We would be putting-in with a guide named Sally and two Belgian dudes who she was escorting during their two-day paddle. Once the kayaks were in the water we were soon on our way. We had been given a bunch of gear by the kayak company, including waterproof jackets, skirts, booties, bags, and a couple dry bags. Its remarkable how friendly people are here, all that gear came to us at no extra cost, which stands in stark contrast to the US where one would DEFINITELY be charged for all the little things like that, none of which we needed, but all of which were much appreciated.
We had been kayaking for less than an hour when Sally directed us to beach on a little strip of sand where she would give us a "safety briefing," along with some delicious cake. The "safety briefing' was given in typical Kiwi style, "so, uhm, yeah couple rules. Number one, don't be dumb. Number two, use your flare in emergencies. Number three, the answer to all problems can be found by adhering to one and two." While that isn't exactly what Sallygirl told us, thats all we were able to pick out. We were having serious problems paying attention due to the stunning views that lay before us (no, I'm not talking about Sally, though she was pretty cute). The sky was startlingly blue. While we had had fantastic weather for the entire trip, the weather today was like nothing we had seen since our arrival in NZed.
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| postcard perfect, eh? |
We unpacked our kayaks, setup the tent, and began to do what boys do best - explore their surroundings. With some quality rock scrambling under our belts, we returned to the campsite to begin cooking dinner. Dinner, which consisted of spaghetti, sauce and sausage was coming along quite well. Scruffman Ethan and I were enjoying some quality conversation about previous camp-cooking fiascoes when disaster struck. Midway through a conversation about mishaps regarding the draining of pasta without the benefit of a strainer... well, I think you can imagine what happened. We tried to salvage as much as we could, but between the ground seasoning and the not-heated pasta sauce, we were all rather unsatisfied by dinner. We took a look at the supplies we had brought and decided that we had far more than we were going to need for dinner the next night, so we cooked up some noodles and through in some soup flavoring and more sausage for a hearty stew-ish thing. It was well after dark by the time we finished cooking dinner round two, and we decided to pack it in after a short lay on the beach staring up at the stars.
FRIDAY:
Paddling, dia numero dos. We were up early, not quite early enough to see the sunrise, but pretty dang early if I do say so myself. I made the mistake of commenting to Ethan and Jacob that I was, "feeling a bit slow," that morning. As I had already developed a little bit of a reputation for not being a morning person, I had a hard time living that comment down. We breakfasted on fruit and nut bars and had the kayaks loaded fairly quickly.
Once again, we had an entire day of cloudless blue skies. We paddled up to our next campsite and were there before noon. Although our campsite was called Mosquito Bay, we determined this to be a complete and utter misnomer. We set up our tent and staked a claim on a patch of ground next to a picnic table and returned to our boats. We paddled to the northern most end of the Abel Tasman National Park for our lunch at a place called Tonga Quarry. While we initially had the beach to ourselves, we were soon intruded on by the infernal noisy Germans from the day before. We concluded they had bee stalking us, waiting for us to let our guard down before stealing our gummy bears. But we put our stalkers our of mind and had a great, warm, sunny nap before heading back to the kayaks and paddling back to our campsite. I had elected to take the single kayak which didn't handle large waves quite as well as the tandem. When All American Jacob and Scruffy Ethan elected to take the long way 'round a little island where there were supposed to be seals I took the faster inside track back to the Mosquito Bay. When we had setup camp earlier we assumed that we were the only tent there because of the hour at which we made camp, but in fact, we were going to have the entire lagoon to ourselves that night. Jacob and Ethan beached a while after I did and we pulled our kayaks far up the beach to avoid them getting swept away when the tide came in that night. Rather than try to explain the change in water level, I will provide a couple pictures instead...
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| Scruffy at our private campsite. |
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| Our lagoon at low tide. |
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| Our lagoon getting near high tide as the sun began to set. |
SATURDAY:
After our initial apprehension that we would have a really long day of paddling ahead of us on day three since we had been paddling farther North the two previous days, we did some calculating and determined that it should take us all of about 5 hours to paddle back to where we put in from the campsite we where we slept. Speaking of sleeping, while I was warm and cozy in the tent, Scruffy E. and All American J. chose to sleep outside beside the fire. They woke up very wet and quite cold and were ready to go waay before I even managed to crawl out of the tent. I had determined that day before that the inflatable air pad that I was using, which had been thrown in to the Gus Bus deal, had a hole somewhere and was therefore unable to provide much in the way of comfort. The hole must have been fairly small because a fair level of air could be maintained if one was rather diligent at inflating it.
At All American Jacob's urging, we began our day early, without even the courtesy of breakfast, not that I usually eat breakfast, I just take full advantage of the time that I therefore gain while E and J are eating. As I learned later, we were moving fast so that we could explore the lagoons before the tide went out and made the lagoons inaccessible. Ever since the word lagoon was first mentioned, I repeatedly inquired if we were going to explore Blue Lagoon, a pretty terrible Brooke Shields cult classic that frequently plays on bad movie channels between the hours of 3 and 6 AM in the US. I think my compadres got kinda tired of that question, but I got rather weary of them calling every bird we saw either a penguin or a kiwi. A penguin was any bird seen on or near the water, a kiwi was any other bird. As far as my limited knowledge of our aviary friends goes, during the entirety of our trip we saw neither kiwi nor penguin... or Brooke Shields for that matter.
Having satisfied our need to explore a couple lagoons, we beached up and got around to having a late breakfast. Driven off quickly by sand flies, we paddled on South and arrived at Adele Island (our day one lunch stop) around 1:00 PM. We decided to end the trip as it began with lunch and a nap on the beach at Adele. After lunch and a nap we made for the bay in which we had initially put in and tried to figure out what we were supposed to have heard Sallygirl say during our briefing about getting picked up. Luckily, we spotted her and the tractor and trailer she had driven out on a sand bar and made a B-line for her. We unpacked out kayaks and loaded them on the trailer.
Once back at the rental place, we loaded the stuff back into Baby Bey and got back on the road. We figured that we needed to cover well over 700 kms over a day plus in order to get back to Dunedin by Sunday afternoon. We made some significant progress, but by the time we got to Blenheim we decided that it was time to stop for the night. We pulled over in a gas station and evaluated the backpacker options in Blenheim (pronounced Blen-um). As our guide book explained, "Blenheim is a flat, dead, old farming town." We found this a very accurate description... except for the flat part, there were more speed bumps in Blenheim than we had encountered in the rest of New Zealand combined.
We selected a backpackers on principle of its offer of a Playstation 2. After locating the Arrow Backpackers, which turned out to be in a very sketchy area of town we pulled in to the parking lot, and surprise-surprise, we were the only car in the lot. Just as we were making the decision to find somewhere else to stay that night a hospitable looking Asian gentleman stepped out onto the porch. Ethan made eye contact, and at that point it became too late to leave. The gentleman who barely spoke understandable English, but who's name we determined was Bruce, ushered us inside and INSISTED that we all sit on a rather small love seat. (Three dudes, one van just became three dudes on a love seat) Bruce requested ID so he could take down some information, so we all handed over our 18+ cards (standard NZed ID for people without NZed driver's licences). He looked at these in the same way I imagine Socrates would look at an iPhone, rolling them around in his hand and staring blankly at them. When he asked if we had any other forms of identification, Jacob and Ethan produced their US state drivers licenses and I gave Bruce my student ID. He seemed less happy with these, but reluctantly took them and started copying down numbers left and right. We concluded he had no idea what he was doing because the numbers he took down we the inconsequential ones that only someone with a deep understanding of the DMV would have any reason to understand. Bruce required that we pay in cash, which none of us had, so we got back in the Gus Bus and headed back into town. Immediately when we entered the van we all started talking at once about how we should probably stay somewhere else for fear of getting ax-murdered. We had contracted a case of the giggles and that coupled with our actual slight fear of the place made for a very interesting trip to the ATM. Cash in hand we returned to Bruce an paid him. He insisted on giving us a very thorough tour of the complex (including the rooms that were empty). Its very difficult to convey the entirety of the creepiness of the place through words. (If you are really interested in hearing a very animated story, ask me in person sometime) It became clear how little English Bruce and his wife understood when we started reading the signs posted around the backpackers. Next to the love seat we had been forced onto there was a sign that read "NO VISITORS." On the refrigerator in the kitchen there was a sign which read, "Please note that SOMOE FOOD STUFFS have been stolen by someone like shop lifter. This kind of action is a STEALAGE definitely and destroyed an atmosphere in BACKPACKERS life." There was another sign that read, "EVERYONE DO NOT WANTED TO GET DIRTY IN THE KITCHEN." We were so on edge that we actually traveled around the backpackers in a group, never allowing one person to be separated from the others. It was a crazy night, punctuated by someone getting up at 4:30AM and watching Asian language TV very loudly in the lounge across the hall from our room.
SUNDAY:
(I'm getting REALLY tired of writing and there isn't much to write about for this day, so...) We woke up early, with no complaints from me for once, and headed for home. Three hours of driving by each of us later and we were pulling into my driveway at 669/3 Castle St. It was good to be home.
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