Fun on the Water

We headed through a few more towns, over the next couple of days enjoying small adventure and Hi-jinks as we went. Reaching Queenstown, it was time to get the wallet out as we had reached the adventure capital of NZ. This is where everyone comes to bungee and sky dive and everything else.

A fortnight or so on the road in the car, cooking by camp stove is just about as long as you want to do without a little break, and as we were less than half way round our South Island journey, we decided to treat ourselves for the night, staying in a fairly posh hotel on the waterfront. In the end, thanks to a half price offer and a little bargaining we managed to pick up a suite for the night which had a big bedroom, big bathroom, lounge and patio doors out onto the rooftop for about the same cost as a single person staying in a Travel Inn back home.

Next morning its up and off for a ride on the Shotover Jet which is a Jet boat, maxed to the gunnels and that rockets up and down a white water river, spinning donuts on the water and sraping past the canyon walls. Not quite wet enough, we book to go Kayaking next in the Milford Sound, which is a beautiful fjord, fed from the melting glaciers still visible on the mountain tops around it.

Its a long drive to Milford Sound, through some unbelievable mountain scenery, including the Homer Tunnel. The tunnel has been blasted out of the mountain and the inside is left just as you imagine the dynamite left it. Its a long tunnel taking about 5 minutes to pass through and its one way at a time. Unhelpfully though, at 8 o'clock at night, and it was a little later than that, the authorities switch off the lights inside the tunnel and the traffic lights outside it controlling the direction of traffic. As there is no way to see the other side, you have to head on in hoping not to meet anyone the other way, though truth be told, two cars could probably squeeze by. Its further made eerie by the lack of road surface, causing our car, which is not best equipped for rugged terrain to bound all over the place, thumping and groaning regularly - it was like driving into the center of the Earth.

We reach the other side trouble free and it's about another hour till we reach our destination. Milford Sound is little more than a pub, a hostel and an air strip and a whole lot more NO CAMPING! signs. It is also the end of the road, so short of any reasonable place to park up and make dinner and then sleep without a pubful of people staring across at us, we retraced our steps about 10 minutes back out of town till we found a nice little spot off the road just into the woodlands.

The Ice Age Cometh

Further down the West coast and it's time to rejoin the tourist trail. First of all it's the Glaciers. There's two Glaciers of distinction in NZ, Franz Joseph and Fox, and a hundred or so other ones that apparently aren't worthy of the coach loads of tourists the other two get. Or, it could be the fact you have to climb to the other ones that mean most people, ourselves included, are happily contented with the main attractions.

Either way we arrive the night before in the town of Franz Joseph where we encounter a sign that will become very familiar to us everywhere we go: NO CAMPING! Unable to find a suitable place to sleep, we instead choose a wholey unsuitable place which is on the shore of the glaciers melt water. A raging torrent of cloudy, nutrient-rich, icey water, we decide the odds of a huge ice chunk falling off the glacier up river and causing a big sploosh that would envelope us, to be in our favour and pitch camp. We survive the evening and decide in retrospect that it probably wasn't our wisest decision of the trip so far. That morning it's up and out on foot as we walk up to the glacier where we get a chance after standing back in respect, to gingerly approach it and touch it, keeping half an eye on the ice shelves above us and the car sized boulders resting on top of them. Had we only come a day later we might just have caught sight of the two fools who ventured inside the glacier before it fell on them, requiring emergency assistance and ridicule, the national broadsheet referring to them rather accurately in it's front page headline as "Bloody Idiots". Then glacier number 2, Fox which we couldn't quite get as close to but was still very impressive.

A Town Named ROSS

Arriving at a village near tea time we decided to stay for the night as we rather liked the name of it: Ross. It seemed like a nice little place with a pub, a pond and very little else except lots of big signs with my name on it. Parking the car at our spot for the night on the local playing field we popped across the road to the pub to sample the local ale and took to a seat outside where we were joined over the following couple of hours by the owner and then several of the regulars as we sat under the porch with our drinks. Drawing the evening to a close reasonably early, we bid goodnight to our new friends and settled down for the evening in the car.

Our first rainfall arrived that night and the clouds had clearly been storing it up as we looked out the car windows in the middle of the night to see the water rising around us. We moved the car to the Tourist office car park and settled down again. The following morning, we are getting ourselves into order when we bump into one of our friends form the previous evening, Aireeni the pottery artist who is having her early morning fag.

Ross is a goldmining town, still actively mining gold today but very reminiscent of it's heritage. Sadly for Ross, the tourists really only stop for the toilet before carrying on past. They don't see the heritage walk which meanders through the hill sides past hundred year old tunnels leading into the old gold mines. No action has been taken to prevent tourists from wandering in to them, because so few tourists actually take the time to explore them. You can squeeze in as far as you dare, passed the pit props until you decide they are too rotten. We then popped back down to the town for breakfast and popped into a little cafe run by Marcus who runs the cafe from the living room of his house and has converted his garden to grow as much of his own produce as possible. After a fine sandwich and coffee we promised to spend the second night parked in his drive way if we stayed and left with handfuls of his garden produce to take on our travels and cook up as we went, gratis. Then round to Aireeni's for afternoon tea and to see her workshop and we decided Ross was quite possibly the finest town in the world. That said, we had an agenda and decided we owed it to the rest of New Zealand to find the second best town if we could.

The West Coast

Our first stop for the night is just outside Westport, where we find a beach to park up at and make our home before heading on the next day. This will become the routine for most of our journey. Reach somewhere, park out of town to sleep and then head in or on the next morning. The one thing we didn't manage to fit in the car was a shower but as this is a nation of camp sites, we've not done too bad, sneaking in and out of parks 'testing' their facilities, including at our most audacious, sneaking in in the evening for a shower and leaving our ice blocks in the freezer and sneaking back in in the morning to collect our frozen blocks for the cooler bin and washing our dishes.

The journey continues and driving through Blenheim, we find ourselves in one of NZ's major wine producing regions. As such, we dutifully pop in to a winery to sip a glass and try our best to conjure images of woodland walks with hints of elderberries and faint whiffs of such and such. As irony would have it, we picked the one winery that exports all it's produce to the UK, and keeps very little for it's domestic market. So if you pop into Sainsbury's have a look for the Grove Mill label, we've been to check it out and it was very nice too.

Stopping in at Greymouth for the afternoon, we dole on up to the town's top10 holiday park for our showers before finding somewhere to stay. Looking in to the back of our car to get our stuff we suddenly realise that disaster has struck. The chilly bin, full of bags of ice cubes to keep our food (and grove mill wine) cool, has broken free from it's seat belt which keeps it up right, sitting on top of our bed and it has tipped over, pouring water all over our bed. We park up right at the beach and entrance to the camp site and hang our bedsheets over the fence and stand our mattress up against the car to dry them all in the afternoon sun. Eventually successful, we had a dry bed again but also a beach full of people who thought we had had a 'little accident'. A few of the passing children gave us understanding glances.

During these days we saw quite a few things too. We saw a seal colony at Cape Fowlwind, pancake rocks at Punakaiki which is a big rock structure that has formed like lots and lots of pancakes stacked on top of each other, and the lesser spotted Kiwi, albeit in captivity - A dangerous beastie right enough, that when it smelled us through a gap in the glass started trying to break through it to get to us, but don't worry, it didn't manage it.

Then by day 4 we were to be passing a rather well named town that seemed worthy of a visit if just for a photo by the sign, Ross! We stopped for an hour and ended up staying for two days.

Heading South

Making it back to civilisation safely, we pack the car for the grand trip to the south Island and set off. A four hour drive to Wellington, an overnight sleep in the car between the dockside service road and the railway line, a three hour ferry crossing and we drive off the other side onto the south Island, turn on the radio and manage by sheer chance to catch the owner of the Waihiki ferry company getting a roasting about the previous night's debacle which managed to make the headlines. The South Island is going to be good.

Our plan for the trip is to drive in an anticlockwise direction around the South Island and arrive back at the top in Picton (the ferry town) in three and a half week's time. We're driving a Nissan Prairie which is Nic's Mum's car, and which has been kindly lent to us to facilitate our seeing of NZ. It's a car for the Japanese market, so nothing we have in the UK. All round it's a pretty decent car (if a little underpowered), it's a pseudo people carrier with seating for seven if required or it can all fold down. In folded down form, the flattened seats resemble something of the floor of a bouncy castle, roaming up and down in a manner that doesn't really fulfil the manufacturer's promise of a bed in the back. No problem though, and a visit to the timber yard later, a few 2X4's and some ply, some old bed struts from the garage and a couple of foam mattresses later and we have our selves a fully working proper bed, as comfy as a real one. Underneath the bed, between us and the undulating seats, and doors, there are plenty of nooks and crannies that have offered us all the cubby holes and storage solutions that we could ask for. With easy access to everything we need and all of it out of the sight of burglars, it's a mobile home that IKEA would be proud of.

Party Time and Riots.

Our first week in New Zealand was mostly spent settling in, and catching up with friends and family. We're staying at Nicki's house which is in a town called Morrinsville, about half an hour from Hamilton and an hour from Auckland.

It seemed we arrived in party season, and upon arrival, we're immediately enlisted on the party circuit. First up it's an exlcusive invite to possibly Auckland's swankiest party of the year, Nicki's friends Russ & Nita's 3 year old daughter Katya's pirate birthday party where everyone's dressed up, funnily enough, as pirates. Several Ginger beers later, and a day or two to recover, party number two is upon us and the nautical season continues with more friends. This time it's Phil, an expat from England who loved Auckland harbour and it's city views so much he bought a boat to live on and do up and so we spend an evening bobbing and sipping wine looking across to the lights of the city.

So far so good, and when party number 3 cast us an invite, which was to the pre-opening dinner of a new swanky winery and restaurant located on a very posh Island in Auckland harbour called Waihiki, there seemed no sensible reason to refuse, the head chef, Will being another friend of Nicki's.

The dinner was lovely, the wine was lovely, and the ferry trip over in the afternoon too, was lovely. The last ferry home that night though, at 11.30 was less lovely. Well I say that, it may not be true. We unfortunately were not on it, as like us, the guests of the two unknown wedding parties on the island and the big dance party also had a similar timetable to ourselves. Left with about 70 other people on the pier, we stood watching as our boat sailed merrily into the blackness without us.

Despair was not upon us however, as the ship's crew assured us it would return in an hour for us. To a sensible man, and woman, common sense would suggest that with a 45 minute crossing each way and a couple hundred drunken people to get rid of at the opposite end, an hour was optomistic, and true enough, it was a much longer wait. As we sat there waiting, you could see the crowd of mostly young, drug fueled dance party idiots becoming more and more restless as they wandered around in little groups bumping into property and each other. As the situation became less and less savoury, and as all hope of seeing the ferry again dwindled we started thinking about moving away from the area. As people broke into the ticket office, smashed bottles and stole onto boats moored in the harbour we decided it was time to go, leaving in time to see the mob setting fires on the road and ransacking the terminal. Taxi's being as rare as ferries off the island, it was only by jumping into someone else's that we managed to escape to the otherside of the island, and to Will's place where we spent the night before leaving the next morning on the now very unpopular ferry.

No, we've not abandoned the blog!

A thousand apologies to anyone who has been bored enough to catch up on what we've been doing, only to discover that it would seem we've been doing nothing for the last month.

Having been very kindly offered the use of Nic's mum's car, we converted the back of it into a bed, photo pending, and set off on a tour of the South Island in it. We've now been down here for about 3 weeks and having a fantastic time. Sadly though, we didn't get the time to install the full PC and Internet suite into the car so the experiences have been building up in our diaries so we can give you all a full and exciting account on our return to the North Island (and broadband PCs).

Hopefully in about a fortnight we'll be able to tell you all about the car, the ferry crossing, the wineries, rope bridges, thieving of camp site showers (just the water, all appliances left intact), pancake rocks and dinosaur egg rocks, Kiwis, Wekas and Wetas, the best village in the world, called Ross, our discovering of gold, touching of glaciers, kayaking with seals, jet boating, touring of brewery and Cadbury factory, hiding with penguins, the steepest street in the world, the most tranquil and deserted beach in the world, until the naked man turned up, and most recently and most excitingly of all, our going for a flying lesson in two planes at the same time and doing it all ourselves with co-pilots just sitting there beside us!

So hello to you all, and thankyou for checking up on what we're doing. We promise the full account in a fortnight.

Nic & Ross