No Wrench

Today was our cruise out into Doubtful Sound. The brochure mentioned viewing opportunities of penguins, dolphins, and seals. We saw exactly jack shit. A couple sea birds flying around at a distance and that was it. The fjord itself was absolutely beautiful and I’m glad we got to see it. But was it worth the money and the time we invested? To me, not at all. I went of that cruise to see fauna and while the flora was quite nice, it wasn’t why I was there. So essentially I feel like I wasted the day because we spent it on a boat looking at pretty mountains and didn’t see any cool animals. The trip to the underground power station afterwards was pretty cool, but only interesting briefly. So I had decided to get up at 4:30am the next morning to do the Key Summit hike (my sister wasn’t interested), but since the boat got back from the cruise around 5:30pm, I figured I’d try and make it that night. So it was a 20 minutes drive from Manipouri (where the cruise docked) back to Te Anau (where our hotel was). We got to the hotel, I dashed inside, grabbed my hiking light and took off for the trail.

Now according to the official times, it was an hour-and-a-half drive to The Divide, where the trail took off, a three hour hike, and then another 1.5 hours drive back. So if I left Te Anau at 6pm, I wouldn’t be at the top of the hike till 8:30pm (close to sundown if not already dark) and wouldn’t be back in town till 11pm. That’s according the official times, which obviously weren’t created with consideration for me. I had an easy cruise up to the trailhead, without a single car going the same way I was. Made it there by 6:40pm. Hit the trail and bombed through the entire thing (up and back) in an hour and twenty. Crossed paths with a German couple who were coming down while I was going up and then caught and passed them on the way back down. The guy thought I was his girlfriend when I came up behind them and said something to me in German before he released who I was. He then said something pissed to his girlfriend, which I think was related to the fact that I had just handed them their asses. Not all Americans are fat and lazy. Finished driving back around 9pm. Stopped in at The Moose to get a beer to go with the dinner my sister had picked up and noticed they had karaoke that night. Went back to our hotel and ate dinner, and decided to head out for karaoke. I mean, when else would I have a chance to sign karaoke in New Zealand. It was really odd. Most of the songs they had were American country songs. You haven’t really lived till you’ve heard a Japanese woman sing American country songs at a New Zealand karaoke bar. You really haven’t. I managed to find a group of songs to sing in the country mix. Had some Kiwi beer, sang some tunes. A good night. The hike and the karaoke made up for the cruise.

Drove down to Te Anau. Stopped briefly in the town to get a map of the surrounding area and then drove up in the Fiordland National Park to do the Key Summit hike, supposed to be one of the most spectacular in the entire pack. Except it was pouring and didn’t stop pouring. So we drove over an hour into the park to sit in the car and wait for it to stop raining. Which it never did. So we drove back down towards Te Anau and by the time we got back down the valley, the weather was gorgeous. So we did a couple small hikes down there, including a nice one out to a lake where we sat and ate lunch, while enjoying the NZ sun. Then back to our hotel and into town for Chinese food. Was actually pretty good, though we both miss Yummy House. Off to a bar for a beer and to watch twenty minutes of incomprehensible rugby. And then walked down to the lake, where we board a catamaran to cross to the other side for our glowworm cave tour.

The limestone caves were amazing as was the river running through them. Makes me very excited for the upcoming blackwater rafting I’m doing. The actual boat ride was pretty cool. You get into this little river boat and drift through absolute darkness, with the only light being the tiny little star like dots of the worms in the ceiling of the cave. Everything is silent except the rushing of the river and everything is dark except the worms. Very much an exercise in sensory deprivation. It doesn’t last that long and the amount of cave you actually go through is pretty small, both of which are sad. But just getting to be down there in those caves was really cool. Tomorrow is a short drive down south to catch our day long cruise through Doubtful Sound, where hopefully we see penguins, dolphins, and seals.

This day will henceforth be known as the day that made Jesse angry. So it started off well enough, cruising down the highway, ahead of schedule, enjoying the glorious New Zealand morning, when just around 9:30am the car gives a horrid lurch and starts pulling horribly. I manage to retain control and drive off onto the shoulder where we discover that the car has blown a tire (or tyre as the Kiwis call them). I’m really not sure how we managed to, given we were driving on a flat even road in a straight line, but whatever. So I have to jack up the car, remove the old tyre, and put on the spare (which is thankfully full sized). Manage to do all of that in about half-an-hour which means we are back on schedule but not late.

By the time we reach the outskirts of Queenstown, we’re doing well enough on time that we stop at a fruit stand outside an orchard. I stopped because the sign said it was a cidery, and I do like apple cider, however the only variety of cider they had was of the alcoholic sort, which really didn’t go to well with the whole driving thing. So we left there and made it into Queenstown around 1. Rafting was scheduled to leave around 1:15. Parking was a nightmare so we found a temporary place near the rafting shop to leave the car and went to check-in so they knew we were there and wouldn’t leave without us. Then we went to find a parking space, which took forever and we ended up having to park blocks and blocks away. We hurried back down to the shop and of course the bus had already left without us. Thankfully it had not got to far, so it swung back around and picked us up.

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I’ll get pictures up when I’m not paying by the minute for internet.

Let me start by saying that driving on the left side of the road is the dumbest fucking thing I have ever heard of. There were definitely moments when I first started driving that I really thought we were going to die. The worst was when right out of the airport on the first day we drove into a mess of construction. The lanes were so narrow and I had so sense of where the left side of the my car was, which resulted in me taking out two traffic cones and part of a tree. I’ve gotten quite a bit better since. But there are other things about driving here that absolutely infuriate me.

Traffic circles. We’re gotten rid of the damn things in New Jersey because they’re so fucking dangerous. Obviously NZ hasn’t gotten the memo because they’ve got them all over the place, including at major intersections in big cities. Why? For the love of god, why?

Street names. They have state highways. They all have numbers, but they also have names. And the names change every ten blocks or so. So you never have any idea what street you’re actually on. When there are actually street signs, they always have the street name, but not the highway number. So it is perfectly possible to drive off the highway and not even realize it till blocks later.

Gas is ridiculously expensive here. I know, it is ridiculously expensive everywhere compared to the US (except South America and the Middle East), but still. It hurts every time I have to fill up the car. And that is often, considering we’ve put over 1000 miles on the car already and we’ve still got plenty more driving to go. Gas may end up costing as much as accommodations before this trip is over.

Nice early start as we had a lot of driving to do. Drove all the way across the South Island east to west and then turned south and journeyed down into Arthur’s Pass National Park. The drive was excellent. It started with an escort of New Zealand falcons which were all out early in the morning hunting small birds and cleaning up road kill from the previous day. Many of them flew incredibly close to the car, but none of them would stop long enough for us to get a picture. As we continued driving into the dawn, the most amazing rainbow I’ve ever seen appeared. It was the sort of rainbow that makes you understand why people think rainbows are so cool. This was a full bow, arching high across the entire sky, as bright and visible as anything. As we entered the park, we went through the high pass above the town and stopped off to see the kea, the New Zealand parrot. These are some big birds; would not want to piss one off. But the ones at the top of pass were just hanging out hoping for some handouts. We then drove down into the town, stopped at the DoC station to get our bearings and then headed off the trail head.

The hike we were doing was the Beasley Valley hike, listed in the guide as being a four hour roundtrip hike up the bed of a river into the foothills of the Arthur Pass mountains. The first part of the hike was really easy, as the entire trail consisted of elevated wooden bridges, seemingly put in place to allow access even in wet conditions. They were cool and all (and must have been an absolute bitch to put in), but they really seemed like cheating to me. The second part of the hike totally mad up for it. The trail took a sharp zig over to the side of the river and the entire rest of the hike consisted of scrambling along over the boulders that lined the side of the river. A lot of hand-over-hand careful climbing, made worse by the sharp spray off the river which made everything slippery. When you got to the top, there was a nice sign that informed you that going any farther was dangerous due to risk of avalanche. We decided to keep going anyway, since fall isn’t considered avalanche season and it wasn’t raining too hard. The rest of the hike was a combination of boulder fields and more riverside scrambling, following cairns up towards the source of the river. We almost made it to the base of the waterfall that fed the river, but getting to it would have required a river crossing and we weren’t eager to try that given how slippery it was and how fast the river was. So we turned around and hiked back down to the car. Total round trip time was just a smidge over 2 hours.

Ess was tired by this point, but I wanted another hike, so I headed off the Devil’s Punchbowl Falls hike. This was a short little hike that headed up from the town of Arthur’s Pass itself. The entire hike up was staircases, which I hate. I can hike uphill forever (at least when I’m in shape) but having to climb stairs just kills me. But I blasted through it (since it was so short) quickly and made it to the falls. Pretty cool waterfall coming down from high off the mountains. Turned around and headed back down. There were two groups of people that I had passed on the way up that I passed again on the way down, and I got odd looks from both of them. Obviously they aren’t used to us speedy American hikers. Left the town to drive onto Christchurch, our evening destination. Highway 73, like most NZ highways is a single lane in each direction, so traffic can have a tendency to bunch up behind slow moving vehicles, which some time pull off and some time don’t (fuckers). But 73 had great lines of sight so it was really easy to pull into the opposite lane and pass the slow people. So we spent a fun couple hours overtaking slow cars and blowing by them. There was one point where there was a line of about 15 cars. We started at the back and slowly moved forward. A bunch of other cars saw what we were doing and started doing it too. So every time there was a break in the opposite traffic, you’d have five cars pulling out and passing the person in front of them. Good times. Made it in to Christchurch, found our hotel, which is located on an adorable little park, and took a shower. About time to go and find some dinner, and then off to bed since we’ve got another hell of a drive tomorrow, down to Queenstown followed by some Whitewater rafting.

Originally, we were supposed to spend the day in Wellington, crash around 7pm, wake up at midnight, catch the 2am ferry to the South Island and make a full day of it over there. We decided this was crazy and moved up our ferry trip to 6:15pm so that we’d get to the South Island tonight and sleep a full night rather than waking up at the uncheery ass-crack of midnight. That only gave us a half day in Wellington to explore. The drive down was relatively uneventful and went quite quickly. The highlight was clearly passing through the little town of Bulls, where the police station was named the Const-a-bull station. I shit you not.

We were going to get lunch at Tsunami, a sushi restaurant recommend to us, but it no longer existed, so we made do with Chow, a Pan-Asian place in the center of downtown Wellington. Excellent food and even better cocktails. We spent the rest of the day wandering the city, acquiring various goods that we needed. I picked up some sunglasses, with a slight gold tint, that make the entire world appear a little happier. Also got a USB cable for transferring pictures off the camera, so as soon as I have an Internet connection and can post all of this, there will actually be pictures to go with it. Also picked up a Vodafone sim card, so I now have New Zealand cell phone service, which should be quite useful. It is really damn expensive, though. NZ pre-pay mobile is around 89 cents (NZ) a minute or 72 cents (US). Still cheaper than using my US plan. It is going to come in handy because most of the activities we have scheduled for the next week require us to call and confirm.

My sister picked up some hand-carved NZ pendants at a little stall in Wellington. The guy selling them was a salty old Kiwi who told us the mythology behind all the different pieces he carved. He then explained to us that there were two sort of New Zealanders, those who lived on the mainland (what they call the South Island) and those who wish they did. He then told us that there were two types of Mainlanders, those who lived on the west coast and those who wished they did. Obviously, he was from the west coast of the Mainland. However, he then told us that his west coast village was virtually abandoned and had been turned into a huge coal mine . . . which made me wonder why anyone would want to be from there.

The ferry ride was pretty cool. The boat was big enough and the crowd small enough that it didn’t feel crowded at all. Got some good food from the restaurant onboard, which was surprisingly reasonably priced. And they had power outlets scattered all over which allowed me to use the laptop during the three hour cruise, which was extra nice. Nothing like playing some GalCiv2. Disaster struck on the South Island. We had booked a room at Picton Lodge on the Internet the day before. We show up and there are no rooms to be had and no record of our booking. Hostelz.com has some explaining to do. The very nice people who ran the Lodge called around and managed to find us an empty dorm room in The Villa, another hostel down the street, which we could have for ourselves. So we didn’t have to end up sleeping in the car, which was a sweet development. Tomorrow we get up all nice and early and drive down to Arthur’s Pass for some more sweet hiking, then off to Christchurch for some sleepies.

We got an early start, rousting out of our hotel around 7. We were supposed to leave around 6:30, but my sister was a wee bit slow in actually getting out of bed. The morning was spent driving south, first down the center of the island and then branching over to the west coast. Around 1, we stopped off in Egmont National Park to take a hike from Lucy’s Gully. The trail was mostly through tropical rain forest terrain, the sort of primeval ferny forests that you expect to see raptors coming through. Alas, there were no raptors and surprisingly little in the way of fauna at all. However the flora was spectacular enough and we got some great views from the top of the ridge looking out over the coastal towns and the ocean. The online guidebook listed this as a 4 hour hike, while the sign in the national park listed it as a 2 hour hike. We managed, despite both of us being a bit out of shape, to power through in about two hours. The last 500 meters of the hike were the strangest. Here we were hiking through this tropical rain forest when you go around a corner, down a hill, and are in the middle of a grove of about 100 massive evergreens. Looked more like something you’d expect to see in Northern California than plunked down in the middle of our tropical adventure. You looked 30 meters to either side and it was right back to the ferny forest. An odd and delightful surprise.

Finished up the day with a drive down into Wanganui. Got some dinner there at an excellent little cafe and then crashed out in a hostel.

Upon arrival we had to trek though immigration, customs, and biological quarantine. During the last step, the NZ officials apparently pegged my sister as a problem and started asking her about her drug habits. Whether or not she had ever used drugs, whether she was bringing them into the country, whether a gang had asked her to carry drugs for them, what she knew about the New Jersey drug scene (!), and finally whether she was carrying a boot knife (!!). They finally ascertained that she was not a dangerous drug dealer and allowed her through. I, meanwhile, breezed right through.

Our car is a silver Mazda 6, not shabby at all. We cruised out of Auckland, heading towards Bethels Beach. This required some tricky navigation on our part, since we ran right into the end of rush hour traffic on the 1. Thankfully we had picked up a NZ road atlas in the airport and were able to navigate our way around the traffic and get outside the city Our goal for the day was to visit Bethels and Piha beach, two sites where they shot a lot of the Xena series (my sister was so excited). Both were amazingly pretty. Explored a cave and a rocky point with a blowhole out at Bethels and climbed up Lion’s Rock at Piha, an ancient hill sacred to the Maori. We also encountered a very friendly dog the size of a small pony at Bethels that decided it wanted to come play with us rather than follow its owner. She was forced to drag it away.

Came back to Auckland, dumped our stuff at the hotel, and headed up to Newmarket to get some lunch. Grabbed some food and some beers at The Mustang Cafe (shades of Paris) and then headed back the hotel to crash. Dinner is a possibility but not a necessity at this point. Been taking pictures but none of the USB cables I brought fit the camera’s port and I don’t have a SD reader for the laptop, so I can’t upload anything yet. I’ll rectify the situation and start posting pictures shortly. Tomorrow we drive south and hike in on the national parks. We were originally planning to drive down the coast and hike in Egmont and we may still, but we’re intrigued by Tongariro, which is a volcanic national park which they used as Mordor and Mount Doom in Lord of the Rings. The only drawback is that it is inland, so we miss all the coastal views we’d otherwise get. So we’re debating the two. Either way, we’ll be staying in Wanganui tomorrow night.

Twelve hour flight from LA to New Zealand and it was surprisingly not that bad. I have to say, the addition of Video-On-Demand service to economy class international travel makes the entire thing an incredibly bearable experience. I would be woefully behind on my 2007 movies if it wasn’t for my long-haul international jaunts. The food, however, was pretty damn poor. I went with the Asian Vegetarian option, since my experience with American and British carriers is that is the most reliable meatless option. Obviously a mistake on a Kiwi airline. Dinner was some sort of tasteless vegetable curry. I think it was supposed to be Indian, but it was impossible to be sure, and it came with a pineapple and cucumber salad on the side. The Pinot Noir was excellent and definitely helped with the whole sleeping on the plane thing. I think I managed somewhere around eight hours of sleep, though it was off-and-on. Definitely better than my sister managed as the wails of the child behind us kept her up.

I don’t know what was wrong with the kid’s mother, but she just ignored him for the ten or so hours he spent alternatively crying and giggling gleefully while kicking the seats. I would have said something, because it was just incredibly rude to everyone around them in the plane, but I hate criticizing other people’s children. Nothing makes people more defensive and violent than implying they’ve screwed up raising their children. Which she obviously had, because the kid’s behavior was terrible, though I refrained from comment because I managed to sleep through the worst of it. But I digress.

Breakfast rolls around and Air New Zealand is right back with the winning food options. My sister had ordered the seafood meal option and she basically got a slab of grilled fish for breakfast. I received an almost enjoyable vegetable lo mein. Neither of these would be considered a typical breakfast food and usually when you request special meals they serve you a breakfast type meal that coincides with your special request. Not so much here. But besides the food and the manic depressive child behind us, it was a good flight. Even arrived early.