Our Travel Blog

Today was one of those days. Again it was bright and sunny this morning, and ideal day to go up the gondola to get a great view of the town and the lake. The gondola was meant to open at 9AM, but when we left the room at 9:15, not only was the gondola not moving, there were no cars on it. We drove over to it anyway, only to be greeted by one of the staff who explained there was some unscheduled maintenance required, but it should be working again mid-afternoon. Now to plan B.

We headed off to Arrowtown, another old mining gold mining town. This one was a little different to previous ones insomuch that that a number of the old miners cottages had been preserved, and an old Chinese settlement had been discovered and partially restored. The Chinese came over in the late 1800’s to mine for gold but were never fully accepted by the locals and Europeans so they set up their own area. As you can see their accommodations were pretty small.

Chinese Village House

We wandered around the town for a bit until a sign for “obscenely delicious sticky buns” caught our eye. With a description like that we just had to try them. The description was accurate!

Phone Box

No real reason for the picture of the phone box, other than it was different!

We went back to the motel for a late lunch, on the way back we drove by the launch point for yesterdays flight, it is just on the snow line, to the right of centre.

View From the Passenger Seat

After lunch we again checked on the gondola situation; it was still dead. Next check was on the Milford Sound road, it was still closed but scheduled to open tomorrow, so we went ahead and booked a boat tour there for Friday.

Lyn had some laundry to do so we spent a lazy afternoon hanging around the motel. Later on we headed out to the supermarket. All the motels we have stayed at have had cooking facilities with pot and pans etc. and we really haven’t put them to use. We bought the ingredients to make a stir fry and headed back. Queenstown is hard to describe, physically it is very up and down, and for the area it is a large town, probably the largest we have seen since the North Island. As far as we could tell 90% of the stores are related to the “adventure” industry, skydiving, bungee jumping, swings, paragliding, hang gliding, boating etc. There were only 2 supermarkets and on pharmacy that we could see. I guess most of the population is transient.

Supper time. Lyn went to get out the frying pan; no frying pan, in fact no saucepans or other essentials. The final clue was that there was not even a hotplate to cook on! We had just assumed that the facilities were there…. Never assume!

Question time. What is this bird?

Bird

We woke to another sunny and clear day. After breakfast we headed off to a place called Puzzling World. This was a building that had a number of optical illusions, sloping rooms, snooker balls that roll uphill etc. It was pretty interesting and mind challenging. Outside was a 3D maze, the object being to go through the maze and climb each of the four towers in the corners. We managed to get to more than 1 and less than 4 of the towers before frustration set in. Must admit it was an excellently planned maze!

The Maze

After the maze we headed off to a quilt store where Lyn found a quilt kit that depicted NZ themes in its pattern. Now my navigator is happy!

Yesterday we crossed part of the Southern Alps on the lowest of the trans-Alpine crossings routes, today we crossed another part of the Alps on the highest of the routes, climbing up NZ’s highest paved road to a height of 1083 metres, before dropping down into Queenstown.

View From the Passenger Seat

Once settled into the hotel I decided to try and change some plans I made yesterday. I had originally planned to try and go hang-gliding tomorrow, but the forecast was a bit iffy so I called the company and switched the flight to this afternoon. We went into town and met up with the pilot who drove us up to the ski fields and the launch point. We spent a fair bit of time there just waiting as the wind was just on the limits for launching.

After 45 minutes or so it was declared safe to fly. I was “poured” into a flight suit and harness while the pilot “built” the hang-glider.

Some Assembly Required

Once the glider was assembled it was time for a briefing, then we moved to the launch point. After a short run we were flying.

View from Launch Point

It Flys

Once airborne we had about a 12 minute flight down to the landing zone. It was a great experience gliding gently above the trees,  I even got to fly it for a short  while. One tip though, don’t ask the pilot questions like “can this recover safely from a stall?” The answer, as demonstrated 3 times, is yes!

We finished off the day with a pub meal in one of the downtown pubs. Lyn got her lamb fix and I re-acquainted my self with beef wellington.

Time to relax now

A little cloudier first thing this morning but it was dry. We had a long drive ahead of with our final destination being Wanaka in the Southern Alps. The first (and only) planned stop today was at the Fox Glacier, this one was easier to get closer to than the Franz Josef one yesterday.

Fox Glacier

The rest of the day was going to be driving, driving, driving as we had about 220km to go to destination through mostly uninhabited areas , signs like no gas station for the next 109km reinforced this. In fact part of the road that we were taking was not built until 1965, and didn’t have a hard surface until 1995.

What we weren’t prepared for, yet again, was the stunning scenery. Unfortunately it is impossible for me to describe the scenery and do it justice. Those who have been here will know what I mean; those that haven’t been here should try to get here some time!

There were waterfalls all along the route, some in the distance others at the roads edge, some just trickles others over 100ft high

Waterfall

For a lot of the journey we followed the Haast River, in places it was a very milky in colour, in others it was a brilliant blue.

About half way along the route we saw a sign for The Blue Pools, so we pulled off and set off along the track for a 30 minute stroll to the pools. The good news was that it was downhill, the bad news was that we had to get back. Again, the path was well maintained and easy to follow, there were two bridges along the way, but nowhere near the length of the swing bridge we went on a few days ago. The journey was worth it.

The Blue Pool

Back on the road again, we saw a sign “Rock fall, expect delays”, but we saw nothing….. for 20kms, then we ran into a line of stationary traffic. This jam was huge by NZ standards; there must have been at least 8 vehicles in front of us.

Rock Slide

The crews had cleared one lane, but there was a lot of work to do on the other. We are a bit concerned about another rock fall. Currently Milford Sound has been cut off by a large rock fall, this is one of the major tourist areas for scenery. They hope to have it open by Wednesday; we plan to be there Friday. Let’s hope it gets opened up on time.

We now started to climb slowly as we got into the Southern Alps, the road we were on was the lowest of the trans-alpine routes, climbing only to around 1700 feet. Tomorrow we plan to take a higher route on our way to Queenstown.

View From the Passenger Seat

We woke up this morning to calm winds and blue skies. After breakfast we headed back down to the beach where we watched the waves crashing in. Although the sea was still pretty rough, the scenery had changed completely from 24 hours ago. Visibility was great, and the mountains all had a fresh coating of bright white snow on them.

Snow Capped Southern Alps

We’ve finally got into the mindset that we don’t have to travel 8+ hours a day, todays trip is only about 120kms going down the coast to Franz Joseph. The visibility remained clear and we had a good view of snow capped mountains for most of the trip. About halfway down we pulled off onto a dead end road that took us down to a beach. The beach was full of smooth rounded stones which would be great for landscaping in the back yard, unfortunately even with an allowance of 64Kgs each, I don’t think we could bring enough back. Also on the beach were small pieces of what appeared to be jade, we collected some and will bring it back in the hope that we can try and polish it up.

Beach Stones

Back on the main road we past another sign that made Lyn sit up and take notice

Kiwi

Seems like the only way we are going to see some of these beasts is on road signs.

Again we were treated to great scenery

View From the Passenger Seat

We arrived in Franz Joseph in the early afternoon and checked into the motel. We then headed out to the areas main attraction, the glacier. It was billed as a simple 20 minute walk to the viewpoint, Lyn begs to differ. According to her simple walks do not go up steep hills and around hairpin bends.

Franz Joseph Glacier

Today was a day of deep meditative reconciliation. Well actually today was a day for doing almost nothing as the weather was not at its best. We had torrential rain and gale force winds all night and well into the afternoon.

We headed down to the beach to see how high the waves were with the strong winds, there were some pretty impressive breakers coming in, definitely the sea was not as inviting as it was a week or so ago.

Next we headed off to the National Kiwi Centre as they have a couple of kiwi birds there;  you normally can’t see them in the wild as they are both shy and nocturnal. Unfortunately we couldn’t see then in the centre either, they were well hidden (assuming they were there in the first place!) So all we saw at the kiwi centre were eels and whitebait, not too impressed!

Next stop was the grocery store to restock on supplies, also a little comfort food to go with afternoon coffee given that it was a miserable day!!

The wind and rain finally stopped around 5PM so we walked across the road to the beach for some exercise. The beach is a designated penguin breeding colony, but again we had no luck seeing any of the elusive creatures; however Lyn did find a lump of Jade on the beach.

Tomorrow we hope to see the glaciers, but given our luck today the thing may have melted by the time we get there.

I am finally up to date with the blog, hopefully I can keep it this way. I have just discovered one entry that didn’t get published. If you scroll down the page there is a “new” entry form the Cook Islands entitled “Driving Test”

We left Westport after a leisurely breakfast and a quick trip to the beach. The weather was cool, around 13C with a high overcast. The only plan we had to day was to visit Punakaiki and the pancake rocks. The trip was once again spectacular; the majority of the trip was along the coast road with the Tasman Sea on the right side. Todays trip was over much flatter terrain, and as usual we stopped at a number of lookouts.

Lyn got very excited when we saw the following sign post

Penguin Crossing

Unfortunately the only penguin we saw was the one on the sign

We reached the pancake rocks and headed out to the walkway. The majority of sites we have been to have well maintained walking paths making for an easy stroll. Again a picture, or two, is worth a thousand words.

Pancake Rocks 1

Pancake Rocks 2

Pancake Rocks 3

Even today scientists are not sure what causes the layering of the rocks.

We carried on to the south heading towards Hokitika, there are many single track river bridges all over New Zealand and you get used to them fairly quickly, but today we came upon a new twist to the single track bridge. Not only did it carry cars, there was an active railway track on the bridge sharing the space with the cars. Luckily there were no trains around when we were there. About 5 miles down the road we came across the first of two roundabouts (traffic circles) with the railway line passing right through the centre of the roundabout.

We found the motel in the town of Hokitika, about a block from the beach. Just before reaching the town the heavens opened and it looks like the rain and high winds are going to be with us for a day or so. The town seems to be the centre for producing jade and gold jewellery from locally mined materials.

Starting with this post I have reduced the quality of the pictures to make the uploads smaller. The higher quality ones were taking forever to upload and sucking up all the bandwidth. Let me know if they are OK, in fact let me know if you are reading this!!!

Again we woke up to a clear morning with very few clouds. After breakfast we started out from Nelson which is on the Central North coast in a SW direction to Westport on the West coast. This trip was a lot straighter than yesterdays, but we still had a few hills to climb. The hills changed slightly, up until now the hills / mountains had been almost entirely tree covered, now many were devoid of trees and there was just rock at the top.

As in previous days, there were many lookouts along the route. Some of these had 10-15 minute walks from a parking lot to the lookout, so we still got our daily exercise (and then some!).

Next stop was a swing (suspension) bridge across the Buller Gorge. This bridge makes the Capalino (spelling) Bridge near Vancouver look pretty tame. I think a picture is worth a thousand words here.

On the Swing Bridge

Swing Bridge

The bridge is about 75ft above the river, in the office there were pictures of the same bridge during the great flood of 2010, when there was only about 10ft between the bridge and the water. There was also a walking loop around the area, which was an old gold mining area. About 130 years ago there was a lot of gold mining in the area and in fact it was one of the key reasons behind the population of NZ by Europeans.

Following on from our death defying traverse of the bridge (twice, as we had to get back!) we continued on to Westport, our destination for the night. Like other towns, this one had a High Street, which housed most of the towns stores, again pretty much all family owned businesses. The street looked very much like I remember High Streets in the ‘60s.

When we got to the hotel, we really thought we had been transported back 50 years, the furniture and the room with its brass fittings and a FUSE panel with ceramic fuses all added to the illusion. Once we had settled in and transported ourselves back to the present we headed out in search of a local seal colony. When we got there we were disappointed as we could only see one seal. After watching for a few minutes we discovered more and more seals hidden among the rocks.

Babys at Play

Mean Old Parent

A beautiful start to the day with blue skies and good visibility. After breakfast we headed out to find the northern most part of the South Island, a place called Cape Farewell on Farewell spit. We headed out of Nelson  to the South West then turned North West following the coast. Our first planned stop was the airport at Moteuka as I had some crazy idea about hang gliding. I had two options, a micro light which is a small cockpit for two suspended below a hang glider and powered by a small engine, or the pure hang glider which is launched by strapping the hang glider on (with a qualified pilot as well) and leaping off the edge of a cliff. The second seemed much safer as there was no engine to fail!! Anyway, when we got to the airfield it was still rather cool, so I gave the idea a miss, but all things being equal I will be leaping off a cliff before leaving here.

We continued North West and yet again the scenery was stunning, even more so today due to the excellent visibility. We started climbing up the Takaka hill which had numerous scenic lookouts, and the scenery to justify them. One of the look outs was about a 15 minute walk off the road, so at least we got a little exercise.

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Typical View

The hill peaked at around 2500 feet, the drive was full of hairpin turns yet again, I think Lyns hand is frozen to the shape of the grab handle in the car. Once safely down the other side of the hill we stopped in the town of Takaka to look around the local stores. So far we haven’t come across any large store chains with the exception of a couple of food store chains and McDonalds and KFC! All the stores seem to be family owned and hardware stores sell hardware, not food and clothes, what a concept!!

Next stop was some fresh water springs. Again, we got some exercise as it was about a 30 minute boardwalk trip to the springs. These springs pump water up to the surface at the rate of 14,000 litres per/second or 40 bathtubs full/second or 425,000,000 gallons per day! The water is crystal clear, evidently the only purer water in the world lies under the Ross Ice Field in Antarctica.

Clear Spring Water

Next stop was the Farewell Spit, in reality this was a non event as there was nothing to see, as to get to the end of the spit was a 5 hour walk!

On the way back we went a little faster as it was the same route, and we had seen the scenery on the way up, so it was time to enjoy some driving. The local drivers are very polite and many will pull over to let you pass if they are travelling slower on the hills, the same applies to truck drivers; very impressive.

Just a quick note, the blog is running a few days behind “real time”, as internet is not as easily accessible as I had hoped. The blog is being written each night, and is uploaded when I can get the WiFi going.

No rush to get moving this morning. We have found that motels invariably have kitchenettes in them, so in the interest of keeping additional inches off the waste line by forgoing a cooked breakfast every morning and keeping the $$ flow under control (NZ isn’t quite as bad as the Cooks, but it is still more expensive than Canada) we just make some toast and coffee. After breakfast we headed out for a walk through the marina and along the edge of the inlet. There was a large cruise ship in port, which may explain why the Saturday market was open on Tuesday! We didn’t escape unscathed as Lyn found something to buy.

Back at the hotel we packed up and checked out. We liked it so much we have booked our last night in the South Island there before we go back on the ferry at the end of the month. We took the scenic route out of Picton to Nelson. Even though there were rain showers the scenery was stunning, it was like the Scottish Highlands on steroids. The roads were fun to drive, not much traffic and numerous hairpin bends. We stopped in the town of Havelock for a coffee; unfortunately it was at a bakery so the breakfast theory bit the dust. It seems you can’t get a drip coffee a la Timmies over here, they all come from those hissing frothing machines.

I am having one major problem with the car, the indicator and wiper stalks are on the opposite side of the steering wheel compared to Canadian vehicles. I can’t count the number of times I have indicated at turns and roundabouts and the wipers came on instead of the flashers. For some reason the locals don’t understand the concept of indicating with wipers, but they are too polite to complain.

After Havelock we went looking for a 3.2km zip-line ride, but it wasn’t there. Not sure what happened to it, but we finished up at a place called Cable Bay, at the end of an 8km ¾ track lane, the other  1¼  tracks appeared to have succumbed to wash outs. The place was given its name as it was the point at which the first undersea communications cable came ashore from Australia in 1896.

We carried on to Nelson and booked into our motel for two nights, we made some lunch and then went off to the Founders Park. This is an area that has a collection of old buildings that have been donated and transported to, and a small working village has been created similar to Upper Canada Village.

Changing tack slightly, back in the 50’s and 60’s in the UK, there used to an air ferry service from Lydd to France using Bristol Freighter aircraft. I thought all these aircraft had long since been destroyed, since we have been here we have seen 3 of them, admittedly not in flying condition, but still recognisable.

After the village we headed into the town of Nelson to scout out a dinner venue, unfortunately we discovered another quilt store; suffice it to say Lyn has yet another project.

Back to the hotel, Lyn headed off to the laundry, and I sat and watched the planes! We are about 1km from the end of the runway and 200m metres off the centreline, bliss!!

Dinner tonight was a very classy affair, takeout pizza and Gin and Tonic drunk out of coffee mugs.

Really must try to get the sleeping under control, for the last week 9PM bed seems to have become the norm, but wake up time hasn’t got correspondingly earlier. Must be all the fresh air! We hit the road about 9:00AM after breakfast and headed South towards Wellington and the InterIslander Ferry. The trip was mostly down hill (physically) and there were more populated areas than we saw yesterday. Also the sheep finally took over as the most populous beast on the island. Again it was mostly two lane roads with passing places, but the roads were not busy and 90-100k was an easy drive. We stopped after a couple of hours to take a walk along Otaki beach to get some fresh air and exercise. The water looked grey, cold and uninviting.  We headed into Wellington (now renamed the Middle of Middle Earth until the end of October in celebration of the city being chosen to host the world premiere of The Hobbit this month). We are now crossing the Cook Straight and will be in Picton in about 3 hours.

InterIslander Ferry

We arrived in Picton about 25 minutes late. For some reason the ferry came into Wellington, turned around to reverse back to the boarding ramp and then went forward again and did a tour of the harbour. Must have been a good reason, but we never did find out what it was. We checked into the motel, and got a fantastic room overlooking the marina. Once settled in we headed out to the local pub “The Toot ‘n Whistle” for a pint and some supper. This is the last of the “travel to get there days” tomorrow the explorations should start, although the forecast 90mm of rain may dampen our enthusiasm.