Final Pictures

Even the dogs are looking forward in New Zealand.

That's really what the world needs now.

The Takahē, thought to be extinct until rediscovered in 1948, is the largest member of the rail family.

Amazing! And the view's pretty good too.

Another beautiful day in paradise.

One last picture, but it could have been of a lake surrounded by mountains or a beach or the sheep or cows
or the flowers or a bay filled with sailboats or a river gorge or a fiord or a glacier or one of our hosts.
It was all wonderful.

Send us an email if you got to the end of this vacation with us. As one of the guidebooks at one of the houses said, "It's like New Zealand invented going on holiday."

On To Christchurch

We left our house in Wakefield and headed back south. It was 380 km which is something like going from home to Connecticut, so it was going to be another real driving day.  First we backtracked for about 100 km and then we started across the dry middle of the island.  Still scenic, with mountains to cross and rivers to admire, but it got further and further from the ferns and grassy fields -- the signs that warn about fire danger pointed to the orange/red right side of the circle instead of the blue/green side we had been seeing for most of the trip.

For the first and last time, we went to a small town bakery with pies and breads that were hot, just out of the oven. We had our last picnic in a park (and we were not alone, all the picnic tables were occupied) and did a heroic job of finishing off most of our food. It was a feast.

Got to our last Airbnb house, in an upscale suburb with lots of nice landscaping and clipped lawns. Our host was there to greet us at 2:00 and she and I had a long chat about everything while Jon recovered from all that driving. This nice lady is recovering from recent brain surgery (tumor removed, 36 staples in her head) but she is so prosaic about it. She says you could just as easily get hit by a bus.  We had tea and talked about the various places we have traveled, recently and in the past.  One of the perks of staying at real people’s houses is sometimes you actually talk to the real people. She had a lot to say about Trump -- she cannot understand how so many people are behind him. No kidding. She clearly keeps up with the news, probably because she is stuck at home recuperating.

Built in 1911.

A redwood, planted many years ago.

Jon and I went downtown and poked around. Went to the Botanical Gardens (and finally got to read a sign about that blue flower, Agapanthus, that is everywhere -- it is, of course, an invasive and a bit of  weed, but at least it is beautiful) and to the Canterbury Museum right next door and then walked a few blocks to see the Christchurch Cathedral that is still in its post-earthquake crumpled state. Decided to eat out in the downtown main shopping/tourist area because we were in a big city.  There are loads of Chinese, Japanese, Malaysian tourists (not big campers, we guess, more interested in traveling by tour bus) here. We had Malaysian food for the second time.

The aforementioned beautiful, invasive flower, agapanthus.

This one is for Lenny. He would have to say but my guess is .... an earthquake.

We are going to have to brace ourselves for 24 hours of travel, going from here to Auckland to Los Angeles to Dallas to Little Rock.  The whole thing will happen on the same day as we fly backwards in time. We won’t get January 12 back but we will get a double dose of January 23. It will be so disorienting that it just won’t matter. We will land in winter, in a time zone that is 17 hours different from this one, and all the faucets will have the hot water on the left.

Final round of general observations:

• Chullybun  (chilly bin:  cooler)
• Fush and chups
• They have small local bakeries with fresh goods baked every day.
• They have tea rooms. So civilized.
• There are benches and chairs everywhere, in museums, on the streets, in the airports. So civilized.
• Several of the museums we visited were free.
• There is a radio station here that satisfies Jon mightily:  music from the 50s,60s,70s
• The skate parks are used by young people on scooters instead of skateboards.
• There was a mail delivery truck that was charging toward us on our left, delivering mail, even though there was not enough room for both of us.  Not that civilized.
• The parking at the beaches was free and easy.
• There are so many ways to have a camper van, and so many models of Toyota that we don’t have in the US.
• For some reason, there are remarkable numbers of beautifully maintained classic American cars on the road.
• You pump your gas first and then you pay.
• This is a country that likes to vacation outside. There are excellent trails all over the island, places to camp with vans, huts to hike to that have mattresses and running water.
• We drove about 3000 km in 10 days. On the left side of the road.

A Summer Vacation Day, With Less Driving

We thought we would spend the day exploring the national park up in this corner of the island (Abel Tasman) and we headed that way.  We found ourselves unexpectedly in another intensively cultivated area, with vast vineyards and orchards.  Super tidy, many fields covered with netting, lots of sturdy structures holding up the apples and peaches and hops and grapes.  Drove past equipment dealerships -- the tractors are huge here, as we may have mentioned before -- and irrigation stores and later in the day we passed the biggest fruit processing place we have ever seen (judging by the gigantic stacks of empty bulk bins).

This is a crop we understand, beans.

Some kind of tree fruit, like apples, under a 20 ft cover.

Grapes as far as the eye can see.

This represents maybe 5% of the bulk bins we saw at this packing plant.

Our first stop, on the way to the park, was a sandy beach in a protected bay with lots of people swimming, kayaking, going out in boats, playing in the sand. Jon had been thinking of going out in a kayak but he decided he didn't want to. I decided I really wanted to get in the water, even if it was cold. It was that gorgeous deep blue and quite calm.  I went in twice and it was delicious.

Hana exulting.

Many kinds of water craft, from cabin cruisers to paddle boards.

Then we headed off toward the park, winding up a very narrow and tightly curving road (tighter than the last few days), eventually coming to another beach that was much, much wider -- it was a long walk to the water. People were digging for something like clams, but they were too far away to see clearly.  There were tractors parked on the sand because that is how they pulled boat trailers to the water.  Too risky for trucks.  We had lunch at a picnic table and it was so windy that I had honey sprayed all over my dress by the time we were done. (We have been trying to eat through our various purchases all week, and we bought a jar of local honey that is still not finished, but dribbling it all over myself did put a dent in it.)

On the way off across the tidal flats to drop off the kayakers.

They use a wide variety of tractors to tow the boats to the water's edge.

At low tide the boats are just stranded on the tidal flats. Tide height is around 3 meters.

Then we finally headed off to the park but found ourselves thwarted by another one of those stoplights that manage the single lane roads when there are washouts and rock slides. This one said 6 - 12 minutes. Oh, never mind. We turned around and looked for other entertainment.  Everything is interesting and we have spent several days in national parks.  We headed for Nelson, on the other side of the bay.  In the guidebooks they don't say much about Nelson, but it is a real city. We parked in a downtown parking lot and went to a knitting store and then out for some tea.  It is a real pleasure to have tea the way I like it, on real dishes with real tea and cream and sugar. So civilized.

On our way back out of town we came across yet another wide and gorgeous beach, with lots of summer revelers. The sand could have been used in an hourglass, it was so fine.  We stopped to look and then decided we may not have another chance at a beach of this magnificence for many more years. It was fun to be in a place where there was a family playing cricket and there were little kids digging in the sand (wearing the new style of swim suits, the kind with long sleeves and shorts to keep the sun off) and pretty young people soaking up the sun.  So we put on our suits and went in the water.  Warmer than the earlier beach and shallower.  SO nice.

First we just put our toes in, but it was too wonderful not to put on our bathing suits.
Note the small figures at the top who are fully out of the water on a sandbar at low tide.

We are in a commonwealth country so we play cricket on the beach.

Then a little ice cream snack and time to go back home. It was about 5:30 by now and the day had turned out to be a beach day by accident.  Decided we didn't actually want to eat in a restaurant so we went shopping again (the menu started with the onion we have to eat) and got some vegetables and chicken with some sort of marinade, to be grilled.

I forgot to say that last night we finally, finally got to see a sky full of stars.  No clouds, no moon yet and no houses with lights.  Jon used his phone to de-code what we were seeing in this hemisphere. We found the Southern Cross and actually saw the Milky Way and even saw a few shooting stars.  This was after nights of too much light (the sun continues to have an impact until almost 11 PM, on the edges) or too many clouds, so Jon was very happy.

Our host's sheep, everyone has a few.

The next door neighbor's sheep, everyone has a few.

Pushing on Up the Coast

Our host fed us a hot breakfast of eggs and bacon, at the leisurely hour of 8:30 (we chose it).  We talked about her life these days, having moved to the South Island with her husband just a year and a half ago. Of course you can't ask a person about their origins/parents but we wonder about her ancestry because she looks like someone of Polynesian descent.  She had observations about everything we were curious about -- perfectly happy to chat for as long as we wanted.  She had a part time job milking cows but she is going to look for another one because that operation doesn't follow the rules. Whatever that might mean.  She says she has noticed that the North Island dairies are more progressive/efficient because they milk using the rotary method (we are guessing this means the cows get onto some kind of slowly turning table, get hooked up and milked and walk off, so there is no pause) but down here they are still doing it the old way.  All the milk is contracted to a local processor that exports most of it. Buying milk in NZ is expensive, even though it comes from nearby.  She had a friend visiting from Christchurch who lived in this very house for 20 years and they gave us advice on what to see and do in our travels today.

Talking about the hunting business, she says that people are interested in bow hunting more now, but she calls them "bow wounders" because it is really hard to hunt with a bow.  It is important to get a very good shot, and if you only wound the animal, then you have to track it until you find it and shoot it anyway.

She confirmed that there are no predators on this island (except stoats and ferrets) so the tahr and deer and chamois goats have only humans to fear.

We headed back up the coast some more, toward Hokitaka (the location of the big book I have been reading, The Luminaries). It was exciting to be in the exact region where this piece of historical fiction is focused.  We went to the Hokitaka Gorge, along with lots of other friendly tourists.

Hana's favorite kind of road -- completely overhung with vegetation.

The suspension bridge over the gorge.

The kind of bridge we should build to get to the creek house.

Again, the color of the water from glacial run-off.

Next stop a few hours later was in the Paparoa National Park to see the Pancake Rocks -- amazing limestone formations on the coast.  Almost equally amazing was how artfully they had made these views accessible, by making a winding all weather trail with lookouts all along the way. It was sunny and hot but luckily the whole walk was only about 20 minutes long.

The striations in the rock they call "pancake."

Then we had our daily picnic before pushing on up the coast. We were in the national park all day, or if we weren't we in some some other nature reserve. Pristine, uninhabited, vast. Rain forests, beaches with no one on them, steep mountains, rivers running with that bright blue water. It was a long day of going in and out of those deep valleys again, curving back and forth, facing down huge trucks (this is the only road in the region) on those one lane bridges. We finally decoded their absolutely crystal clear signage about who has the right of way.   At least today the navigation system didn't tell us repeatedly to make a U-turn whenever we made all those hairpin turns. I wonder if that thing can learn.

There are at least three requirements to make a town: a golf course, a helicopter rental service to see the fiords or glaciers, and a sign showing where to put the "stock effluent." The houses are all modest, mostly one story, no basements (the soil only goes down one foot before you hit rock), the landscaping reflects a weather pattern that is nice to perennials (big blooming plants), and there is nothing excessive or flashy. It is nothing like the US, actually.  Or we haven't seen where the rich people live, if there are rich people. Some regular houses are made of corrugated metal. Everyone has lots of big windows.

We ended up in yet another elegantly furnished B&B -- this time we have an entire house to ourselves so Jon is using the washing machine. He grilled some sausages outside and we ate on the little back deck. We thought we bought salsa to eat with our chips but it turned out to be much more like the tomato sauce that goes on currywurst, so we changed our menu from Mexican to German in an instant.

A little change of pace, no sheep, just cows ...

... and farmed deer.

A weka, just to see if Mark is reading the entire blog.

West Coast Road Trip

We packed up, fed the sheep a few more handfuls of sheep nuts (looks just like regular old pellets for farm animals), cleaned the kitchen and ate as much of the fruit compote as we could manage.  Rolled out at 8 AM and headed for Queenstown.  We were taking Alissa to the airport so she could start the long trip home, with a stopover in Sydney.  Kissed her goodbye and lost our easy navigation, our cheerful fellow traveler, our best ideas person.
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Detour ... Ever since our children have been old enough to travel, they have traveled a lot.  They have been to many more places than Jon and I have ever been, and we are twice as old. Each of them did a semester abroad but they have also taken lengthy trips, sometimes for months at a time. Alissa was last in New Zealand six years ago when she took a trip around the globe -- as her "last" hurrah before medical school.  Since then, she has been to Australia five times, Guatemala twice, multiple major cities in Europe, Israel, Hong Kong, Singapore, Hawaii.  Anyway, the point of this detour in the story is that we have had the opportunity to travel with each of them and they always take care of us wherever we go because they are so adept at using the technology in their pocket, they aren't afraid to ask questions, and they are basically unflappable. Plus they adapt to our style of travel, which is slower and more comfortable -- no hostels, no overnight trains.  They get to spend more money (ours) when they are with us but they are still very frugal. We all buy food at supermarkets and have picnics, we choose housing that is not the most expensive but is the most interesting.  In recent years, we have traveled with Rebecca more than the others -- and we haven't traveled with Alissa since 2010 in England.
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We didn't stop in Queenstown but we could see it from a distance, perched along the base of the mountains on the edge of a gorgeous big lake. It was 10:00 in the morning and we wanted to keep moving.  We did stop to take pictures many times, and we went to a beach next to a lake with the clearest, most alluring water (kind of cold, stones on the bottom, not sand). We had lunch at a picnic table that was so tall my feet couldn't touch the ground.

The road north hugged some giant lakes, went through rain forests, crossed valleys, became one of those switchback coastal roads overlooking the Pacific Ocean, went back inland, and crossed dozens of one lane bridges. Waterfalls everywhere. The thing is, the landscape changes constantly. Either we are in the mountains or we are in a wide valley or we are on the coast or we are amongst the sheep. It does not stay the same. It feels like Hawaii quite often, with almost no people.  There is NO trash on the road, not one tiny piece. We also encountered at least three of those traffic lights that stops one direction for 5 or 10 minutes because the road has washed out or there has been a rockslide.  This is the super rainy side of the island.  Fox Glacier is the rainiest -- it gets 6 meters of rain a year.  People collect rainwater off the roof and that is a dependable source of water year round. It has not rained a drop since we arrived a week ago.

We stopped for an early dinner in a town that is there because of its glacier (Franz Josef) and we went to a restaurant and waited forever to be served because the waiter forgot to put in our order. We wrote postcards and got caught up on our email while we waited. I had a lamb burger which did not taste as yummy as I had imagined. It was a lot like venison, kind of dry. Jon had a more successful bowl of larb gai with a pint of hard cider.  Jon did some research on his phone and decided it was totally fine not to leave a tip, so he didn't. Otherwise he would have had to figure out how much to leave, and that seemed way too complicated. Besides, they forgot to feed us for a really long time.

Now we are in a house in one of those flat valley areas, with mountains on the near horizon inland and the ocean about 4 km to the west.  This host has a pet calf, a baby deer, a ram and two dogs.  Her husband is a professional guide for hunters, and the house is full of hunter evidence.  She is friendly and cheerful and welcoming. This is the first house we have been in that looks lived in, which is kind of a relief.

Oh, look at that, sheep.

Food for the sheep in the winter.

Mountain Lupin, an invasive, but it brightens up the roadways.

Hana sees a lake like this and just wants to jump in. But the water temperature is a disincentive.

Looking back after climbing out of Queenstown.

This time Jon's showing off the picnic table.

 

On the most beautiful day at the height of summer, this constitutes a crowded beach.

Another lake, another mountain.

The West Coast, a UNESCO World Heritage Area.

Beside our B&B a mountain looms.