New Zealand - South Island

From the South Island port town of Picton, we collected another hire car & the 3 of us headed off to the town of Nelson, our first destination on our way down the west coast of the South Island. When we were the last time for Darren & Nic’s wedding we took the route down the east coast of the South Island, so we thought we would see the other side of the country this time.

Nelson is the main access town to the Abel Tasman National Park - a coastal National Park of white sand beaches, crystal clear turquoise waters & rugged island outcrops - an area popular for multi day sea kayak safaris, coastal walks & sea lion spotting boat trips. We were finding New Zealand to be pretty expensive (particularly coming from South America) - & even for the most basic activity the prices always seemed to start at $60, very quickly rising to several hundred dollars. As a result we just had a couple of days around the Abel Tasman area doing the things on offer that were free, before moving on out to work our way along the west coast.

Thankfully on the first day of driving it was a beautifully sunny, allowing us to appreciate the natural beauty of the area. With the Southern Alps mountain range rising up on our left & the Pacific Ocean on our right, driving through largely unspoilt wilderness we stumbled on a sign for an old gold mine along the way. Intrigued, we pulled in to have a look around. The place was owned by an old eccentric engineer, who had hand made the majority of the contraptions in the mine to extract the gold with - though these days his somewhat alcoholic son was ’looking after’ the place. The son welcomed us in, greeted us with a beer each, gave us a tub of raw meat & sent us off through the overgrown rain forest mine to feed the huge eels living in one of the creeks. Despite the fact that the place looks like it hasn’t been used since the 1800’s, his father still intermittently goes out & attempts to find gold in them there hills - apparently once you get gold fever, you’ll never get rid of it. He showed us through some old newspaper clipping from the early 1900’s when the whole area was under going something of a gold rush, & the nearby town (the name of which escapes us…) was the epicentre, with around 100,000 people living there. These days, the gold rush has well & truly got up & rushed elsewhere, & the town is now home to only around 50 people, though the locals there still appear to live life with that outlaw frontier spirit. Our new little gold digging friend - clearly a man that enjoyed a good time, recommended a little place tucked away a couple of miles down the road that acted as the local night club & pizza joint. We turned up to find a barn, half of which had a few tables & chairs in, the other half was decked out with a make shift bar, mirror ball & glitter wall paper - this being the ‘nightclub’. We had apparently missed the action by one night, as the place with littered with a few local casualties from the previous night still struggling to get it together to make their way home - could’ve been an interesting night if we had made it there a day earlier!

Working our way further down the coast we stop off at a few beauty spots, Tauranga Bay, the Punakaiki ’pancake’ rocks & a seal colony before arriving in the town of Franz Josef - named after the glacier that cuts it’s way down the mountain side & turns into the river at the edge of town. Leanne went out a full day guided glacier hike, having skipped Patagonia while in South America - the group followed their axe wielding guide, cutting steps into the ice with the axe & leading them through crevasses & sink holes.

After stopping off at the lakeside town of Wanaka for a couple of days - where it did nothing but rain the entire time, we carried further on to the south west corner of the island into Fjord land & the town of Te Anau where we based ourselves for a few days for our visit to most impressive of New Zealand’s Fjords - Milford Sound.

The weather was now superb, lovely and hot and Te Anau is set on another gorgeous lake surrounded by mountains. We have a day to chill and then head off to Milford Sound, where Leanne is booked up for Kayaking around the fjord. We opt for the more leisurely approach…a boat cruise up Milford Sound, which thankfully we did first thing in the morning when it was lovely and sunny, as by lunch time yet again it was raining. Milford Sound is just one of the many fjords in the area, and is stunning - although the constant barrage of sand flies relentlessly biting you gets really quite annoying.

We head to Queenstown the following day for the last few days before Leanne leaves for Australia and we head across to the south east coast for a few days until our flight.
Slightly hung over after a night out in Queenstown, Leanne signs herself up for a skydive - cancelled an hour before the planned time due to bad weather, leaving her to endure a further 24 hours of torturous waiting… finally the next day, she does the jump amid lots of apparent hyperventilating and being half thrown out of the plane by the instructor, but loved it in the end. Another one to tick off the list, but another one never to do again!

We leave Leanne in Queenstown to catch her flight to Sydney and drive towards Dunedin on the South East coast. Dunedin is modelled on Edinburgh and the architecture, hills and general feel of the place are exactly that, complete with a bagpipe playing band parading up the main street while we were there.

We spend a few days in Dunedin and took a drive around the Otago Peninsula to an albatross reserve and the only castle in New Zealand. Being tight skin flint travellers & having seen Albatross in Patagonia & traipsed around plenty of castles in the UK, we decide against going in - as yet again they were both charging $60 per person.

We drive round the stunning windswept and rugged South coast, visiting a Petrified forest that is millions of years old, where the fallen trees on the shoreline have now turned to stone. We stay our final night in a hostel that is an old converted fire station, in a weird hick town called Gore. A novel approach to running a hostel, there was no one staffing the place, you just help yourself to a room and the facilities, write you name on a board and leave the cash in an envelope under the owners door… very trusting! We were the only people there but as we discovered in the evening when we walked into town, there is absolutely nothing to do here, not even a decent pub (other than another book makers boozer) and the supermarkets don’t sell alcohol… another movie it was then…

After a good, if somewhat damp month in New Zealand, we leave Queenstown & fly to Sydney in time for Christmas.

New Zealand - North Island

We landed into Auckland in New Zealand’s North Island after a 16 hour flight some 2 days after we took off from Chile - due to our crossing of the international date line & effectively losing a day en-route. Being surrounded by English speaking people now felt strange after being used to Spanish for so long. When people asked us questions our initial instinct was to respond in Spanish, our brains having grown so accustomed to thinking that way - which earned us a few strange looks. Nowhere more so than the supermarket - around which we were already walking like a couple of weirdoes who had never before seen a large, well stocked shop selling products that any British supermarket would sell…looks like we’d better ease ourselves into this culture shock!

Although not the capital city of New Zealand, Auckland is by far the most populous place in the country, with the majority of the countries 4 million population living in & around the greater Auckland area. Set in a harbour with several islands just of shore, with desirable waterfront properties, a good mix of modern & traditional architecture, plenty of good restaurants & bars & within easy reach of the beach it‘s not hard to see the appeal.

After spending a few days around the city, catching up with Leanne & Ruth again - who had been in NZ a couple of weeks already by this point - we hired a car & spent a few days taking a road trip around the Northern Peninsula - the main draw card of the area being the Bay of Islands, which is exactly as the name suggests, located in the aquamarine coloured waters of the Tasman Sea - a very beautiful spot. Stopping off on our way down south we dropped in Neal, a friend from home who now lives over here - in a nice 2 bed sea view apartment - something of an upgrade from his Northampton digs, & doing well for himself out here which was good to see.

Dropping the car off, we jump on a bus down to the volcanic thermal hot pool town of Rotorua. Buses here are a far cry from the luxury of the Argentine & Peruvian buses we had become accustomed to - just an old beaten up coach this time. Due to the amount of hot sulphur pools in Rotorua, the town has a pleasant smell of rotten eggs drifting through most of the time - and is affectionately known by the locals as Rotten-rua.

Here we visited the Wai-o-Tapu ‘Thermal Wonderland’ as it’s known - just out of Rotorua along the ‘Thermal Explorer Highway’ (actual name) - an impressive array of multi coloured thermal mud pools, ranging from a vibrant bright lime, white, blue, green & the centrepiece known as the ’Champagne Pool’ which is a blend of various shades of bright orange, red & yellow - one of the North Island’s main iconic landscape sites.

A little further south we meet up with Leanne, Ruth & Sue again in Taupo, a town set on the side of the huge volcanic crater lake of the same name, from where we dig out the hiking boots again & spend the day hiking the ‘Tongariro Crossing’ - an 8 hour trek that takes you up & over some truly dramatic & impressive volcanic mountain terrain - much of which was used in the filming of the Lord of The Rings Trilogy, including the peak that was cast as Mount Doom in the films, it’s real name being Mount Ngauruhoe…Doom obviously being the easier one of the two to pronounce.

We were blessed with one of the few days of clear blue skies & sunshine we had while in NZ whilst on the hike, providing us with stunning views throughout the day, some of the landscape resembling the otherworldly terrain which we had seen during the Bolivian Uyuni tour, deep red rock colourings, yellow & white plateaus, the flattened infill of volcanic craters & vibrant turquoise pools & lakes.

That night we stayed in one of New Zealand’s many one horse towns - the few residents that lived there all congregating around the local pub, which was essentially a betting shop that also doubled up as a bar - the Kiwi’s having clearly latched onto the money making potential of housing the glorious combination of alcohol & gambling under the one roof - something that as we would discover pretty much defines the pub culture of New Zealand. The general routine seems to be for all the women to gather together with their booze in the area that has all the slot machines, merrily throwing their money away as they drink & chat among themselves, while all the men stand permanently transfixed to the dog racing & horse racing screens, one hand on their pint, the other on the pen filling out their betting slips. Funny.

Our next & final stop in the North Island is the coastal city of Wellington - the capital of New Zealand. This was the one place in the North Island that we had been to previously, when we came to NZ 5 years ago for Darren & Nicola’s wedding. Leanne’s friends, Pauline & Nate live in Wellington, & kindly put us up for the majority of our stay in Wellington. They have a beautiful place up a hillside over looking the city & Wellington harbour, & on a clear day you can see across the Cook Straits down to the South Island. Pauline & Nate gave us the guided tour of Wellington, driving us around the rugged coastline, taking a walk out to Red Rock point - which, as with most things in NZ, is exactly as it sounds - a point on the coastline with some red rocks. We went around the area where Peter Jackson has his film production studios, & the ‘Weta Caves’ are - the animation company that created all the special effects characters for Lord of the Rings & many other films. They took us around the Sunday food market in the harbour full of fresh fish that the fishermen bring in that morning from where we bought up a great selection of fish for a fish pie cooked up for dinner that night. Nate runs a bar in Wellington, so we had an inside track to the Wellington night life which also came in handy.

After a few really nice days in Wellington (even if it did rain the majority of the time!) we jumped on the ferry across the Cook Straits down to the South Island.