Road Trip!!! Naked Sheep!!!

Here's a whole post about the road trip I took with Trond from December 12-16th!

We left Christchurch on Monday afternoon and stayed with his sister in Timaru, about two hours to the south.  The sunset that night was gorgeous!

I've been told that summer in Christchurch almost guarantees skies like this.  I'm waiting~

The next day didn't go quite as planned.  Our intention was to be in the Catlins Conservation Park that night, but we leisurely made out way down the coast, stopping often at areas of interest (or natural beauty, which is basically the same thing).  It was actually a really nice day.  We stopped for a picnic lunch at the Waitaki River.  It was so lovely that we ended up sitting there for an hour, reading.

Very cold glacial river.  But oh-so pretty!

South in Oamaru, we stopped at something completely random.  As a preamble to this, you should know that Oamaru is an old-fashioned, mostly Victorian-Era town.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with Steampunk, it is a sort of style/fashion.  It started as a subgenre of fiction (think H.G. Wells).  It combines Victorian Era dress and machinery.  For a more full explanation, follow this Wikipedia link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steampunk
I think the most helpful part of that article says that Steampunk is what Victorians would have thought futuristic inventions would be like, based on the technology of the day.
Also in Oamaru was a penguin colony.  Sadly, no penguins, but some fantastic ocean waves breaking on the pier.

Further south, we paused for a little while near Hampden.  There was a campsite of sorts just along the beach there.  Incredibly gorgeous.  We wished it was further along so we might have stopped there for the night.

VERY powdery sand

But onward we had to go.  All along the road, I stayed alert to photo opportunities or the chance to giggle (YET again) at all the sheep, freshly sheared and "naked" as I called them.  That night, we got as far as Dunedin, which as some of you may recall, was the town in which I spent the majority of my time when I was last in New Zealand.  Our family friends were not there in their home.  I called at the McClean Falls Holiday Park, which they own.  Lynn and Paul, the owners, were actually in Dunedin on business.  Their capable daughter Nicole informed us that we could come the next night just as easily, so that's where we left it.

A quick trip to the local library (Free internet?  Madness!) pointed us in the direction of some hostels.  After a bit of a walk, we found one that suited just fine.  And when I say that it was a closet with a double bed in it, I'm not exaggerating.

Told you.

The next morning dawned somewhat cloudy and promised rain.  But determinedly, we drove out the to albatross colony on Harington Point.  Unfortunately, they charge crazy amounts of money to actually go through the building to the side of the hill where the albatross nest, but judging by the webcams in the visitor's center, there were only two on the blustery hillside as it was.  After a brief walk around the area, and many gull sightings, we were back in the car to continue heading south.

Harington Point

We decided to veer off the highway and take the coastal route from here.  It was completely worth it.  Not only were there sweeping views of the coastline, but really quaint little towns along the way.  Not to mention the one lane bridges, which became increasingly common.  When the road veered back toward the highway, there's a nice stretch through some hills that's quite picturesque.

Meanwhile, Trond had been telling me about a place called Nugget Point since we started talking about this trip, so we made our way for that.  I was really looking forward to it.  For those of you following maps as we go, we turned off the highway again at a town called Balclutha.  (Also, Nugget Point doesn't appear to be on the map, but look for Roaring Bay). A long gravel road along the coast led there. I was a little worried about the car getting a flat (not exactly a 4 wheel drive).  But I figured if other cars could do it, so could we.  Actually it turned out that many of the roads in this part of the country were gravel, especially when it came to driving to somewhere scenic. 

There were two parts of Nugget Point, a lower and an upper.  The lower one took us to Roaring Bay, which is home to penguins.  Still no penguin sightings, but saw some fur seals.  Also, I took many pictures of waves, which I will not bore you with here.  The upper area, however, offered sweeping views of the coastline to the north, as well as a lovely "hike" out to the lighthouse on the point.  It should be mentioned that this pathway made me a little nervous, being about six feet wide without a railing on one the cliff side.  Trond thought I was silly for not walking next to him, but rather behind him.  I'm still standing by my decision.

The views of Nugget Point were spectacular, but I'll leave you with my favorite.

Where Nugget Point gets its name.

As we got closer to the interior of Catlins Conservation Park, the area became more and more covered in trees until we were in a lush, highly unrecognizable forest.  Virtually none of the trees were known to me, which made it feel other worldly.  The Manuka Tree (the only one Trond could point out with confidence) gets very tall and THEN branches out, with small white flowers blooming out the top which produce a sweet fragrance.  We arrived at the McLean Falls Holiday Park just at sunset and barely made it in time for the kitchen.  The food at The Whistling Frog Cafe was DELICIOUS, Trond having fresh fish and me going with the lamb.  (Ample sampling from both sides).  We went for the wine and dessert as well.  Nestled within the trees with the surf nonetheless making its presence known, the spot was peaceful and relaxing.

Trond went to our cabin in the park while I caught up with Nicole.  I even interviewed a retired couple from Holland about their experiences touring New Zealand.  You may recall it is my plan to start writing about tourism post-quake blog.  I'm getting on that very soon...the recent quakes have upset the formatting a little!

The next morning we had a dilemma which depended entirely on the tide.  There are two places in the area worth seeing in low tide.  Firstly, Cathedral Caves down on the beach.  Secondly, a petrified forest at Curio Bay.  Both are only accessible at low tide.  But also famous in the area is McClean Falls.  And, most importantly, we were not ready to leave until 10 and low tide was at 12:30.  As I am a photo junky, the hike to McLean Falls took "longer than expected."  I wouldn't shorten it at all, though.  It was spectacular.

Along the meandering pathway were close-up views of all those unrecognizable trees, including the Tree Fern, which is exactly how it sounds.

Trunks with ferns on top!  What will they think of next?

After we emerged from the forest, we decided we had to choose between the two beach-going activities.  In the interest of making headway, and being rather into "the strange" we opted for Curio Bay and the petrified forest.  The weather took a turn for the worse at this point: drizzly, windy, and cold. But we persevered.  The petrified forest was pretty awesome.  The trees were on their sides, park of the surrounding tide pools.  Interesting little "mounds" popped up everywhere in which petrified stumps had been encased.

We took a brief stop at Slope Point, the southernmost point on the South Island.  We were rather soaked and cold from our time in Curio Bay, so we didn't get out of the car to walk the 20 minutes down to the water.  But we did get to see what Slope Point's famous windblown trees.

Next we went to Bluff for lunch.  Up on the hill overlooking the town, we could discern the harbor and the incredibly long pier below us.  I think that pier was a good mile long, but when you can understand why when you see the sandbars around it.

Our time in the south was finished (really that's about as south as you can get), so north we went!  On our way to Queenstown, we went through some really fantastic country.  Particularly beautiful was the bit around Lake Wakatipu. 

 

 

When we arrived in Queenstown, we were still along Lake Wakatipu, which has a strange shape to it.  The place is overrun with tourists, as this is the adventure sports capital of New Zealand.  I think we shortly thereafter drove past the place where Meghan went bungee jumping, in fact.  But we were only pausing in Queenstown for dinner, which we had at Hell's Pizza.  It's a rather amusing chain with thematic purchases.  We had a nice view while we waited for the pizza to be finished:

That night, we drove just a little bit further along the highway and stopped at a random campsite along the road on the shore of Lake Dunstan.  It was quite dark at that point, and raining pretty hard, so we set up our nest of comforters and sleeping bags in the car, and passed out.  As an extra precaution, we parked between two Eucalyptus trees.  In the morning, this is where we were.

This last day, we drove through some more really nice countryside of a different variety.  We began in a river valley, which had a fair amount of vineyards.  As we drove on, Lupin flowers began to pop up in groups along the road.  We paralleled a creek for a while, and as we did, more and more flowers appeared until the whole valley was filled with them.  I had never seen so many in one place.

 

Then we started getting into more rugged, open spaces.  Unfortunately, my camera ran out of battery at a VERY inconvenient time: Lindis Pass.  It was still a bit misty this day, but that made for some pretty interesting photos.

For all you Lord of the Rings fans, this was quite near where they filmed the battle outside of Gondor. (Pelennor Fields, if you're extra geeky).

Lindis Pass, though not represented in these photos (nor the gorgeous limestone cliffs shortly thereafter), was rough land.  Rocks jutted out from hillsides and piles of rocks at the bottom suggested long durations of rockfalls.  I hope that I get to go there again before I leave New Zealand, so I can take proper pictures.

Well, that was pretty much the road trip.  The last day was simply us driving back to Christchurch.  To be honest I slept during the second half of that.  Trond seemed alright with it since he had some lectures he wanted to listen to anyway.  The most amusing aspect of the actual driving part had to do with the windows.  Firstly, they roll down manually.  So every time I wanted to take a picture, I had to roll it down rapidly.  I was actually getting a bruise on my left hand toward the end!  The other point of amusement is that Trond always kept his window open a crack, since the defroster is not fast enough.  But every time I opened mine for a snapshot, the rain would come whooshing in on him.  As a result, we eventually developed a system of me saying, "Rolling down my window!" while he quickly rolled his up.

As expected, New Zealand is a fantastically photogenic country, even if the weather is less than optimal.  I took no less than 1,000 photos on this trip, and at least a few hundred since.  Lots HAS happened since then, including Christmas, earthquakes, and a phenomenon called, "Big Gaming Week" which will all be explained in due course.

The Sheep Has Landed...Upside Down.

So here we are again.  Blog time. New look.  New trip.  Sheep. Rugby....Richard Simmons????

We had a rather inauspicious start to the trip, but things only improved from there.  We had a layover in L.A. for five hours, so we weren't panicking in Seattle when an apologetic flight attendant (<--that's still PC right?) came on to say, "I'm afraid we have some bad news."  Basically what happened is the plane got a new windshield recently and the interior caulking was not coping with it's new covering very well.  "Purely cosmetic, but it will take a few hours for the new caulking to dry."  Everybody out!

After about an hour of napping near the gate to hear any more news (clearly I was paying rapt attention), we were instructed to meet our new plane at a different terminal, and that was the end of that.

Our short layover in Auckland provided us with a show.  Apparently Santa has a day job before the 25th:

There were film crews around, so it must have been a promotion for New Zealand Air, which, by the way, has good food and free NZ wine, not to mention your own TV set with way more viewing choices than you'd need for even the lengthy 12 hour flight.  Two thumbs up to that.   My only real "anthropological experience" on the two Air New Zealand flights of the trip were the safety videos.  Let's just say that everyone is just a little bit "Rugby Happy" down here right now.  They teamed up with the All Blacks to do the safety video. Trond hid behind a book and pretended not to notice.  I don't know. I thought it was amusing and heard several people laugh throughout.  Point being: You actually watch the safety video!

Oh alright!  Here's the link!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJ_kMrDmlQY

and if THAT wasn't bad enough, watch what we had for our SECOND flight:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wgpYtJMQQjc

Yes, that is indeed Richard Simmons.  I'm pretty sure Trond wanted to die at this point.  But he watched the safety video!

Unfortunately, the day was cloudy, so my dream of once again seeing the Southern Alps poke up through the morning light was dashed.  Still haven't seen them actually...

Both Trond's parents met us at the Christchurch airport.  I got a hug from Trond's mother Svanaug (she's from Norway) and a friendly greeting from his (more quiet) father, Alan.

Driving through town from the airport did not reveal much in the way of earthquake damage from February 22nd of this year.  I saw a few "bendy" tiled roofs and some stone fences that had been propped up with stabilizing wooden frames.  Svanaug kept saying that the roads were damaged and all bumpy now.  I can honestly say that despite their "disrepair" I thought they were still doing a better job of being roughly flat than, say, Seattle.  I guess the roads are usually incredibly smooth.  There were patches around and the occasional sinking dip, but everything was filled in and repaired.  Getting the infrastructure back together seemed to be the first thing that was fixed (though some roads are still closed).

I actually don't want to dwell on the earthquake damage much.  I may do so on a later date, but everything I've seen in the past few days has merely been glimpsed through the windows of a moving car.  I think their fleeting aspect makes things appear more harsh than they actually are.  I can say that life is continuing on in a more or less normal way for the residents of Christchurch.  The government did an amazing job in not only responding, but in taking care of people long-term.  People who have been forced to vacate their homes, for example, have been given the funds to purchase new ones.  This is all organized and carried out by the Earthquake Commission (EQC).  Those who lost their livelihoods are also compensated with unemployment.  The more I read the paper the more I am amazed at how well organized this all is.  I keep thinking: Wow.  This would not work in the States at all.

I know LOTS about the earthquake and recovery efforts now, in fact.  I've made it a habit since arriving to read the local newspaper every morning.  Some of you may have heard that I plan to write a more serious travel blog on the side.  The point of that blog will be to promote the return of tourism to the area.  Many good things on the horizon for that.

In this first week, however, I have spent many leisurely hours reading and getting myself ready to write LOTS while I'm here.  Preparing the start a serious travel blog is no easy business.  There's a lot of research involved.  I've been keeping my ears open, brainstorming, and asking questions.  There's so much information to sift through.  So far, I've been reading ABOUT travel writing, which has been very interesting.  We'll see where it takes me.

In the meantime, Trond has been taking me around his hometown.  I've been able to meet a lot of his friends just in the first few days, with us out almost every night since I've been here.  I really like his friends.  They are each their own very unique person, but they are linked through that.  It's a little strange how often "Dr. Who" has come up in conversations.  And by strange, I of course mean "awesome."  Also, one of them has a fabulous ragdoll cat named Ted.  Apparently they named him that (it's a declension of the name he originally had, which now escapes me) just so they could use the, "Haaaaaave you met Ted?" quote.  Trond is allergic to Ted, so he's been sneezing a bit the past couple of days.

Daihatsu up and up to the top of a viewpoint called, "Sign of the Bellbird."  If you take a gander at googlemaps of Christchurch, head south to the Cashmere hills, then up the side of them to the southwest.  Sign of the Bellbird is just south of something called, "Kennedy's Bush" (a campsite) along the road up there.  You'll have to really zoom into the Kennedy's Bush section of the map if you want the Sign of the Bellbird to even appear on the map.  If you see the positioning of the viewpoint, you can imagine the view.  Well, actually, you don't have to:

Looking east toward Lyttelton Harbour from the Sign of the Bellbird viewpoint.

We spent a few hours up there one afternoon.  After we had bought some delicious meat pies (Steak and mushroom?  Yes, please!) I sat there and read a book while he did some work on the laptop.  We both slipped in and out of consciousness a few times.  Also, at one point, I got out to walk around the nearby trails and take pictures.  I love that I can walk through long grass and not worry about anything living in them.  No poisonous spiders, no ticks, no snakes.  At all.  Anywhere in the country.  Here are a few more pics from up there.  We were on the top of a ridge, so it was nice to hope across the road to get views of the plains below.

An old scenic post from 1906 overlooking the Canterbury Plains.  Broom's a' bloomin'!

The ridge-top trails to all the way to the tip of the point past Lyttelton Harbour.  I'm pretty sure that the birds I was hearing all around me were, in fact, the Bellbirds.

I love how covered with green, growing things New Zealand is.  Even in the city, there are trees EVERYWHERE.  Weeping Willows adorn the streams and rivers and Birch swivel their leaves in the ever-present wind.

A convenient spot to hop the fence.  After all, it's to keep the sheep in their pens, not people.  I believe these are called, "stiles" and are very reminiscent of Scotland, at least for me.  I, of course, hopped right over to see where THIS trail led.

And this is what I found.  A very closed-in, green tunnel of mystery.  It would have been very easy to follow the many-branching trails within the forest, but it would also have been easy to lose my way on the way back, so I only poked in for a few hundred yards before returning to the open air. 

I look forward to more journeys up into the hills that are expressly for hiking.  I'm even hoping to traverse the incredibly long ridge-trail that (allegedly) takes about 5 hours each way.  (Pretty sure we'd have someone pick us up on the end side, though.  ^_^").  But that will have to wait, unfortunately, until health improves.

Trond has been recovering from a coughing cold that we think he developed over Thanksgiving.  It appears that I have been carrying around the sickness just under the surface these past two weeks.  After the immunity-battering plane trips, I have finally succumbed.  It's annoying, but not debilitating.  No arduous tasks!  Well, okay if you insist...twist my arm...

In fact, Trond and I are about to head south tomorrow for a leisurely road trip for the rest of the week.  We will stop in Timaru where his sister, brother-in-law, and two little nieces live.  After that, it's down to the Catlins National Park to visit cruising friends at their holiday park.  Unfortunately, we are missing the owners in their own pre-Christmas travels, but their daughter Nicole will be there.  The next couple of days will be spent wandering around Lake Te Anau and Milford Sound.  I'm really looking forward to taking TONS of pictures.  Hopefully the weather will change for the better. It has been really windy and a bit cold here since my arrival.  Overcast, too.  I'm ready for sunshine!

Speaking of sunshine, there was a bit of it the other morning.  I immediately found myself dragging a plastic chair from the back porch (relieving it of it's 8-legged residents) to a spot in the garden under a tree.  I read there quite blissfully for over an hour.  It's nice for the sun to be out and actually producing HEAT.

Trond's house has an amazing garden in the back.  It easily takes up more square footage than the first story of the house.  Huge roses, red, pink, and white are blooming near the house.  A vibrant kiwifruit plant is winding its way up a frame that covers the back porch, which gives the underside a leafy, cave-like ambiance.  Various pear trees abound, as well as myriad fruits and vegetables.  We've been sampling much of them since our arrival.  The strawberries are ripening!  I'm waiting to take pictures until the sun comes out again.

That's something that's been a bit weird; the climactic change and the same date thing going on.  It's December 11th and it's supposed to be in the 70s tomorrow.  Not that I'm complaining. It's just weird for "winter."  No!  It's summer!  But it's December!  Gah!  I'm sure I'll settle down eventually.

I doodled this the other day, much to local amusement.