Hello everyone!
So here we are, at the very end of our journey through New Zealand. We sold our car, gave away the knick-knacks we picked up on the way and packed away the road atlas. We are done with the endless packing and unpacking of the tent, cooking soups in the dark of night, brushing teeth with bottled water and peeing in smelly outhouse toilets... We are done with camping!
Well, ok, we might still have to pee in smelly outhouse toilets in Australia, but our accommodation will be upgraded to a rented campervan. Not only are we sick of tenting, we also think of all the toothy and toxic creatures that lurk in the Australian wild. Building a tent after dark is really much safer in New Zealand, where all you might encounter is a curious weka or, more likely, a swarm of sand flies. Not that we're really all that worried about the venomous nature of Australia, but - why not be smart about it?
So we're back in Auckland after our last 3-day side trip to the nearby Coromandel Peninsula. After the hectic 2-week race through the South Island, it was nice to take it easy again and not have to drive 5 hours a day. We soaked in hot pools, visited a mineral gem museum, toured an ostrich farm, hugged a giant kauri tree, visited the famous hot water beach (where you can dig in your own little hot tub in the sand), passed under the magnificent Cathedral Cove - a passageway through a rock of cathedral size that leads from one beach to another, and we played in the weird wonderworld of Waiau Waterworks - an amusement park powered by water pumps and a lot of engineering creativity. (Check the photos later!) After all this, we concluded this little trip with a fire on Cook Beach - the original landing place of Capt. James Cook on his discovery voyage to New Zealand. What a perfect ending to our NZ adventure!
It's been really great here. After 3 months, we can say we saw most of the country, but not nearly everything. In terms of landscape, New Zealand is spectacularly beautiful almost everywhere, otherwise it's "just" plain picturesque. In terms of culture, New Zealand is like a colony of Brits who moved to southern California and took up surfing, but didn't give up cricket. They drive on the left and have the Queen on their coins, but wear Billabong clothes and speak in 1980's California slang. They love to travel, but have a hard time distinguishing east from the west (maybe because they have that upside-down view of the world?). They put canned spaghetti on toast and beet root on burgers, but will never EVER serve you a bad cup of coffee. They call themselves Kiwis and shorten every word that is over 6 letters: grandchildren=grandies, Australian=Aussie, mosquito=mossie, breakfast=breakie...etc. They love travellers and have created probably the best country to travel in. And the weather here is a perpetual spring. If you're feeling inspired to come and explore this wonderful country, here's a few travel tips:
Tips for Backpacker Travel to NZ:
1. Guide book: if there's one country, in which you don't need a guide book, it's NZ. If you're going to rent or buy a car and drive around (the best way to see NZ!), save the money you'd spend on a Lonely Planet and buy a good road atlas with campgrounds and points of interest. Every town in NZ has an I-site (information center) with heaps of brochures and helpful staff. You'll never be lost. Backpacking is a way of life in NZ and you can learn all you need to know from brochures, museum visits, roadside info panels and fellow backpackers.
2. Gear: Don't wait to buy any outdoor gear in NZ - you'll pay up to 3 times as much as you would in the US. Our tent was $200 in DC, but it was $600 in Queenstown(!) Regular Teva sandals cost $100 in NZ! So don't forget to bring all the essentials with you!
3. Work: If you want to work in NZ, you'll absolutely need 2 things: a tax IRD number and a NZ bank account. Both are free to get whether you have a work visa or not, but IRD number might take about 10 days to get, whereas opening of a bank account is immediate. If you're in NZ in the fruit picking season (Feb.-October), you're practically guaranteed to get work without any need for a work visa. There's such labor shortage in the fruit areas that orcharders couldn't care less whether you have a stamp in your passport or not. Do not waste your money on work permits unless the employer actually asks you for one, otherwise you might end up with an expensive sticker in your passport that no one cares to see. (That happened to us.)
4. Traveller's Cheques: Does anyone still travel with these? All you need here is a piece of plastic and you can get cash from any ATM at the best current exchange rate. Your overseas debit card gets treated here as a credit card, and a lot of places accept credit cards, but not all. EFTPOS, the local debit card, is accepted everywhere. Anyhow, getting around with your bank card from home will still be amazingly easy.
5. Trade Me: In NZ, anything that can be sold, can be found on the auction website trademe.co.nz. It's the Kiwi equivalent of craigslist in the US. If you want to buy and sell a used car for your trip, that's the place to go.
I can't think of anything else to add right now, but will update this as I think of it. I guess there's really not much to worry about when visiting NZ - it's an amazingly easy country to travel in. If you can make it, we definitely encourage everyone to come and see this place.
For now, we have to sign out. We will write back from Aussie. Until then - have a great spring and take care!
Saturday, April 28, 2007
Saturday, April 21, 2007
The Complete South Island Whirlwind Tour and back to the North
Hello again!
Where were we? Queenstown, right...
So, the town of Queenstown, where we ended up after our Wanaka reunion with Mark and Erica looked truly awesome and worth staying in for the whole winter or summer season. The town sits on the shore of a tremendously huge (52 mile-long) lake Wakatipu, is surrounded by the imposing mountain range, The Remarkables, as well as other mountains, and has a wild river perfect for river sports. That sort of landscape offers just about any adventure sport you can imagine, so it's no wonder that the town is full of backpackers, outdoor gear stores and adventure booking offices.
We arrived at dusk and had to quickly find our campsite by the lake, so we checked out the town from the car. We spent a miserably cold night cooking our food outside and mummifying ourselves in our sleeping bags, only to wake up to an even colder morning. We were hoping for a clear, sunny morning with splendid reflections of mountain peaks on the glass-like surface of the lake, with puffs of mist caressing the rocky cliffs and the town peaking into view in the distance...but no. We woke up in the wintertime! Chilly gusts of wind were blowing right through our pathetic sweatshirts, our hands were numb, faces stiff and the mountains around the lake were, yet again, completely lost in clouds. So we headed back to town, warmed up in a McCafe (do they have those in the US?) and took the Gondola cable lift to the top of a mountain that's so close to town that you just walk for 2 blocks out of the city center and you're there! From the restaurant on the top we had the magnificent view of the town at our feet and the impenetrable whiteness all around it. #$%*! Disappointed, we took the Gondola down and got stuck on it for half an hour with our asses freezing off (the wind was so strong, the service had to be interrupted) - but this was our lucky moment: the clouds lifted for a few minutes and revealed the Remarkables in front of us with a fresh dusting of first snow! No wonder it was so cold - it was snowing all around us!
With spanking new fleece jackets from the Warehouse, we drove further down south to the border of the Fiordland National Park, passed the tourist town of Te Anau and set up camp in the dark somewhere between the highway and the enormous Te Anau lake. In the morning, we walked down to a lovely pebbly beach and, hallelujah!, the sun was out and shone right on the deep green Fiordland wilderness in front of us on the opposite shore. We couldn't wait to see the highlight of our trip - the Milford Sound fiord.
The Fiordland National Park covers the entire southwestern corner of the South Island and is one of the most pristine, untouched and rare areas of pure wilderness in the world. Milford Sound is the northernmost fiord of the park's 14 fiords and the only one accessible by a highway (only one other fiord, The Doubtful Sound, is accessible by a road). Naturally, this is why Milford Sound is a huge tourist attraction. We drove for over an hour deep into the tightening glacial valleys and further away from civilization and gas stations and yet, we were passing (or were being passed by) dozens of cars, vans, motorhomes and luxury couches all heading in the same direction. Nevertheless, even in this lively traffic, once you cross the Homer Tunnel, you can't help but feel the remoteness of the place. All of a sudden, you are enclosed on all sides by silent and almost vertical rocky cliffs and the only way out is through a narrow hole blasted into a mountain that is now quickly disappearing behind you. There's only one way now - forward - and you hope very much that Milford Sound will be a town that sells food and a gas...
What can I say? Milford Sound was an amazing experience. We took one of the dozens of boat cruises offered that day (a more snug 70-person capacity boat, not one of those 450-person ferries) - and were off for an up-close and personal look. It was all that we expected and more. The deep, silent waters; the massive cliffs drenched in myriads of waterfalls that plummet for hundreds of meters straight down into the sea; the mighty Mitre Peak that looms at 1690m right above your head; the new captivating views at each new turn; the silent beauty of it all... It's one thing to enjoy the view of a gorge that a lively river took thousands of years to cut into limestone - it's another thing altogether to stare at something that took 4 ice ages(!) to form. Over many millions of years, the glaciers that used to cover the mountains, carved valleys that finally reached the sea, so the sea filled the valleys and went further inland. You just can't stop staring up at the magnificence of it. It's bigger than life.
The boat drove us to the windy mouth of the fiord where we watched mesmerized as hundreds of birds (including one albatross) dove into the waves, then on the way back we spotted a seal chilling out on an outcropping rock and watched a group of bottlenose dolphins swim by. It was awesome - and we had good weather the whole time! We took off from Milford Sound straight after our cruise - we felt there wasn't more that we could do to leave a more memorable impression in our minds than what we had just seen. Also, we had the rest of the island to see.
After our cruise, we drove back into civilization, and camped by lake Monowai, somewhere on the southern edge of the Fiordland Park. We had to drive for 5 km off the main road, so for once we wouldn't hear the traffic noise from our tent... In fact, it was weirdly quiet in that forest, really, really quiet, not a single blade of grass stirring...but also much warmer, thank god.
The following day (by now, we can't keep track of what day it is anymore), we hit the bottom of the island. I was sad to see the Southern Alps disappear behind us - they were our companions for a week now - but they were hidden in clouds once again, so there was no view, anyway. The landscape quickly changed from rugged mountains to endless sheep and cattle pastures - and stayed that way practically for the rest of our trip on the island. We drove south through quiet countryside for hours, passed through the oldest town in the South Island and reached the (almost) southernmost point on the island by late afternoon. There was a lighthouse, impressive waves crashing on outlying rocks and - to our disappointment - no seals to be seen anywhere. On our way back to the car, Ryan was poking around in the bushes when I heard a scream - he almost got attacked by a massive sea lion! The beast obviously wanted to be left alone on his stroll and didn't care much for posing for camera, but that didn't deter us, of course. We snapped a few shots and the sea lion disappeared into the bushes. Well, that was at least something!
That night (this was Sunday, I believe) we camped at Curio Bay at the windy bottom of the island. The campground was just meters away from rocky cliffs falling into the raging sea, but luckily, the camp sites were hidden in a growth of tall grasses that effectively blocked the wind, so we had a comfortable night. After a night in a eerily silent forest, we were falling asleep to the distant thunderous roar of the high tide hitting the cliffs. How different every day could be!
On Monday morning we checked out the cliffs and foamy waves that we heard all night, the gorgeous beaches of the neighboring Porpoise Bay that is a home to the rarest species of dolphins (we didn't see any, it's past their season) and walked over to the petrified forest - another one of those curious attractions that abound in New Zealand. I think I could say that Ryan and I weren't the only people who originally imagined "petrified forest" to be an actual forest of standing ancient trees frozen in time, something like a rose dipped in gold. Luckily, though, we heard the disappointment of other tourists who expected the same, but saw only rocks remotely resembling pieces of logs lying at their feet. So, correcting our expectations accordingly, we could at least enjoy the fact that the rocks resembling fallen logs that we saw in the low tide were trees 160 million years old - they grew in the time of Gondwanaland, before the land of New Zealand even existed! It's not everyday that you get to see a forest from the Jurassic era - pretty cool!
After Curio Bay, we started our long way back up along the eastern shore and, I must say, the tour of the South Island just went downhill from there. We crossed endless, flat pastures dotted with identical towns, occasionally interrupted by some minor attractions, like big boulders on a beach, a cheese factory or a penguin colony area (you can only see penguins after dusk, which doesn't work for us, since we don't like to set up camp after dark). So we pushed on to the city of Dunedin, where we spent a well-deserved night in another YHA hostel (to peel off our thermal underwear, wash up, groom and feel like humans again!) and had a few beers in a local bar. On Tuesday we chose something different for a change - we toured the Cadbury Chocolate Factory. There were no Umpa Lumpas and the chocolate waterfall didn't work, but it was very informative (do you know how they make hollow Easter eggs? Ask us next time we see you!) and we scored loads of freebie chocolates, which we are still eating. Unfortunately, this left no time for us to drive to the nearby Otago Penninsula to see an albatross colony, so we just headed north again.
On Wednesday, after a day with no attractions whatsoever, we reached Christchurch, the largest city in the South Island and, possibly, the second largest in the country after Auckland. On Thursday, after getting lost between Hanmer Springs and Christchurch, we ended up driving for hours through empty lands of national parks (instead of the inhabited ocean route), so we got our last and unexpected look at South Island's mountains before reaching Picton - our last stop before the ferry to the North Island on Friday. It was already after dark, it was cold and we were stressed out because in Blenheim, we thought that the long driving messed up the car's engine (luckily, adding 2 litres of motor oil fixed that), so we treated ourselves to another hostel room to relax.
On Friday, we crossed the Cook Strait, drove half across the island and camped at good old Reids Farm by Taupo, where we had frolicked for 4 days with Mark and Erica at the beginning of our camping trip, back in February. This time, no one was floating down the river, of course - we're in the southern hemisphere's version of October, so the nights and mornings are damn cold. The next morning, we found the campsite enveloped by thick and frigid fog, so we quickly got out of Tuapo, drove in and out of fog all day to stop at the famed Hobbiton, the one and only filmset leftover from the filming of The Lord of the Rings. What a disappointment it was to find out that the only way to see Hobbiton was to take a $50/person tour of the privately-owned premises! $50 a person for an attraction that the owners didn't have to spend a penny to build! $50!!! This was 2 to 3 times the price of attractions that families spent lifetimes and fortunes building up from nothing, like the Buried Village or the Owlcatraz. Unbelievable!! Well, you can take your Hobbiton and shove it. We'll re-watch the movie, thank you very much!
And now we're back in Auckland. The weather here is balmy and sunny and we've been able to leave the thermal undies in the car for the first time since we left the orchard in Motueka. We spent Saturday night out on town with Matt and Nathyn (who was up here from Hawke's Bay for a Slayer concert), and spent Sunday slowly recovering, so we had a nice little reunion at the end of our trip.
We'll be leaving NZ for Australia next Tuesday. We already found a buyer for our sturdy little Silver Bullet, so with that burden off our shoulders, we are heading off to spend the next few days on Coromandel Penninsula with its picturesque beaches and hot springs. After Coromandel we'll spend the last weekend in Auckland and we take off to Aussie. We can't wait!
Hope all of you up north are having a lovely spring and that you're all doing well!
We'll be back one more time before we head to Aussie - I'm sure we'll have a few more stories to tell...
Where were we? Queenstown, right...
So, the town of Queenstown, where we ended up after our Wanaka reunion with Mark and Erica looked truly awesome and worth staying in for the whole winter or summer season. The town sits on the shore of a tremendously huge (52 mile-long) lake Wakatipu, is surrounded by the imposing mountain range, The Remarkables, as well as other mountains, and has a wild river perfect for river sports. That sort of landscape offers just about any adventure sport you can imagine, so it's no wonder that the town is full of backpackers, outdoor gear stores and adventure booking offices.
We arrived at dusk and had to quickly find our campsite by the lake, so we checked out the town from the car. We spent a miserably cold night cooking our food outside and mummifying ourselves in our sleeping bags, only to wake up to an even colder morning. We were hoping for a clear, sunny morning with splendid reflections of mountain peaks on the glass-like surface of the lake, with puffs of mist caressing the rocky cliffs and the town peaking into view in the distance...but no. We woke up in the wintertime! Chilly gusts of wind were blowing right through our pathetic sweatshirts, our hands were numb, faces stiff and the mountains around the lake were, yet again, completely lost in clouds. So we headed back to town, warmed up in a McCafe (do they have those in the US?) and took the Gondola cable lift to the top of a mountain that's so close to town that you just walk for 2 blocks out of the city center and you're there! From the restaurant on the top we had the magnificent view of the town at our feet and the impenetrable whiteness all around it. #$%*! Disappointed, we took the Gondola down and got stuck on it for half an hour with our asses freezing off (the wind was so strong, the service had to be interrupted) - but this was our lucky moment: the clouds lifted for a few minutes and revealed the Remarkables in front of us with a fresh dusting of first snow! No wonder it was so cold - it was snowing all around us!
With spanking new fleece jackets from the Warehouse, we drove further down south to the border of the Fiordland National Park, passed the tourist town of Te Anau and set up camp in the dark somewhere between the highway and the enormous Te Anau lake. In the morning, we walked down to a lovely pebbly beach and, hallelujah!, the sun was out and shone right on the deep green Fiordland wilderness in front of us on the opposite shore. We couldn't wait to see the highlight of our trip - the Milford Sound fiord.
The Fiordland National Park covers the entire southwestern corner of the South Island and is one of the most pristine, untouched and rare areas of pure wilderness in the world. Milford Sound is the northernmost fiord of the park's 14 fiords and the only one accessible by a highway (only one other fiord, The Doubtful Sound, is accessible by a road). Naturally, this is why Milford Sound is a huge tourist attraction. We drove for over an hour deep into the tightening glacial valleys and further away from civilization and gas stations and yet, we were passing (or were being passed by) dozens of cars, vans, motorhomes and luxury couches all heading in the same direction. Nevertheless, even in this lively traffic, once you cross the Homer Tunnel, you can't help but feel the remoteness of the place. All of a sudden, you are enclosed on all sides by silent and almost vertical rocky cliffs and the only way out is through a narrow hole blasted into a mountain that is now quickly disappearing behind you. There's only one way now - forward - and you hope very much that Milford Sound will be a town that sells food and a gas...
What can I say? Milford Sound was an amazing experience. We took one of the dozens of boat cruises offered that day (a more snug 70-person capacity boat, not one of those 450-person ferries) - and were off for an up-close and personal look. It was all that we expected and more. The deep, silent waters; the massive cliffs drenched in myriads of waterfalls that plummet for hundreds of meters straight down into the sea; the mighty Mitre Peak that looms at 1690m right above your head; the new captivating views at each new turn; the silent beauty of it all... It's one thing to enjoy the view of a gorge that a lively river took thousands of years to cut into limestone - it's another thing altogether to stare at something that took 4 ice ages(!) to form. Over many millions of years, the glaciers that used to cover the mountains, carved valleys that finally reached the sea, so the sea filled the valleys and went further inland. You just can't stop staring up at the magnificence of it. It's bigger than life.
The boat drove us to the windy mouth of the fiord where we watched mesmerized as hundreds of birds (including one albatross) dove into the waves, then on the way back we spotted a seal chilling out on an outcropping rock and watched a group of bottlenose dolphins swim by. It was awesome - and we had good weather the whole time! We took off from Milford Sound straight after our cruise - we felt there wasn't more that we could do to leave a more memorable impression in our minds than what we had just seen. Also, we had the rest of the island to see.
After our cruise, we drove back into civilization, and camped by lake Monowai, somewhere on the southern edge of the Fiordland Park. We had to drive for 5 km off the main road, so for once we wouldn't hear the traffic noise from our tent... In fact, it was weirdly quiet in that forest, really, really quiet, not a single blade of grass stirring...but also much warmer, thank god.
The following day (by now, we can't keep track of what day it is anymore), we hit the bottom of the island. I was sad to see the Southern Alps disappear behind us - they were our companions for a week now - but they were hidden in clouds once again, so there was no view, anyway. The landscape quickly changed from rugged mountains to endless sheep and cattle pastures - and stayed that way practically for the rest of our trip on the island. We drove south through quiet countryside for hours, passed through the oldest town in the South Island and reached the (almost) southernmost point on the island by late afternoon. There was a lighthouse, impressive waves crashing on outlying rocks and - to our disappointment - no seals to be seen anywhere. On our way back to the car, Ryan was poking around in the bushes when I heard a scream - he almost got attacked by a massive sea lion! The beast obviously wanted to be left alone on his stroll and didn't care much for posing for camera, but that didn't deter us, of course. We snapped a few shots and the sea lion disappeared into the bushes. Well, that was at least something!
That night (this was Sunday, I believe) we camped at Curio Bay at the windy bottom of the island. The campground was just meters away from rocky cliffs falling into the raging sea, but luckily, the camp sites were hidden in a growth of tall grasses that effectively blocked the wind, so we had a comfortable night. After a night in a eerily silent forest, we were falling asleep to the distant thunderous roar of the high tide hitting the cliffs. How different every day could be!
On Monday morning we checked out the cliffs and foamy waves that we heard all night, the gorgeous beaches of the neighboring Porpoise Bay that is a home to the rarest species of dolphins (we didn't see any, it's past their season) and walked over to the petrified forest - another one of those curious attractions that abound in New Zealand. I think I could say that Ryan and I weren't the only people who originally imagined "petrified forest" to be an actual forest of standing ancient trees frozen in time, something like a rose dipped in gold. Luckily, though, we heard the disappointment of other tourists who expected the same, but saw only rocks remotely resembling pieces of logs lying at their feet. So, correcting our expectations accordingly, we could at least enjoy the fact that the rocks resembling fallen logs that we saw in the low tide were trees 160 million years old - they grew in the time of Gondwanaland, before the land of New Zealand even existed! It's not everyday that you get to see a forest from the Jurassic era - pretty cool!
After Curio Bay, we started our long way back up along the eastern shore and, I must say, the tour of the South Island just went downhill from there. We crossed endless, flat pastures dotted with identical towns, occasionally interrupted by some minor attractions, like big boulders on a beach, a cheese factory or a penguin colony area (you can only see penguins after dusk, which doesn't work for us, since we don't like to set up camp after dark). So we pushed on to the city of Dunedin, where we spent a well-deserved night in another YHA hostel (to peel off our thermal underwear, wash up, groom and feel like humans again!) and had a few beers in a local bar. On Tuesday we chose something different for a change - we toured the Cadbury Chocolate Factory. There were no Umpa Lumpas and the chocolate waterfall didn't work, but it was very informative (do you know how they make hollow Easter eggs? Ask us next time we see you!) and we scored loads of freebie chocolates, which we are still eating. Unfortunately, this left no time for us to drive to the nearby Otago Penninsula to see an albatross colony, so we just headed north again.
On Wednesday, after a day with no attractions whatsoever, we reached Christchurch, the largest city in the South Island and, possibly, the second largest in the country after Auckland. On Thursday, after getting lost between Hanmer Springs and Christchurch, we ended up driving for hours through empty lands of national parks (instead of the inhabited ocean route), so we got our last and unexpected look at South Island's mountains before reaching Picton - our last stop before the ferry to the North Island on Friday. It was already after dark, it was cold and we were stressed out because in Blenheim, we thought that the long driving messed up the car's engine (luckily, adding 2 litres of motor oil fixed that), so we treated ourselves to another hostel room to relax.
On Friday, we crossed the Cook Strait, drove half across the island and camped at good old Reids Farm by Taupo, where we had frolicked for 4 days with Mark and Erica at the beginning of our camping trip, back in February. This time, no one was floating down the river, of course - we're in the southern hemisphere's version of October, so the nights and mornings are damn cold. The next morning, we found the campsite enveloped by thick and frigid fog, so we quickly got out of Tuapo, drove in and out of fog all day to stop at the famed Hobbiton, the one and only filmset leftover from the filming of The Lord of the Rings. What a disappointment it was to find out that the only way to see Hobbiton was to take a $50/person tour of the privately-owned premises! $50 a person for an attraction that the owners didn't have to spend a penny to build! $50!!! This was 2 to 3 times the price of attractions that families spent lifetimes and fortunes building up from nothing, like the Buried Village or the Owlcatraz. Unbelievable!! Well, you can take your Hobbiton and shove it. We'll re-watch the movie, thank you very much!
And now we're back in Auckland. The weather here is balmy and sunny and we've been able to leave the thermal undies in the car for the first time since we left the orchard in Motueka. We spent Saturday night out on town with Matt and Nathyn (who was up here from Hawke's Bay for a Slayer concert), and spent Sunday slowly recovering, so we had a nice little reunion at the end of our trip.
We'll be leaving NZ for Australia next Tuesday. We already found a buyer for our sturdy little Silver Bullet, so with that burden off our shoulders, we are heading off to spend the next few days on Coromandel Penninsula with its picturesque beaches and hot springs. After Coromandel we'll spend the last weekend in Auckland and we take off to Aussie. We can't wait!
Hope all of you up north are having a lovely spring and that you're all doing well!
We'll be back one more time before we head to Aussie - I'm sure we'll have a few more stories to tell...
Tuesday, April 17, 2007
The South Island Whirlwind Tour
Uff, the last week has been a blur of fun activities, amazing sights and freezing cold. Where to start?
Maybe I'll start with our farewell "barbie" in the orchard. The party was, in my opinion, a great success. At 6PM it didn't look like anything, but by 8PM we had a lovely fire going in the fire pit (firewood courtesy of Thomas Bros. Orchard) and burgers, sausages and steaks sizzling on a large grill (also courtesy of Thomas Bros.). We had a steady crew of twelve partiers all night and since it consisted of 2 Czechs, 2 Irishwomen, 2 Hungarians, 1 Slovak, a bunch of Kiwis and Ryan, you can imagine that the thirst for beer was enormous. We ate, drank, sat around the fire and talked all night and the next morning, the scene "after the battle" was truly impressive. The ground as far as eye could see was carpeted with empty beer bottles and cans (I haven't seen such a sight since my college days AND back then it took us a week to collect such a garbage dump!) - all in all, it came out to almost an entire carton of beer per person. A great party, indeed!
The next day was a sunny Sunday and, given the circumstances, you can imagine it took us quite a long time to clean up, pack up, say good-byes and get on the road. It was already 3pm by the time we took off, so in a few hours we had to set up camp in a river gorge somewhere between 2 national parks and in the middle of a lot of wilderness. It was a pretty, but unremarkable spot called Lyell, which was strange, since it was just a little grassy patch of ground in the middle of a river gorge. Soon though, I was shocked to learn that over a hundred years ago this very spot used to be a lively gold-mining town with no less than 5 hotels, a prison, post office and a store(!) The only access to it for a long time was by rafts (imagine early settlers transporting grand pianos and fine English furniture on white water!) and the houses were built on stilts right up against the steep slopes of the gorge. The forest around the town was all cut down and - this I noticed on many other old photographs - the town sat in the middle of a clear-cut waste land - the kind you see today around surface coal mines and such. I have to say that we are a wee bit kinder to our immediate environment these days... Already in the early 20th century Lyell had been a ghost town, vacated after people realized they weren't going to find gold in the river, and now there is nothing left (except for the info boards) to suggest that this dot on the map used to be a lively town. Interesting.
On Monday we reached the Tasman Sea, or the western shore of New Zealand, and headed south to inspect some weird geological phenomena called the Pancake Rocks. The Pancake Rocks are stacks of striped rocks that, of course, resemble very tall stacks of pancakes. They stand on a windy shore, beaten constantly by large and thunderous waves, which makes for a very impressive display, but not good photos. The blowhole that's advertised together with the pancakes is only active during high tide, so it's mostly a disappointment, as it usually doesn't blow when YOU are there. It was a pleasant stop on the way, but I would say that Shantytown, a much less visited but no less fascinating tourist destination some miles down the road, was a much more interesting break from driving.
Shantytown is a living museum of an old gold-mining settlement from the age of the gold rush (NZ, as well as Aussie, had their own gold rush just like the US) - and as far as we could tell, it really used to be a town and Shantytown was its real name. It was great! We visited a real old-times confectioner's store, bank where people used to cash out for their gold, a shoe store, barbershop, a mine, "Chinatown," a hospital with a surgery room, a Freemasons Hall (still in use), fire station AND we took a ride on an actual steam-engine train. (As you can tell, we are not hard people to amuse...) The place was filled with tons of old, cool stuff and you could almost smell the history in the air. You could even dress up as a saloon owner (Ryan) and a bar harlot (me) and have an old-looking photo taken, which, of course, we did because we allow ourselves to be cheesy from time to time. We didn't do the gold panning, however - that seemed like too much work for extra admission AND you didn't get to find any real gold. Maybe next time. Anyway, Shantytown was an interesting history lesson. New Zealand is very much like the US in many ways - in the 1800's NZ was a harsh frontier just like the old American West used to be(minus the rattlesnakes and combative natives). Early settlers had to cut through mountains and raft on wild rivers to start fragile existence in the bush. In the towns that survived, they left behind the cool Victorian frontier hotels that you'd expect John Wayne to walk out of. We see these hotels everywhere and we think that NZ looks just like the American southwest sometimes.
Our next destination, one of our main destinations in the South Island, was the glacier country. At dusk we arrived at a campground that was just at the doorstep of the Southern Alps, the magnificent mountain range that stretches almost along the entire west coast of the South Island. In the morning, we looked over the lake at which we camped and got our first glimpse of the snow-covered peaks. But only a glimpse - the mountains were mostly covered in thick clouds and we hoped that by the time we'd get to them and their glaciers, the clouds will miraculously dissipate and reveal their full splendor.
They didn't. We drove up to Franz Josef Glacier, a little town of lodges and restaurants catering to the busy tourist traffic going to see the Franz Josef and Fox glaciers, fixed some car trouble and went to book a helicopter flight over the glaciers. We were more than ready to spend $300 for 20 minutes of a most amazing view and a landing on the top of the glacier, but, alas, the weather wasn't with us. The last little hole in the clouds that gave us hope closed up within an hour and all helicopter flights were cancelled. Now we had two other options - to walk TO the glacier or book a guided hike ON the glacier, for which we would have had to stay for another day. Hiking on an ancient mountain of ice would have surely been very cool, but we sort of weren't in the mood and we didn't have the adequate attire, so we chose the easy walk instead.
Only about 4km down the road from the town, we reached the carpark and walked with literally hundreds of other tourists to a rocky expanse, from which we had a view of the light blue ice in the distance. In 1750, Franz Josef Glacier reached to about a mile before the carpark, in the 1800's this rocky expanse was filled with ice, in the 1930's this spot was a glacial lake where you could row between icebergs, and now you have to walk on it for about 1km and cross many icy streams to get to the edge of the mountain of ice. But surprisingly, the glacier doesn't only shrink these days. In the 1970's, the glacier was reduced to a tiny trickle that you couldn't even see from this viewpoint. Since then, the ice has expanded again to a considerable size, filling back up the massive valley it had carved so long ago. The barriers at this point didn't deter any of the livelier visitors from the 1km or so of a further walk closer to the ice. So we walked and enjoyed the awesome sight in front of us. (I personally also enjoyed the smell of snow that filled my lungs - this smell and the slight chill on the cheeks was what I longed for in the steamy tropics).
We couldn't take our eyes off the icy cliffs ahead of us - it was such an amazing and unfamiliar sight. The wonderful thing about NZ is not that it has glaciers (and these glaciers, I'm sure, are not the most spectacular or the biggest in the world), but the fact that it has two glaciers that are so easily accessible from the main road. You don't have to be a mountaineer with crampons, thousands of dollars of Goretex gear and years of experience under your belt to see a natural wonder that is quickly disappearing from the world. You can simply walk to it, or book a guided hike on it. You can be just a Jo Schmo driving by in your dilapidated campervan and practically run into it even if you didn't know it was there (since it would be hard to overlook the signs pointing you to it)! It's easier to get to these glaciers than sometimes getting to a public toilets is. Amazing. We didn't touch the ice - we respected the 4 "extreme danger" signs at the end of the walk and enjoyed our view from afar. Beyond this point, only the experienced and the guided were allowed to go. But that was enough for us, we had other places to see...
After Franz Josef, the weather was getting worse. We skipped the neighboring Fox Glacier because of the starting cold drizzle and because we had to be in the ski resort town of Wanaka by that evening. We drove in fog and rain past the Southern Alps whose splendid and snow-covered peaks were all disappointingly hidden in thick cloudage and pushed on in thick rain through Mount Aspiring National Park not concerned about the views we were missing because we couldn't wait to catch up with our backpacker friends Mark and Erica (whom we met on the North Island and who had just recently relocated to Wanaka) - and we were looking forward to a night on a couch!
We spent 2 nights in Wanaka with our friends. We peeled off our long underwear for a good wash, cooked some real breakfast and talked for hours. Wanaka is an Alpine-looking little town filled with lodges and surrounded on all sides by attractive mountains, but it was miserably cold and windy, which prevented us from seeing much of it. We were much more interested in staying warm in Mark and Erica's new apartment (which was pretty cold as it is, since Kiwis do not believe in central heating and we couldn't figure out the electric heater) and in catching up on all the new experiences we've all had, which was A LOT.
From Wanaka we headed, predictably, to Queenstown, the next town on the route to the Fiordland and another cool, adventuresome ski-resort town. Actually, Queenstown is supposed to be an "adventure capital of the world," which we could believe, since its streets are lines with bungy, jet-boating, white-water-rafting, skydiving and everything else booking offices. The town is absolutely awesome - nestled snuggly between much grander, bigger and more formidable mountains than those around Wanaka, filled with fancier hotels and bigger shopping malls...
To be continued next time...
Maybe I'll start with our farewell "barbie" in the orchard. The party was, in my opinion, a great success. At 6PM it didn't look like anything, but by 8PM we had a lovely fire going in the fire pit (firewood courtesy of Thomas Bros. Orchard) and burgers, sausages and steaks sizzling on a large grill (also courtesy of Thomas Bros.). We had a steady crew of twelve partiers all night and since it consisted of 2 Czechs, 2 Irishwomen, 2 Hungarians, 1 Slovak, a bunch of Kiwis and Ryan, you can imagine that the thirst for beer was enormous. We ate, drank, sat around the fire and talked all night and the next morning, the scene "after the battle" was truly impressive. The ground as far as eye could see was carpeted with empty beer bottles and cans (I haven't seen such a sight since my college days AND back then it took us a week to collect such a garbage dump!) - all in all, it came out to almost an entire carton of beer per person. A great party, indeed!
The next day was a sunny Sunday and, given the circumstances, you can imagine it took us quite a long time to clean up, pack up, say good-byes and get on the road. It was already 3pm by the time we took off, so in a few hours we had to set up camp in a river gorge somewhere between 2 national parks and in the middle of a lot of wilderness. It was a pretty, but unremarkable spot called Lyell, which was strange, since it was just a little grassy patch of ground in the middle of a river gorge. Soon though, I was shocked to learn that over a hundred years ago this very spot used to be a lively gold-mining town with no less than 5 hotels, a prison, post office and a store(!) The only access to it for a long time was by rafts (imagine early settlers transporting grand pianos and fine English furniture on white water!) and the houses were built on stilts right up against the steep slopes of the gorge. The forest around the town was all cut down and - this I noticed on many other old photographs - the town sat in the middle of a clear-cut waste land - the kind you see today around surface coal mines and such. I have to say that we are a wee bit kinder to our immediate environment these days... Already in the early 20th century Lyell had been a ghost town, vacated after people realized they weren't going to find gold in the river, and now there is nothing left (except for the info boards) to suggest that this dot on the map used to be a lively town. Interesting.
On Monday we reached the Tasman Sea, or the western shore of New Zealand, and headed south to inspect some weird geological phenomena called the Pancake Rocks. The Pancake Rocks are stacks of striped rocks that, of course, resemble very tall stacks of pancakes. They stand on a windy shore, beaten constantly by large and thunderous waves, which makes for a very impressive display, but not good photos. The blowhole that's advertised together with the pancakes is only active during high tide, so it's mostly a disappointment, as it usually doesn't blow when YOU are there. It was a pleasant stop on the way, but I would say that Shantytown, a much less visited but no less fascinating tourist destination some miles down the road, was a much more interesting break from driving.
Shantytown is a living museum of an old gold-mining settlement from the age of the gold rush (NZ, as well as Aussie, had their own gold rush just like the US) - and as far as we could tell, it really used to be a town and Shantytown was its real name. It was great! We visited a real old-times confectioner's store, bank where people used to cash out for their gold, a shoe store, barbershop, a mine, "Chinatown," a hospital with a surgery room, a Freemasons Hall (still in use), fire station AND we took a ride on an actual steam-engine train. (As you can tell, we are not hard people to amuse...) The place was filled with tons of old, cool stuff and you could almost smell the history in the air. You could even dress up as a saloon owner (Ryan) and a bar harlot (me) and have an old-looking photo taken, which, of course, we did because we allow ourselves to be cheesy from time to time. We didn't do the gold panning, however - that seemed like too much work for extra admission AND you didn't get to find any real gold. Maybe next time. Anyway, Shantytown was an interesting history lesson. New Zealand is very much like the US in many ways - in the 1800's NZ was a harsh frontier just like the old American West used to be(minus the rattlesnakes and combative natives). Early settlers had to cut through mountains and raft on wild rivers to start fragile existence in the bush. In the towns that survived, they left behind the cool Victorian frontier hotels that you'd expect John Wayne to walk out of. We see these hotels everywhere and we think that NZ looks just like the American southwest sometimes.
Our next destination, one of our main destinations in the South Island, was the glacier country. At dusk we arrived at a campground that was just at the doorstep of the Southern Alps, the magnificent mountain range that stretches almost along the entire west coast of the South Island. In the morning, we looked over the lake at which we camped and got our first glimpse of the snow-covered peaks. But only a glimpse - the mountains were mostly covered in thick clouds and we hoped that by the time we'd get to them and their glaciers, the clouds will miraculously dissipate and reveal their full splendor.
They didn't. We drove up to Franz Josef Glacier, a little town of lodges and restaurants catering to the busy tourist traffic going to see the Franz Josef and Fox glaciers, fixed some car trouble and went to book a helicopter flight over the glaciers. We were more than ready to spend $300 for 20 minutes of a most amazing view and a landing on the top of the glacier, but, alas, the weather wasn't with us. The last little hole in the clouds that gave us hope closed up within an hour and all helicopter flights were cancelled. Now we had two other options - to walk TO the glacier or book a guided hike ON the glacier, for which we would have had to stay for another day. Hiking on an ancient mountain of ice would have surely been very cool, but we sort of weren't in the mood and we didn't have the adequate attire, so we chose the easy walk instead.
Only about 4km down the road from the town, we reached the carpark and walked with literally hundreds of other tourists to a rocky expanse, from which we had a view of the light blue ice in the distance. In 1750, Franz Josef Glacier reached to about a mile before the carpark, in the 1800's this rocky expanse was filled with ice, in the 1930's this spot was a glacial lake where you could row between icebergs, and now you have to walk on it for about 1km and cross many icy streams to get to the edge of the mountain of ice. But surprisingly, the glacier doesn't only shrink these days. In the 1970's, the glacier was reduced to a tiny trickle that you couldn't even see from this viewpoint. Since then, the ice has expanded again to a considerable size, filling back up the massive valley it had carved so long ago. The barriers at this point didn't deter any of the livelier visitors from the 1km or so of a further walk closer to the ice. So we walked and enjoyed the awesome sight in front of us. (I personally also enjoyed the smell of snow that filled my lungs - this smell and the slight chill on the cheeks was what I longed for in the steamy tropics).
We couldn't take our eyes off the icy cliffs ahead of us - it was such an amazing and unfamiliar sight. The wonderful thing about NZ is not that it has glaciers (and these glaciers, I'm sure, are not the most spectacular or the biggest in the world), but the fact that it has two glaciers that are so easily accessible from the main road. You don't have to be a mountaineer with crampons, thousands of dollars of Goretex gear and years of experience under your belt to see a natural wonder that is quickly disappearing from the world. You can simply walk to it, or book a guided hike on it. You can be just a Jo Schmo driving by in your dilapidated campervan and practically run into it even if you didn't know it was there (since it would be hard to overlook the signs pointing you to it)! It's easier to get to these glaciers than sometimes getting to a public toilets is. Amazing. We didn't touch the ice - we respected the 4 "extreme danger" signs at the end of the walk and enjoyed our view from afar. Beyond this point, only the experienced and the guided were allowed to go. But that was enough for us, we had other places to see...
After Franz Josef, the weather was getting worse. We skipped the neighboring Fox Glacier because of the starting cold drizzle and because we had to be in the ski resort town of Wanaka by that evening. We drove in fog and rain past the Southern Alps whose splendid and snow-covered peaks were all disappointingly hidden in thick cloudage and pushed on in thick rain through Mount Aspiring National Park not concerned about the views we were missing because we couldn't wait to catch up with our backpacker friends Mark and Erica (whom we met on the North Island and who had just recently relocated to Wanaka) - and we were looking forward to a night on a couch!
We spent 2 nights in Wanaka with our friends. We peeled off our long underwear for a good wash, cooked some real breakfast and talked for hours. Wanaka is an Alpine-looking little town filled with lodges and surrounded on all sides by attractive mountains, but it was miserably cold and windy, which prevented us from seeing much of it. We were much more interested in staying warm in Mark and Erica's new apartment (which was pretty cold as it is, since Kiwis do not believe in central heating and we couldn't figure out the electric heater) and in catching up on all the new experiences we've all had, which was A LOT.
From Wanaka we headed, predictably, to Queenstown, the next town on the route to the Fiordland and another cool, adventuresome ski-resort town. Actually, Queenstown is supposed to be an "adventure capital of the world," which we could believe, since its streets are lines with bungy, jet-boating, white-water-rafting, skydiving and everything else booking offices. The town is absolutely awesome - nestled snuggly between much grander, bigger and more formidable mountains than those around Wanaka, filled with fancier hotels and bigger shopping malls...
To be continued next time...
Friday, April 06, 2007
Packhouse Blues
G'day everyone!
Tomorrow we celebrate: after two weeks of torture, we are at last emerging from the purgatory of a fruit packhouse job!
We are so happy it's over. It wasn't as hard, dirty and miserable a job as apple picking, but it was bad enough to make us count minutes till the end of the ordeal. My heart goes out to those poor souls who feed their children and pay rent on this sort of job. For us, it was just about making a little bit of play money for the rest of our holiday, so really, we can't complain.
Here's what happened: Last Monday, a few hours after writing our last blog entry, we set up camp in the kiwifruit orchard behind the Thomas Brothers packhouse outside of Motueka and on Tuesday we punched our timecards at 8AM for the first time. Ryan, the youthful healthy hunk he is, was immediately assigned to stacking full boxes, which, as it later turned out, is a job better suited for Bulgarian weight-lifters, not normal humans. I was put to one of the packing lines where I was happy to hear that I only had to worry about helping the apples into their trays and weeding out the ones with bruises, stem rips, stem punctures, discoloration, spots, rots, russet and any other "blemishes." And did you know that apples can also get sunburn? Sunburn was out, too. So for the next 8 hours, I stood by a conveyor belt staring at apples pouring onto my line as Ryan stacked 20kg boxes onto pallets 8 rows high. It seemed easy enough at first, but my back, neck, legs and shoulders started to stiffen after the first morning break and Ryan - poor Ryan. He and two other stackers were the galley slaves...
Here's our daily routine: Our alarm clock rings at 7AM, it takes us 15-20 minutes to motivate to get out of our warm sleeping bags and out into the cold and dewy orchard. At 8AM we clock in, girls put on their sexy hair nets, and we file in with dozens of other packers, graders and stackers into the bowels of the large and dusty packhouse where machines are already humming urgently. In a minute or so the hateful sound of apples falling on the lines is heard and we are busy at work till 10AM - the first "smoko." 10:10AM we are back, work till lunch that starts at 12:00PM. We wolf down sandwiches and are back at the lines and boxes at 12:30PM. We brace for the worst part of the day - the longest stretch till the next break at 2:50PM. We are all getting sore and bored, we complain to each other when we have time to look up from our work for a milisecond. We all think: "This is mind-numbing shit. Why am I here? I quit tomorrow. If they want me to pick out another f#$%ing bruise/stack another f$*#ing box, they better slow down the lines!" We all count seconds till the break. You hear the Irish girls laugh in the background - only the Irish can laugh in this sort of situation. Sympathetic glances, quick arm stretches, micro-conversations. The radio is blasting "the worst of the eighties, nineties and today", but luckily, the clicking of machines drowns out the howling of Avril Lavigne and Blink182. Then we exhale in relief - the break is here. We drink more coffee and tea (it's free!) and at 3:00PM we file in one more time. This is the home stretch, only an hour and a half to go - we can do this! At 4:30PM, the last fruit comes down the lines, the machines stop. We can't get out of there fast enough. We clock out and can barely stand, we're so exhausted. Ryan's face has a bluish tint from the blue dust that comes off the blue print on the boxes. We are happy the work day is over. If we take it one at a time, we can survive another day of this crap. So we go to our tent, rest, cook dinner in the kitchen, take a shower in the ancient orchard hut, go to sleep at 8 or 9PM. We notice that the orchard smells faintly like something died in it, and it's not until somebody explains to us that it's the kiwifruit - the fruit "that looks like sheep's nuts and smells like ass," as Ryan deftly put it.
And so this is pretty much how it went for the last 14 days. The lines were viciously fast every day and Ryan did some calculations with his fellow stackers: On an average day, they stacked about 90 pallets of boxes. Each pallet was 8 rows high, each row had 7 boxes. Each box is about 20-22kg. There were 3 stackers, so you do the math... Each stacker lifted about 1,600 boxes a day, which makes about 32,000 kgs in 8 hours(!) That should qualify Ryan for...something.
We got to know many of our fellow sufferers and thus met a bunch of fun and nice people - Kiwis, Irish, Hungarians, Czechs, Koreans and Americans - with whom we'll have a "barbie" tomorrow to say our goodbyes before the last leg of our NZ adventure. Blowholes and Big Ice, here we come!
Tomorrow we celebrate: after two weeks of torture, we are at last emerging from the purgatory of a fruit packhouse job!
We are so happy it's over. It wasn't as hard, dirty and miserable a job as apple picking, but it was bad enough to make us count minutes till the end of the ordeal. My heart goes out to those poor souls who feed their children and pay rent on this sort of job. For us, it was just about making a little bit of play money for the rest of our holiday, so really, we can't complain.
Here's what happened: Last Monday, a few hours after writing our last blog entry, we set up camp in the kiwifruit orchard behind the Thomas Brothers packhouse outside of Motueka and on Tuesday we punched our timecards at 8AM for the first time. Ryan, the youthful healthy hunk he is, was immediately assigned to stacking full boxes, which, as it later turned out, is a job better suited for Bulgarian weight-lifters, not normal humans. I was put to one of the packing lines where I was happy to hear that I only had to worry about helping the apples into their trays and weeding out the ones with bruises, stem rips, stem punctures, discoloration, spots, rots, russet and any other "blemishes." And did you know that apples can also get sunburn? Sunburn was out, too. So for the next 8 hours, I stood by a conveyor belt staring at apples pouring onto my line as Ryan stacked 20kg boxes onto pallets 8 rows high. It seemed easy enough at first, but my back, neck, legs and shoulders started to stiffen after the first morning break and Ryan - poor Ryan. He and two other stackers were the galley slaves...
Here's our daily routine: Our alarm clock rings at 7AM, it takes us 15-20 minutes to motivate to get out of our warm sleeping bags and out into the cold and dewy orchard. At 8AM we clock in, girls put on their sexy hair nets, and we file in with dozens of other packers, graders and stackers into the bowels of the large and dusty packhouse where machines are already humming urgently. In a minute or so the hateful sound of apples falling on the lines is heard and we are busy at work till 10AM - the first "smoko." 10:10AM we are back, work till lunch that starts at 12:00PM. We wolf down sandwiches and are back at the lines and boxes at 12:30PM. We brace for the worst part of the day - the longest stretch till the next break at 2:50PM. We are all getting sore and bored, we complain to each other when we have time to look up from our work for a milisecond. We all think: "This is mind-numbing shit. Why am I here? I quit tomorrow. If they want me to pick out another f#$%ing bruise/stack another f$*#ing box, they better slow down the lines!" We all count seconds till the break. You hear the Irish girls laugh in the background - only the Irish can laugh in this sort of situation. Sympathetic glances, quick arm stretches, micro-conversations. The radio is blasting "the worst of the eighties, nineties and today", but luckily, the clicking of machines drowns out the howling of Avril Lavigne and Blink182. Then we exhale in relief - the break is here. We drink more coffee and tea (it's free!) and at 3:00PM we file in one more time. This is the home stretch, only an hour and a half to go - we can do this! At 4:30PM, the last fruit comes down the lines, the machines stop. We can't get out of there fast enough. We clock out and can barely stand, we're so exhausted. Ryan's face has a bluish tint from the blue dust that comes off the blue print on the boxes. We are happy the work day is over. If we take it one at a time, we can survive another day of this crap. So we go to our tent, rest, cook dinner in the kitchen, take a shower in the ancient orchard hut, go to sleep at 8 or 9PM. We notice that the orchard smells faintly like something died in it, and it's not until somebody explains to us that it's the kiwifruit - the fruit "that looks like sheep's nuts and smells like ass," as Ryan deftly put it.
And so this is pretty much how it went for the last 14 days. The lines were viciously fast every day and Ryan did some calculations with his fellow stackers: On an average day, they stacked about 90 pallets of boxes. Each pallet was 8 rows high, each row had 7 boxes. Each box is about 20-22kg. There were 3 stackers, so you do the math... Each stacker lifted about 1,600 boxes a day, which makes about 32,000 kgs in 8 hours(!) That should qualify Ryan for...something.
We got to know many of our fellow sufferers and thus met a bunch of fun and nice people - Kiwis, Irish, Hungarians, Czechs, Koreans and Americans - with whom we'll have a "barbie" tomorrow to say our goodbyes before the last leg of our NZ adventure. Blowholes and Big Ice, here we come!
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