from Akaroa, NZ
Four days into New Zealand and we have yet to see the sun! Fortunately, it hasn’t been raining either. After splurging on hostels our first two nights here, we’ve opted for tent sites the past two, with mixed results. Both the Rolleston YHA hostel and YMCA hostel in Christchurch seemed to be filled with fairly unfriendly if not hostile people, although we managed to strike up some conversation during breakfast of the second day. We decided to rent a car from Christchurch to Queenstown since it will allow us to see and do much more, after which we have a short break with two multi-day hikes and another, much cheaper car rental from Queenstown to Auckland. We immediately took the car over to the Christchurch gondola for a ride up, a walkabout at the lookout complex above, and a tour through the Heritage Time Tunnel, within which they seem to have spent all their funds on a slick, if not historically accurate, film presentation rather than on maintaining the lights, sounds, and other gadgets.
Camping in a holiday park our third night provided slightly better company and much cheaper accomodation. Holiday parks in this corner of the world involve an often crowded and stark campground with a small kitchen and bathrooms for sharing. Our fourth night, spent tenting at a farm hostel in Akaroa, turned out to be much more enjoyable, and we spent part of the evening chatting with those guests who were staying in the warmer main building. Our tent site is the highest of a series of sites on the side of a steep hill. We both managed to get through the first night without stepping out of the tent in the dark and rolling all the way down to the bottom.
It’s been fairly cold in New Zealand, with temperatures unlikely to have exceeded twenty degrees at any point, and dropping to less than ten or five at night. I understand from fellow travellers that we can expect the southern South Island to be a fair amount colder at that. They seem to have had a very cold summer this year in New Zealand, whereas the Gold Coast of Australia, where Liz spent the summer, saw some of the hottest and sunniest months on record.
We had our first real (read anxiety-filled) adventure yesterday. Having not yet adjusted ourselves to the realities of driving in New Zealand, we hadn’t adjusted our sense of what constitutes a road. What appeared on the map in the guidebook to be a paved and fairly well-used road turned out to be a harrowing and wild hour of narrower-than-one-lane dirt track winding entirely along cliff-sides with hundreds-of-meters drop on one side and rock wall on the other. By the time we realized where we were, we had committed ourselves, there being nowhere to turn around and a large tractor blocking our retreat. Definitely the most exciting driving I’ve ever done, and I’m very thankful that our brand spanking new set of tires on the rental car didn’t blow out at an inconvenient time. Thankfully we simply emerged a little dusty at the other end. I’m also quite thankful there were no other stupid tourists lost and driving the other direction along the same stretch of dirt track. The tractor turned out to be the only vehicle we encountered, and its operator kindly drove a few feet up a hill to let us past.
We’re planning on spending another night tenting at the farm hostel here in Akaroa before heading off, possibly back to Christchurch to meet up with Liz’s friend, or south down the coast towards Dunedin.