avelog

But that’s alright, because we got lots of sunshine yesterday!

We’re currently in Dunedin visiting with Liz’s sister Laura, and Laura’s fiancé Nelson. We made our way down the coast from Akaroa, stopping in Oamaru for a night at a completely mediocre Top 10 holiday park. Top 10’s are supposed to be the best holiday parks around, and are priced accordingly, but I’ve been less than impressed thus far. Mostly filled with campers and sites less than a couple feet from eachother, crammed into a little grassy space with simple bathrooms and stove/sink for $26 per night for the two of us. We really need to swing by the Department of Conservation office here and grab a map with their campsites, since they tend to be much more scenic, and cost as little as nothing and at most $10. We’re more than willing to forego the kitchen and flush toilets for a bargain, a nice view and a smidgen of privacy.

Oamaru was a simple rural city of approx. 28 thousand. We went and watched the yellow-eyed penguins in the early evening as they made a very steep climb up the side of a hundred-foot cliff to get back to their nesting sites for the night. We also had a walk through the historic downtown filled with beautiful white limestone buildings and a nice church.

The drive down to Dunedin yesterday morning included a few stops along the way to enjoy the brilliant sunshine and magnificent views, as we opted to avoid the well-travelled SH1 highway and instead followed a couple of more relaxed, scenic, and local coastal roads. Upon arrival in Dunedin, a walk along the beach with Laura and Nelson was followed by wine and a filling pasta and roast vegetable dinner with some trip-planning thrown in. A night sleeping indoors on the floor of Laura and Nelson’s little rented room, along with the luxury of a borrowed pillow, provided a excellent contrast to our windswept, cold, and damp night huddled in the tent at Oamaru. This morning was swim and gym at the city’s main pool complex, which turned out to be very refreshing after a week of almost no vigorous exercise.

The plan from here is to sleep another night on the floor, perhaps heading out to the wildlife-filled Otago peninsula tomorrow. After another day or two around here we’ll be heading south to explore the Catlins coast, which is apparently less-frequented, more rugged, and more beautiful than anything we’ve seen thus far. The car has definitely been worth it, even though I think I may have to paper over the gas gauge so I don’t have to watch our fuel bill climbing at $1.50/litre. It’s great to be able to pull over for an hour and explore the countryside or enjoy the views wherever we want.

Due to the poor facilities in this particular soulless internet cafe, I won’t be uploading photos of penguins and rocks and such until sometime in the next couple of days.

I hope everyone is well back in Canada, and enjoying the late-March cold and snow!

Just a quick update with some photos. You can also visit my Flickr photo site to see more.

The area where we’ve been for the last two days, the Banks Peninsula, is the sunken remains of several massive volcanoes, and therefore the hills around here are the rim edges. You can see it fairly well on the google maps representation. We had a great hike up through the sheep farm we’re staying on yesterday, with lots of sheep and great views! We also had our first driving-through-the-cloud experience, when we took the half-hour drive up over the rim to Okains Bay for lunch and a walkabout. I couldn’t see more than 20 feet ahead, and nothing at all over the cliff edge we were driving along.

We’re now heading south, probably to stop in Oamaru and see some penguins. Apparently there’s not much else to do in that town. We need to find another Pak’n Save (like Canadian Superstore) so we can stock up on food again, since our budget is tight.

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.

Liz and I have arrived safely in Christchurch, having flown in on Jetstar from the Gold Coast. We got in at midnight to the quiet YHA hostel on the edge of the big park here, and found that nobody there would talk to us. The next morning, we immediately hiked over to the YMCA hostel, which had much nicer facilities and a friendlier crowd. We then spent the day trying to get food sorted out, having a walk through the gorgeous neighbouring park, discovering new and funny little birds, and having a jaunt through the Christchurch Art Gallery.

I pretty sure that we’ve decided to rent a car down to Queenstown so that we can see everything that we’d like. The rental should only be slightly more than $30 per day (cars are apparently dirt cheap here), but gas is upwards of $1.50 per litre (should be able to drink it at that price, feel bad burning it).

Hopefully we’ll have more reliable access to the internet and I’ll be able to get some more photos up. You may have noticed that I’ve uploaded 8 photos from our Gold Coast adventures to the Flickr site.

We had a nice day-trip down to Byron Bay the third day I was there, and spent the day sunning ourselves on the beach, frolicking in the ocean, and doing a bit of shopping in town. Byron Bay’s pretty touristy, but much less tacky than Surfer’s Paradise and the rest of the Gold Coast area. The first four pics above are from our walk up to the lighthouse in Byron Bay, from which we saw some dolphins dancing about and a couple of turtles floating by the cliffs. We woke early for the sunrise the next morning down at the beach near the grandparents’ place on the Gold Coast, followed by a drive up inland to Springbrook falls for a couple of short hikes out to lookouts. The drive up was quite exciting, both because of the incredible winding of the narrow road, and the proliferation of wallabies crossing in front of us. Fortunately, we managed to avoid hitting any.

Well, we’re off again to do some more adventuring around Christchurch before we head south to Dunedin!