Christchurch to Te Anau - April 30th to May 8th
New Zealand seems to have more weather than anywhere else in the world. It deftly manages to fit lashing rain, bitter wind, mist, fog, blazing sunshine and hail all into the same day in varying quantities. One cannot rise in the morning and dress sensibly as it's entyirely possible to be in need of shorts, t-shirt, rain mac, scarf, and sun hat all in the space of about two hours. I arrive in Christchurch, principle city of the South island, to a tempurature of five degrees and clouds that promise rain. Australia this is not.
I had spent just a couple of days back in Sydney, staying at Asylum hostel, to celebrate Eli's 22nd birthday (or, due to the fact that her 21st was a non-event, her 2nd 21st. I have never seen a more touching display of affection for someone than this day. All the Swede's mates, myself included, have known her for not more than a month, and yet she is treated like the oldest of friends by everyone. I buy her lunch at Vaucluse House, a very English tea room set in lush gardens that Nick has landed a job at, accompanied by Natalie, another Swede and a very sweet girl. Later Nick and I reserve a table at an Indian restuarant and eight of us head out to take Eli for a meal, party poppers exploding every five minutes. A cake and candles brings tears to our friend's eyes, not a first as she has already cried over the group card from all at Asylum. We head out to Darling Harbour but realise, after much tramping around, that we would have been better off in King's Cross, away from the snotty bouncers, strict dress codes and outrageous drink prices of Sydney's trendiest nightlife area. We end up, just Nick, Eli and myself now, in an Irish pub near the hostel, drinking -joy of joys!- cider. Later we fall asleep all wound up together on a little sofa at Asylum and I feel safe and happy. The next night I dine out Jess, Justine, and the 501/801 crew. I haven't seen some of them in a while so it's lovely to hang with them again, but sadly I cannot spend the night as I realise, suddenly, that I booked my flight for 7.50am. In what world I though that was a good idea, I don't know.
12 hours later and I am in New Zealand. The hostel I find for myself in Christchurch is an all women one and extremely cosy. There's gorgeous gardens full of herbs, a resident cat, blazing fires, soft sofas, a great kitchen, clean bathrooms and more chick flicks on DVD than you can shake a stick at. Girls: we know how to live. The rain continues to fall and so I watch movies and catch up on some seriously missed sleep.
The next day I spend with two fellow hostelers, Kerry, a 26 year old Liverpudlian, and Jodie, a 33 year old Kiwi. They are both great, if completely different- Kerry is sarcastic, funny, and strong, Jodie is more reserved but thoughtful, sweet, and wise. We eat both lunch and dinner out -an unheard of extravagance for a traveller- the latter with a Kiwi friend of theirs named Steve, before heading out to an Irish pub for Guinness and folk music. Back at home we watch 'Best Of Britain' on video and laugh at its desperately bias, out-dated, and incomplete representation of our country while Jodie coos over the quaint cottages and magnificent castles.
Wednesday dawns as miserable and wet as its predecessor but I venture out to meet the originally Canadian but now local Frederique, a couchsurfer. We have tea and quite possibly the best muffin I have ever had and chat about our wildly different lives for a couple of hours. Fred is intelligent and candid. We decided to walk down and peruse the city's excellent art gallery together. A giant inflatable bunny takes up most of the huge entrance hall and we wanter about for an hour, puzzling over the strange and sometimes scary pieces in the modern art exhibition. This evening, a tiny, unbelievably curvy, short-haired American with a cheerful smile makes conversation with me over ravioli in the kitchen. We watch two chick flicks together and end up chatting until late. This is Anne, 30 years old from Vermont but now living in Washington DC, an interior designer taking a seven mont break from her hectic life. She has a car, Sammy, whose enitre bonnet is covered with a painting of a sunflower, and it is this funky vehicle Anne offers me a lift in to Dunedin, the next city down the coast. I jump at the offer. We set a leaving date for Friday and part to go to sleep.
Christchurch is a very quaint city, built in a pseudo-English style and centered around Cathedral Square. It is here I start my Thursday, with a free half-hour tour of the beautiful gothic cathedral. I am the tour's only participant and so my guide leads me around this magnificent building giving me plenty of interesting tid bits. It seems the early British settlers were promised a fully established town but upon arriving found little more than marshland. But they sucked it up, stuck it out and built the cathedral, turning Christchurch into a piece of home. Afterwards I stroll into the Botanical Gardens. These are the best I've seen so far, the falling golden and brown leaves smell of England, there's a winding river and numerous ponds being wept over by willows and boredered by mossy rocks. An English rose garden finishes my cold but miraculously sunny walk. It's like a crisp autumn day in Dorset. Next I take another free tour, this time of the excellent Canterbury museum, and feel suitable cultured for the day.
Anne and I leave early this Friday morning. The sun is shining and the day feels like a good one for adventuring, a thought I impart to Anne. Sammy cruises down the coast and we are given alternating views of the Pacific Ocean on one side and the mountains on the other. I insist we make and very windy detour to the Moeraki Boulders, huge spherical rocks that have mysteriously formed on one of the East Coast's beaches. Anne and I strike poses standing on them before running back to the warmth of the car. Another, more disappointing stop off is made at Shag Point. Anne is inconsolable when we discover that there is no sign saying 'Shag Point' that we can take photos standing next to but we are both cheered by the sight of wild penguins. The rest of the way to Dunedin we make childish jokes about how we've only known each other for a day but we're already at the shag point.
Dunedin is a peaceful little student city that sits picturesquely on the water, a few miles in from the open sea at Otago Peninsula. Our hostel is pretty much anyone's granny's house on a larger scale but it's comfy and kitsch so all is well. After an evening spent chatting, we while away Saturday with some very fortuitous second hand clothes shopping and a gorgeous drive out to the peninsula for a picnic of fresh farmer's market food. On Sunday Anne departs for the wineries -she is a conniseur and obsessive- and I board the Taeiri Gorge train, a 1920s relic that takes the rider deep into the gorge over old bridges, viaducts, and through the most beautiful high hills carved in two by a sparkling and meandering river. The sun is out again and, despite the most chronic hacking couch, the day is extrermely pleasant and relaxed.
It seems Anne is not sick of me yet so we depart together for Te Anau and stay in Rosie's Backpacker's, a homestay hostel in this little lakeside town- the closest you can get to the Fiordland National Park which consumes most of the Southland's South West coast. On Tuesday we take a tour of Milford Sounds. The National Park has many fiords, incorrectly named 'sounds' by the hapless Captain Cook, and Milford is one. Not that Cook knew that, as he didn't spot the entrance. Similarly, he thought that the immense Franz Josef glacier up the coast was a low lying cloud, despite visting it twice. A fiord is a velley cut by a glacier and flooded by the sea and Milford is regarded as being one of the world's most spectacular examples of this natural process. The minivan trip to our cruise lasts a couple of hours and includes some textbook photo opportunities. We stop at Mirror Lakes, oxbox lakes that relect exactly the mountains that towere over them. Low early morning mist lingers over the once glacier covered plains, and the river cuts extraordinary shapes into the rock. Primordial forest, thick with moss and impossibly green, borders the road until we travel through a mountain tunnet cut more that fifty years before. And to top it all off, there is not a cloud in the sky. It is, to say the least, spectacular. We arrive at Milford and board our ship which takes us leaisurely out to the Tasman Sea. The commentary is excellent and against all odds (they average nearly 300 days of rain here, around 8 metres a year) the sun keeps shining. The highlight of the day comes when the dolphins play next to the boat, showing off their skills to the tourists and seals, who watch lazily from their sun-drenched rocks. It is a supremely relaxing and fulfilling day I will not soon forget.
Anne and I spend th evening chatting and arguing. She is very much like the sister I never had in that we spend 60% of our time together playfully bickering and insulting each other (I am forever calling her short of old and sometimes both), 30% having in-depth discussions on life, and 10% laughing, mainly at immature jokes. My cough has been with me a week now and I am kept awake every night by it so when I climb into bed tonight I am exhausted. I hackingly couch the night away before daylight dawns on Ash and Anne's Adventures: Part Two.
I had spent just a couple of days back in Sydney, staying at Asylum hostel, to celebrate Eli's 22nd birthday (or, due to the fact that her 21st was a non-event, her 2nd 21st. I have never seen a more touching display of affection for someone than this day. All the Swede's mates, myself included, have known her for not more than a month, and yet she is treated like the oldest of friends by everyone. I buy her lunch at Vaucluse House, a very English tea room set in lush gardens that Nick has landed a job at, accompanied by Natalie, another Swede and a very sweet girl. Later Nick and I reserve a table at an Indian restuarant and eight of us head out to take Eli for a meal, party poppers exploding every five minutes. A cake and candles brings tears to our friend's eyes, not a first as she has already cried over the group card from all at Asylum. We head out to Darling Harbour but realise, after much tramping around, that we would have been better off in King's Cross, away from the snotty bouncers, strict dress codes and outrageous drink prices of Sydney's trendiest nightlife area. We end up, just Nick, Eli and myself now, in an Irish pub near the hostel, drinking -joy of joys!- cider. Later we fall asleep all wound up together on a little sofa at Asylum and I feel safe and happy. The next night I dine out Jess, Justine, and the 501/801 crew. I haven't seen some of them in a while so it's lovely to hang with them again, but sadly I cannot spend the night as I realise, suddenly, that I booked my flight for 7.50am. In what world I though that was a good idea, I don't know.
12 hours later and I am in New Zealand. The hostel I find for myself in Christchurch is an all women one and extremely cosy. There's gorgeous gardens full of herbs, a resident cat, blazing fires, soft sofas, a great kitchen, clean bathrooms and more chick flicks on DVD than you can shake a stick at. Girls: we know how to live. The rain continues to fall and so I watch movies and catch up on some seriously missed sleep.
The next day I spend with two fellow hostelers, Kerry, a 26 year old Liverpudlian, and Jodie, a 33 year old Kiwi. They are both great, if completely different- Kerry is sarcastic, funny, and strong, Jodie is more reserved but thoughtful, sweet, and wise. We eat both lunch and dinner out -an unheard of extravagance for a traveller- the latter with a Kiwi friend of theirs named Steve, before heading out to an Irish pub for Guinness and folk music. Back at home we watch 'Best Of Britain' on video and laugh at its desperately bias, out-dated, and incomplete representation of our country while Jodie coos over the quaint cottages and magnificent castles.
Wednesday dawns as miserable and wet as its predecessor but I venture out to meet the originally Canadian but now local Frederique, a couchsurfer. We have tea and quite possibly the best muffin I have ever had and chat about our wildly different lives for a couple of hours. Fred is intelligent and candid. We decided to walk down and peruse the city's excellent art gallery together. A giant inflatable bunny takes up most of the huge entrance hall and we wanter about for an hour, puzzling over the strange and sometimes scary pieces in the modern art exhibition. This evening, a tiny, unbelievably curvy, short-haired American with a cheerful smile makes conversation with me over ravioli in the kitchen. We watch two chick flicks together and end up chatting until late. This is Anne, 30 years old from Vermont but now living in Washington DC, an interior designer taking a seven mont break from her hectic life. She has a car, Sammy, whose enitre bonnet is covered with a painting of a sunflower, and it is this funky vehicle Anne offers me a lift in to Dunedin, the next city down the coast. I jump at the offer. We set a leaving date for Friday and part to go to sleep.
Christchurch is a very quaint city, built in a pseudo-English style and centered around Cathedral Square. It is here I start my Thursday, with a free half-hour tour of the beautiful gothic cathedral. I am the tour's only participant and so my guide leads me around this magnificent building giving me plenty of interesting tid bits. It seems the early British settlers were promised a fully established town but upon arriving found little more than marshland. But they sucked it up, stuck it out and built the cathedral, turning Christchurch into a piece of home. Afterwards I stroll into the Botanical Gardens. These are the best I've seen so far, the falling golden and brown leaves smell of England, there's a winding river and numerous ponds being wept over by willows and boredered by mossy rocks. An English rose garden finishes my cold but miraculously sunny walk. It's like a crisp autumn day in Dorset. Next I take another free tour, this time of the excellent Canterbury museum, and feel suitable cultured for the day.
Anne and I leave early this Friday morning. The sun is shining and the day feels like a good one for adventuring, a thought I impart to Anne. Sammy cruises down the coast and we are given alternating views of the Pacific Ocean on one side and the mountains on the other. I insist we make and very windy detour to the Moeraki Boulders, huge spherical rocks that have mysteriously formed on one of the East Coast's beaches. Anne and I strike poses standing on them before running back to the warmth of the car. Another, more disappointing stop off is made at Shag Point. Anne is inconsolable when we discover that there is no sign saying 'Shag Point' that we can take photos standing next to but we are both cheered by the sight of wild penguins. The rest of the way to Dunedin we make childish jokes about how we've only known each other for a day but we're already at the shag point.
Dunedin is a peaceful little student city that sits picturesquely on the water, a few miles in from the open sea at Otago Peninsula. Our hostel is pretty much anyone's granny's house on a larger scale but it's comfy and kitsch so all is well. After an evening spent chatting, we while away Saturday with some very fortuitous second hand clothes shopping and a gorgeous drive out to the peninsula for a picnic of fresh farmer's market food. On Sunday Anne departs for the wineries -she is a conniseur and obsessive- and I board the Taeiri Gorge train, a 1920s relic that takes the rider deep into the gorge over old bridges, viaducts, and through the most beautiful high hills carved in two by a sparkling and meandering river. The sun is out again and, despite the most chronic hacking couch, the day is extrermely pleasant and relaxed.
It seems Anne is not sick of me yet so we depart together for Te Anau and stay in Rosie's Backpacker's, a homestay hostel in this little lakeside town- the closest you can get to the Fiordland National Park which consumes most of the Southland's South West coast. On Tuesday we take a tour of Milford Sounds. The National Park has many fiords, incorrectly named 'sounds' by the hapless Captain Cook, and Milford is one. Not that Cook knew that, as he didn't spot the entrance. Similarly, he thought that the immense Franz Josef glacier up the coast was a low lying cloud, despite visting it twice. A fiord is a velley cut by a glacier and flooded by the sea and Milford is regarded as being one of the world's most spectacular examples of this natural process. The minivan trip to our cruise lasts a couple of hours and includes some textbook photo opportunities. We stop at Mirror Lakes, oxbox lakes that relect exactly the mountains that towere over them. Low early morning mist lingers over the once glacier covered plains, and the river cuts extraordinary shapes into the rock. Primordial forest, thick with moss and impossibly green, borders the road until we travel through a mountain tunnet cut more that fifty years before. And to top it all off, there is not a cloud in the sky. It is, to say the least, spectacular. We arrive at Milford and board our ship which takes us leaisurely out to the Tasman Sea. The commentary is excellent and against all odds (they average nearly 300 days of rain here, around 8 metres a year) the sun keeps shining. The highlight of the day comes when the dolphins play next to the boat, showing off their skills to the tourists and seals, who watch lazily from their sun-drenched rocks. It is a supremely relaxing and fulfilling day I will not soon forget.
Anne and I spend th evening chatting and arguing. She is very much like the sister I never had in that we spend 60% of our time together playfully bickering and insulting each other (I am forever calling her short of old and sometimes both), 30% having in-depth discussions on life, and 10% laughing, mainly at immature jokes. My cough has been with me a week now and I am kept awake every night by it so when I climb into bed tonight I am exhausted. I hackingly couch the night away before daylight dawns on Ash and Anne's Adventures: Part Two.
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