Brent and I spent a week on the South Island of New Zealand in late May/early June (that would make it late fall). I tend not to take pictures when I'm busy looking at things the first time, and for some things I had trouble getting good pictures, and besides the camera I had with me at the time has a limited amount of storage, so the pictures may not have all that much relationship with the text.
Getting to New Zealand took a very long time and something went wrong at every stage. We were late leaving Geneva (ground hold for traffic at Heathrow), even later arriving at Heathrow (free circling tour of London, where the number of fire-engine red cars boggles my mind), even later leaving Heathrow for Washington -- but we made up some of the time due to a medical emergency on board. Left Washington on time, but were late into LAX due to weather. Brent was even later. Boarded on time in LAX, but were way late out of LAX due to a mechanical failure. Therefore missed the plane in Auckland, but we probably would have anyway, 'cause we had to stop to declare my lost luggage.
We finally draggled into Christchurch, got the car and found the B&B, which was very nice. Saturday we wandered around Christchurch, which is really very full of Victorian pseudo-gothic red brick stuff. We had lunch at a restaurant which Brent thought was pseudo-French, but which I'm pretty sure was genuine French with pseudo-American touches (the special of the day was smoked salmon and cream cheese on a bagel -- with chips). I had a smoked salmon and hard-boiled egg salad that turned out to consist of a pile of home-smoked salmon the size of my head, lightly held together with mayonnaise and the occasional bit of egg, and when they said it was on a toasted brioche, they were not lying, it was actually toasted brioche. Lovely. The same restaurant turns out also to run a restaurant on the tram; your group gets on the tram, and every time it gets round to the stop with the restaurant, waiters rush back and forth with trays of things. We were impressed. We were less impressed to discover that McDonald's offers a version of this service.
I bought a bone carving, in a Maori fishhook design, at the Christchurch Arts center. I was tempted by some of the greenstone stuff (a lot of it is clunky, but a lot of it isn't) but settled on the bone because it was clearly a labor of love.
Saturday we went to the Christchurch museum, a fine museum in the European tradition of local museums. It started out with stuff on the Maori and the moas, and then rapidly moved on to an assortment of things that they happened to have. A nice costume exhibition; an exhibition of amazing Victorian things, including a stove in the shape of a suit of 13th century German armor; an exhibit of Chinese stuff including a stone from the Great Wall of China; an exhibit on geology that was clearly hand-labelled at about the time I was born, if not before; a fascinating section on shipwreck caches; and a bunch of stuffed birds.
Akeroa Bay
Then we went to Akeroa, the French settlement in New Zealand, which isn't very French these days, but does have a place that serves good hot chocolate. For dinner, we went to a wildlife park that does dinner and then shows you around in the dark; since most of New Zealand's wildlife is nocturnal, this is a good way to see it actually awake. Since the park was uncrowded (the entire occupancy was us, a pair of Japanese women, and a group of Thais with so much film equipment that Brent joked they seemed like a film crew -- which, in fact, they were) we got to get very close to the animals. I'd never realized that kiwis were actually utterly wingless. We got to see kiwis really, really up close (they like edges, including the fences separating their pens from the path), and moving around a lot. Of course, I'm probably on some Thai travel program making horrible faces at overenthusiastic eels (eels can crawl right out of the water, and these were, ick) and fascinated faces at keas and possums and kiwis. Truly, since everybody else was fiddling with cameras, I kept ending up within a few inches of the animals, which I thought was much more fun than trying to take photos.
This was where Brent discovered brandy snaps, which are actually very conservative for a New Zealand dessert; most of the rest of the ones they had involved things in vicious colours. He tried to claim the Smarties on top of one of them were M&Ms, and was un-dissuaded by my pointing out that some of them were pink.
Monday we took the TranzAlpine train across the South Island from east to west. This train serves no practical purpose; it exists to move tourists from place to place, and most of them actually aren't going anywhere except back to where they came from. They give you little headphones to listen to informative commentary on the scenery (which is impressive). Tree ferns are really quite something, and I finally figured out why so many Swiss rivers are funny colors -- it's the classic color of glacier-fed rivers. On the other hand, once you get to the other side, there isn't much there, and you're really just as happy to turn around and come back (although frankly, Greymouth's reasonably complete lack of tourist attractions was something of a relief at this point, it was a real town with real people buying real things). We were entertained part of the way back by a tourist family from the north island, taking the train a short ways in order to amuse the children, with stunning success. Their mother was sitting with us, and she and Brent talked about cattle ranching (they're dairy farmers). She was more than a little ambivalent about the fact that the children had ended up seated interleaved with other people, and were occasionally getting swept away by their enthusiasm and being loud. However, everybody was inclined to cut them some slack; she was keeping it to a dull roar, and they truly were fascinated by the whole experience, which was nice for those of us who were merely doing it again in reverse.
This is a river, as seen from the speeding TranzAlpine train. Believe it or not, this is one of my better photos from the train. I had terrible reflection problems (this one is from the observation car). At least you can tell that the scenery was odd...
Tuesday was on to Queenstown, after breakfast at the B&B with American Tourists. They were nice folks, but it was an awful lot like eating breakfast with a fifties TV show.
Queenstown is South. Queenstown is south of pretty near everything. (Not quite; it is north of Invercargill, Dunedin, and Stewart Island, to name only those places with hotels. It is also north of the entire continent of Antarctica, and the southernmost tip of South America. Still, it's not really very far north of anything on this planet.)
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Two pictures from our first night in Queenstown; sunset over lake Wakatipu, and a Paradise Shelduck hoping for a handout.
At this time of year, Queenstown is fairly cold (in the single Celsius digits, mostly), and it has that tide-is-out off-season vacation-town feel to it. Many things are closed or on reduced schedules, and the sun comes up at 8am and goes down again at 5pm like a good little office worker. The locals are taking a deep breath between the departure of the summer people and the arrival of the ski bums.
This part of New Zealand is reputed to be beautiful aside from hordes of tourists, even larger hordes of sandflies, and 7 meters of rain a year. Except winter is dry season and sandflies hate the cold even worse than tourists do, so it is currently jaw-droppingly gorgeous, sunny most days, set up for tourists but nearly empty, and cheap. The fall colour is also striking.
The fall colour at Arrowtown
Tuesday, when we arrived, we went to Arrowtown, where they used to mine gold. The Arrowtown museum has a timeline; at around the time my apartment was built, Europeans first heard rumours of the existence of lake Wakatipu, which Queenstown is next to. (They didn't actually get there for another decade.) Several towns here in Switzerlandare celebrating their thousandth anniversaries; that's about the date humans discovered New Zealand.
Wednesday we went flying. Queenstown is full of little airlines doing scenic tours; we chose the brochure that seemed the most down-to-earth, and got a nice guy in a Cessna 172 (we were hoping to get a bigger plane, because it was a kind neither of us had ever been in before, but at the last minute actual other tourists showed up, and there were four of them.) We flew from Queenstown to Milford Sound, across 4 mountain ranges. New Zealand mountains are jaggier even than the Alps, and many of them are brown, not just because it's winter but because they're covered in moss, the rain forest determined to survive at all costs. They are the prettiest mountains I have ever seen.
Two of my many unsuccessful attempts to photograph New Zealand mountains from the air
Milford Sound is very pretty, and we got within a few feet of a gigantic waterfall. I was an adult before I ever saw a waterfall, and I still think they're just unbelievably cool. Unfortunately, it is not penguin season, and we didn't see any dolphins, although we did see two incredibly apathetic fur seals.
Milford Sound, looking as if there wasn't really a sound there...
Dramatic lighting effects at Milford
We flew back from Milford sound over the glaciers. Glaciers are even better from the air, although flying over mountains is bumpy, and even more so when you're flying over ice-covered mountains on a bright sunny day, so I spent a fair amount of time closing my eyes and counting to 10 in various languages. Both the pilot and the weather were as accomodating as could be, and it was worth it.
On our way back from the airport, we wandered around a bit, and eventually noticed signs for a zoo. None of the guidebooks mentioned a zoo in the Queenstown vicinity, and besides, it was nearly 5, and most things zoo-like close at 5 in the winter, but we were in a sort of what-the-hell mood anyway, so we followed the signs, which led us into a non-descript suburb near the airport, and thence to a goat in a gatehouse. We passed the goat, and some sheep, and got to a tiny little parking lot, full of peacocks, with a white-board with prices on it, and a sign that said "Due to an unfortunate increase in dishonesty, please pay the keeper". We argued briefly about sticking around, and I won, and we asked the old guy raking out pens if they were still open. Oh yes, he said, enthusiastically, and showed us around.
It was his zoo, or anyway, his slightly-out-of-hand pet collection, kept on what used to be the town dump. We all got our share of amusement out of the event; I particularly enjoyed Inchy the chinchilla (zippy little buggers, chinchillas), and the keeper's story of the prize-winning goat that liked to ride to town in the truck, stick his head out the window, and bleat at passers-by. The nice thing about coming at dusk was that the possums were awake.
Our guidebook claimed that there was a restaurant in Queenstown called the Swiss Iglu, but fortunately or unfortunately it appears to have (in my opinion, deservedly) gone out of business since the guidebook was printed. (In answer to the most popular question this observation raises: No, the Swiss do not build igloos, in any spelling.)
Thursday we went to lake Te Anu-Au, to see the glow-worm caves. We threw in a brief visit to the local bird sanctuary, which has some very rare New Zealand birds, but Brent didn't want to go to the other local sight, the underwater trout observatory. Lake Te Anu-Au is a spectacular black lake with cute little round islands in places. The glow-worm caves reminded Brent of Pirates of the Caribbean; I have never been on the Pirates of the Caribbean, so they reminded me of being in a boat in a cave. I thought this was terribly exciting, if somewhat scary (the boat wobbles, there's clearly no risk at all, but I'm a little timid about boats). The glow-worms were unexpectedly good; they're really quite bright, much brighter and bluer than fireflies.
Lake Te Anu-Au
I'm sorry I didn't take a picture of the fields of red tussock grass, but the nice thing is that I thought about it a lot, so I have a really good memory of what it looked like. I did that a bunch. Doesn't do much for the rest of you, I'm afraid. The drive to Te Anau (which is the city on Lake Te Anu-Au) was very beautiful, and not only were there large flocks of sheep, one of them being herded, there were also large herds of deer and elk.
Queenstown from above
Friday we went up the hill on the gondola (a glorified chair lift which I was happy to see was made in Switzerland). There are really good views at the top, and a silly movie in ShowScan which is actually not bad as silly tourist movies go, although you have to wonder where the main character gets a freshly ironed shirt after the airplane crash, the toboggan down the mountains, and the extended rafting. (Oddly enough, Brent did not have to wonder this. I suppose he permanently suspended disbelief round about the time they successfully inverted and uninverted an aircraft that was supposed to be low on fuel at the time.) Then Brent went and rode a jetboat on the Shotover, an experience I passed on on the grounds that everybody I knew who had done it said with shining eyes that it was better than the best roller coaster they'd ever been on, and in my opinion, standing still on flat ground is better than the best roller coast I've ever been on. As predicted, Brent thought it was big fun. A jetboat is kind of a motorized waterbug; it skitters around on anything over a couple inches of water, in any direction and orientation it feels like.
The Shotover River -- jetboats with 10 people in them go past here.
Then we drove to Glenorchy, because we could. At Glenorchy, which is the end of the highway, there was a sign that said 'Paradise, 20 km', so clearly we had to go there, too. That was big time fun. I wouldn't have wanted to drive a single inch of it, but Brent doesn't mind gravel roads and it was a 4x4. Paradise is, indeed, quite attractive.
When we got back, we took another boat, this time across the lake that Queenstown is on. Most of the year, this route is served by a steamer that's been in commercial service on this lake since 1914, but we hit during the month it's out of the water for its annual. In any case, the boat goes across the lake to Walter Peak High Country Farm for a farm tour with or without food -- we took an evening trip with dinner. On the way from London to Washington, my seatmate was a guy from the American embassy to Pakistan and Bangladesh, who as it turned out had recently gone to the South Island of New Zealand on vacation, and he recommended this boat trip. He said it sounded hokey but was fun. Brent was less than entirely convinced ("Farms don't excite me. I grew up on a farm") but anything with a New Zealand carvery dinner in it is basically OK with him. (A New Zealand carvery dinner involves large amounts of roasted meat, plus roasted vegetables, and dessert -- always pavlova, a meringue object that Brent approves of, and in our first one also brandy snaps, which Brent *really* approves of and had never had before. The roasted vegetables generally include kumara, which are little white yams. Particularly when they're really little, they look like witchety grubs or something, but they taste yummy. They're my favorite part, although brandy snaps are not bad.)
On the down side, it turned out that this trip had been laid on for a large American church tour group; it was us, them, a local couple on a serious date, and four tourists from Auckland. They were, once again, extremely stereotypical but not really objectionable. After dinner, there was a farm tour. This involved the world's most placid bull, a Highland (small and shaggy), which was a bit boring. However, it also involved sheep dogs herding sheep, and one of the sheep dogs had puppies. Mr I-grew-up-on-a-farm was an instant convert. "Puppies! Awww!" We got to cuddle the puppies, too. To tell the truth, he'd been hoping to get to see sheep dogs the whole trip, and about the best we'd done was from the air, where you can tell there must be sheep dogs involved because of the way the sheep are moving, but you can't actually see them.
We left Queenstown in a cold drizzle. Checking in at Queenstown was interesting, since we were checking 4 bags to 3 destinations (my 2 to Los Angeles, one of Brent's to be reclaimed in Auckland, the other checked through to San Francisco). We then took a large turboprop aircraft run by Mount Cook airline to Christchurch.
In Christchurch we had most of 2 hours layover, so we went to the International Antarctic Centre (follow the blue footprints across the parking lot). This was big-time fun, I strongly recommend it. It is, in fact, the base point for a bunch of country's Antarctic missions, and it also has a superlative museum, full of hands-on stuff and information, ranging from the photo-of-the-day web site from McMurdo to current research projects, with a cute penguin film (they pop up out of the water like toast out of a toaster) and a serious penguin film (how to prove that seals are *not* actually all that cute; show one crunching up a penguin as if it were a piece of toast, except that usually you don't pause after the first bite of toast to make sure that your bread is actually dead). In the McMurdo base golf rules, if an animal moves your ball, you are allowed to replace it without penalty. However, if an animal removes your ball from play entirely, by stealing, eating, or destroying it, that's a penalty.
We then flew Air New Zealand from Christchurch to Auckland, where very little of interest happened. After that it was 11 hours via United to Los Angeles, and the third showing of "Grease" to come my way on this trip. We arrived in Los Angeles about the same time we had left Queenstown, on the same day, which was the first disorienting thing about the LA experience. The next disorienting factor was that LA was having proper LA weather. It was summer. It was brilliant. Sunny; a few little fluffy clouds; bouganvillea and jasmine blooming in great showy scented clumps all over the place. Mike carried me off and listened to me babble, and fed me Mexican food (I managed, narrowly, to avoid greeting the waiter with a cheerful "Salut!"), and, via a process involving all sorts of exciting research methods including a phone call to London, found a place that sold the digital camera I wanted and took me there.
Then we went to Venice Beach, and whatever remnants of grasp on reality I had fled, gibbering. This is of course a perfectly normal reaction to Venice Beach, even when you are not jetlagged out of your mind to begin with. I resisted Mike's promptings to get a temporary henna tattoo, pointing out that the people at work weren't really that easily shocked anyway. I did admire the roller skaters, both the dancing ones (very impressive) and the guy in the turban just kind of wandering around.
After that things become vague, but they do involve Chicago pizza and books, so I must have had a good time. Mike claimed at the time that I appeared to be awake. In the morning, it was off to LAX again, with a pause to take a few pictures of Mike's cactus garden.
A picture of some of Mike's cactus