Day 246 – 04 April 2010: A glacial day

After a brief forest walk by the stream, we start off towards the Fox and Franz Joseph Glaciers. Our first stop on the way is at Bruce Bay, a long rocky beach where a tradition has arisen whereby people leave trinkets, random objects (like shoes), or just a pile of rocks at the top of the beach and write messages on them. I write a message on a rock with a light blue marker saying ‘Caz, Mary and Justin – UK to Oz 2009-10: NZ #1’, but the ink seeps into the rock and evaporates before my eyes.

We arrive at Fox Glacier in time for a pre-lunch walk. The glacial stream interrupts the route to the glacier, though there is a line of rocks to use as steps through it at which a queue has built up. I have a little slip when it is my turn and this is enough to defeat Mary. She finds a crossing further up stream where it is shallower, but is turned back by Department of Conservation officials who chastise her for going off the track.

There are a number of signs on the designated walking track warning against leaving it, though some give historical information, e.g. the glacier has been in retreat for centuries. Near the bottom of the glacier, there is a fence and a sign saying it is dangerous to go beyond this point without a guide. We are still about fifty metres from the ice, so I go over to climb a boulder to get a better view of the ice cave from which flows the glacial stream and as a little act of rebellion.

After lunch, we drive onwards to Franz Joseph. There is a small resort village here, and Mary and Caz book a helicopter flight to go up the glacier tomorrow, from where they will be dropped off for a walk down it. I am not too comfortable with the idea of a helicopter flight, and it is very expensive, so I choose a cheaper option by booking a quad bike ride.

Caz and I go for another glacial walk. Franz Joseph is the more popularly visited glacier, and it is bigger and more impressive than Fox, though I did like the more intimidating landscape at the latter. However, for waterfall fans, FJ is also more of a treat, as several tumble down from the surrounding mountains. This trail isn’t so defined nor so policed with safety officials as at Fox either, so I am able to go up near the waterfalls. I get a slightly euphoric feeling going up close to powerful falls. Some might describe it as feeding off the energy, but I don’t believe in that hippy crap.

It is raining, so after the walk we decide to look for a hostel to stay at tonight. It is Easter though, so a lot of places are fully booked. We stop at the Rainforest Retreat Lodge. There is a Kiwi Experience bus parked outside, these being notorious vehicles for rowdy teenagers and twentysomethings getting escorted on a shagathon tour of the country. I am given a key to look at a room, but when I open the door I find an embarrassed looking couple jumping from the bed, although they are fully clothed. They have apparently just taken the room. The girl from reception gives us another key, and it looks comfortable and is fairly cheap at NZ $90. However, by the time we get back to reception to say we will take it, this too has been booked by somebody else. This only leaves the dorms, which will be full of the Kiwi Experiencers. We decide that we will rough it again tonight.

The Department of Conservation are good value, as I’ve said before, at approximately $6 a night per person, and they all have drop toilets that somehow don’t smell too bad (with plenty of TP too!). Tonight’s, the Otto / Macdonalds site overlooking Lake Mapourika, is a short drive from the Franz Joseph village. As we are setting up camp, a pick up truck carrying three men stops near us. Leaving the truck blocking the site exit and, without shutting the doors, they trot down to the lakeside with their dog. I assume that they will be there for a few minutes, but in fact they stay for a half hour or more. Recently, there was a story on the news about somebody getting shot at a campsite, so I am a little nervous of this somewhat suspicious behaviour. However, I think they were doing some flash fishing, or perhaps setting some nets. Perhaps they left the truck ready for a quick escape because they didn’t have a fishing license....

It rains again during the night.

Day 245 – 03 April 2010: to Jet Boat or not to Jet Boat, scenic driving

One of our fellow guests at the hostel is Michelle from Oregon. She is also leaving Queenstown today, and Mary, Caz and I had been considering getting a jet boat ride up the Dart River at Glenorchy, which is an hour or two away from Queenstown at the northern tip of Lake Wakatipu. Michelle is also going up there, so I tell her that we will give her a lift. However, by the time we are ready to leave Scallywags, Mary tells me it is too late for us to catch the Jet Boat at Glenorchy. Ah well, we give Michelle a lift there anyway, even though we will have to turn back again to get to our next destination of Franz Joseph glacier.

At Glenorchy, Caz and Mary again decide to stay in the van while spend a few minutes wandering along the bank of the lake. Here it is quite choppy and the water is like the sea with little white tip waves and foaming circle currents colliding with the shore. Meanwhile the Dart River Jet Boat’s company base looks decidedly open and active. However, having got my adrenaline fix myself with my river boarding trip, I am not complaining when neither Caz nor Mary express any interest in participating.

The drive to Glenorchy and then back to Queenstown features some more great scenery with mists floating around the mountains that climb up from the lake.

It is quite damp today, and for tonight’s camp we find another Department of Conservation site called Pleasant Flat which is in the Mount Aspiring National Park. The site lies next to the Haast River and features good views of Mount Hooker. Perhaps more importantly it has a sheltered seating and cooking area.

the view from Scallywags hostel

 

New Zealand Pictures Part 2 (post Milford Sound)

Day 244 – 02 April 2010: A life without risk is not a life worth living

When we arrived yesterday, we had to spend some time finding accommodation as it is Easter this weekend and Queenstown is busy.

The hostel we find is called ‘Scallywags’, a few minutes drive from the town centre. It’s run by a welcoming and talkative retired male nurse called Evan. I say welcoming, but when three Taiwanese girls arrive enquiring about a room while he is showing us around, he asks us to wait a moment so that he can tell the girls that he can’t help them, when in fact that he has several rooms available. Actually, he does give them a room and I learn over the next couple of days that he has a slightly prickly sense of humour.

I asked him about a regal rug he had hanging up in the hallway which dated from the reign of whichever king it was a portrait of. He tells me he has been told that it is Edward VII, but I suggest that it is actually George VI, the father of the current queen, and he seems impressed by this. Then later, after we have both had a few glasses of wine, he returns to prickly, responding to my question about which jet boat ride to take by telling me to do my research (i.e. read the leaflets in the hostel) and then ask him a question.

The hostel is also his home, with his office being a desk in the corner of the kitchen. The living room is his living room too. It’s a very comfortable hostel, situated on a slope going up Ben Lomond, and the balcony off the living room looks over Lake Wakatipu. If you can tolerate Evan’s eccentricities, it is a very homely place to stay. Speaking to other guests, I discover that several people stay here for long periods and there are a line of postcards on display in the kitchen from people declaring their fondness for Scallywags and Evan. We only chose to stay in a hostel because of the soaking Mary and I’s tents took the night previous. One thing though, Evan doesn’t seem to believe in computers, so there’s no internet access.

Back to today and Queenstown: we had been considering doing a jet boat ride, i.e. a speed boat powered by jet engines that throws you around rivers. However, the ladies are not all that keen and eventually I sign up for a white water river boarding trip with ‘Mad Dog Adventures’ for this afternoon instead.

Killing time until it’s time to go back to the Mad Dog office, I watch a street performer who calls himself ‘Slim Pickings’. He spends a bit too much time building up his audience, but then he get going with some juggling, a trick with a flaming hat, doing a Houdini with a straight jacket and chains, and finishing off with sword swallowing. There’s an attractive goth girl who waits around to talk to him after he finishes. He is the first street performer I’ve seen to get a groupie. Funnily, he doesn’t say too much to her and seems quite shy.

Finally at lunch time, I go back to the Mad Dog office to get on the bus to the river. We get changed into wet suits at a hut they keep next to the river on the grounds of an old mine, which is now open as an attraction where participants go panning for gold. This seems quite boring compared to what else is available to do in and around Queenstown.

Surfing down grade 2 to 3 rapids on a body board is quite fun, but can be tiring as it is something of an effort to keep going or staying on the board when the water speeds up. It’s more fun to get on a board tied to the back of a jet ski which then throws you around the river until it is the next persons turn, at which point the jet ski does an about face, ejecting you off the board so that you go skidding down the river. After this, it can be quite fun to jump from a ten metre cliff into the cold rapid water, although this is not so much fun if you hold your hands to slow you down on impact with the water, only for your hands to make a sound like slapping a snare drum. It’s actually quite painful, as the blackness in the palm of my hands testified. This didn’t stop me going down a slide on the rocky slopes with my body board which then propelled me across the river. And it didn’t stop me climbing up onto a platform to get on a swing that threw me back into the water, though this was probably a bit of a mistake too, as the swing flipped me over and I hit the surface with the back of my head with a thud. This isn’t quite as funny as the girl who let go of the swing at the lowest point, leaving her sliding and tumbling across the surface with her limbs flailing. I bet you’re not allowed to do this kind of thing in Australia.

On the bus back into town, one of the guys who nervously did a lower cliff dive than mine reveals that he has vertigo, which would explain his nerves somewhat. He is a doctor, probably in his mid forties, and he defines vertigo as the tendency to imagine yourself jumping off when you are crossing a tall bridge. It’s not just me then. However, he then explains that he took up sky diving to try to cure his vertigo. After seventy odd dives, it hasn’t worked. So Far. Given how nervous he was at diving from the cliff earlier, I can’t imagine what he’s like when he’s about to jump out of a plane.

When I get back to the hostel, I have a long chat with Steven, who is my roommate in the male dorm (Evan is quite old fashioned like that) at Scallywags. We have both discovered that on Good Friday, Easter and Christmas, the liquor stores are shut and pubs can only serve alcohol with food. Oddly though, it being Good Friday today, it seems the churches are also closed, or at least Steven couldn’t find one that was open when he went out this morning to catch a service.

After an hour or so chatting to Steven, Evan comes into the dorm unannounced and declares that there is not enough air in the room and opens the windows wider, making the room somewhat brisk. He joins our conversation which has now moved onto the increasingly rules based culture of western and Australasian societies. When I complain about the closing of the pubs today, Evan protests that it is a Christian society and what do I need the alcohol for anyway? A Christian society where the churches don’t open on Good Friday....

At 8:30 in the evening Steven suggests it is time for dinner, so I take the opportunity to leave Evan to it and invite Steven to join the ladies and me for a pizza in town. Many places are closed, but we find a ‘gourmet pizza’ place that is also a bar. As we are waiting for food, we are allowed to order drinks. Though all the tables are full, there seem to be even more people at the bar ‘waiting for a table’. Because of the holiday and the fact that there are so few places open, in the spirit of Christianity the restaurant has put a 20% surcharge on all the prices on the menu. As I have found in Australia, ‘gourmet pizza’ means that that they don’t know how to make a decent margarita pizza. The base is wholemeal dough, and there is not enough tomato sauce on it. It’s only worth a five or six. I had been expecting pizza in Oz and NZ to be the best of my journey so far, but I have been disappointed so far.

Day 243 – 01 April 2010: Ladies and Gentlemen, Milford Sound

I wake up in a wet sleeping bag and a flooded tent. As we journey toward Milford Sound the rain continues to flush down.

I had thought about going to Doubtful Sound instead of Milford Sound, as it had been recommended by Lonely Planet, though it is smaller. Also, it can only be accessed by boat. However, having chatted to a Kiwi in the kitchen last night, he recommended Milford Sound as the more spectacular.

As we pass over a narrow bridge coming near to Milford Sound, I notice that there is a waterfall passing under the bridge with a level of violence that makes me stop and turn around to get a better look. It is not the biggest waterfall by any means, but water is gushing with an intensity that I do not think I have ever seen before. Though I am soaking in the rain, it puts a smile on my face. I am told later by a local guide that this waterfall is hardly noticeable on dry days.

It is still teeming with rain when we get to the Milford Sound car park. Having come here only because the girls wanted to, it annoys me a little when they say that they would rather stay dry than go out on one of the boat trips available for exploring the sound. Still, there’s a Kiwi – of the fowl kind, rather than the fruit or fellow - wandering around the car park, so at least they have seen something....

Having come all this way, especially considering that we have travelled for hundreds of kilometres specifically to get here, I am not leaving without going onto the Fjord*. I pay NZ $90 for a boat trip dubbed the ‘Nature Encounter’. This is supposed to be different to the other trips available as it promises to go up close to the mountains and waterfalls.

When I get onto the boat, the two guides are a young Irishman and an equally young Kiwi, both of whom are friendly and chatty. They are not too busy as the boat is supposed to take about a hundred people, and there are only about thirty people on board. Ironically, I think this is because of the rain. I say ironically because a handful of people on board are Milford Sound guides on their day off and they are here specifically because of the rain. Although there is about 7m of rain here annually, they say there hasn’t been such an intense day of it for a long time and they are coming out because the waterfalls will be much more powerful and numerous than normal.

*One of the things explained by the guides is that Milford Sound is a misnomer, in that a ‘sound’ is formed by a river being flooded over by the sea, while Milford Sound is in fact a Fjord, i.e. a valley into the sea formed by a glacier. The difference then is the difference between ice and water. The same is true of Doubtful Sound, but to compensate for this, the area is dubbed Fiordland National Park, though they still haven’t managed to spell it right. Ironically, the only individual places that are called Fjords in the area are bodies feeding off Lake Wakatipu by the Remarkables mountain range, so they are not Fjords at all. So whoever originally named this part of New Zealand didn’t seem to know their geography.

Today’s rain means that we can’t see very far to some of the peaks made famous by their inclusion in the Lord of the Rings films. However, with the hundreds of towering waterfalls, some viciously pounding into the fjord and some serenely cascading down, with mountains rising right out of the water and with the great mists tumbling over the overhanging peaks, those who have skipped out today because of the rain have made a big mistake. You can call it fantastical, you can call it Tolkienesque or perhaps otherworldly. I just call it bloody awesome. And really the pictures don’t even do it justice.

There are rain coats on board, and these are not just for those who have come unprepared for rain. You can sit in the inside deck drinking tea or coffee if you want to, but more hardy souls are invited to stand on the bow of the boat as we approach the waterfalls. I have brought a plastic mac that I found in the clothes bins at Foley Towers hostel in Christchurch, but it isn’t robust enough for this.  Several times we inch up close to the bottom of a fall, and the water deflects off the surface of the fjord and pounds our faces like large hail stones. I have to turn away from hanging over the bow, but I stay outside and get soaked through to the skin, despite the rain coat. My camera is wet and fogged up too.

One of the off duty guides who have come on this trip is a Japanese girl who does the trips for Japanese tourists. She tells me that there is an additional reason for the off duty staff being here, as the annual party for people who work at Milford Sound is tonight. The climax to the evening festivities is a naked run from the docking port to the restaurant bar by the car park. She invites me to come along. I ask her if she will be taking part in the run and she says she might after a few drinks. Regretfully, I have to decline the invitation as I can’t really expect Mary and Caz to wait around here having left them waiting in the van for the past couple of hours.

I depart the boat drenched but happy. When I get back to the van, the ladies asks me how it was. I deliberate. Having come all this way just to sit in the van, shall I be kind and just tell them ‘it was OK’? I’ve never been too good at hiding my feelings though, so I tell them that they have just missed the most bloody awesome place on the entire planet. No fooling.

We depart to Queenstown, the adrenaline activity capital of New Zealand.