Wanaka and Queenstown

Queenstown and Wanaka are in a little pocket of NZ and are surrounded by mountains, so while most of NZ has had the coldest summer anyone can remember, these two amazing little towns have had beautiful weather.  Queenstown is just north of a huge lake:

But as pretty as this is, Wanaka, north over a pass from Queenstown, quickly became my favorite place in New Zealand.  We got here the day before my birthday, and decided to stay at least until the day after my birthday, which would make it the place I'd spent the most time in so far on this trip.  Wanaka is also on a lake, and I really wanted to go on a boat for my birthday, but since it was raining in the morning, we decided to go to the toy and transport museum instead.  Luckily, while we were there the weather cleared up so we got to pedal around in this thing:

We tried calling a few places that rented out kayaks since the sun came out, but it seemed they had all made a quick decision in the morning upon seeing a cloud in the sky that the weather would not be good enough to work that day.  So we found a nice hike to do, which offered some good views:

After hiking we stopped at a little place we had been the day before for a beer/wine because they were having an after-party for a bike race in town.  Then for dinner we had mexican food since we heard that on your birthday you get something free at the only mexican spot in town.  This turned out not to be true, and mexican food is apparently so rare in NZ that we had to wait an hour and a half for a table!  But it was still tasty, and I had a delicious margarita to accompany our fajitas.

We checked a weather report and saw that it was expected to remain sunny and warm for the next few days, so we decided to stay longer, and possibly even spend Tres' bday here.  And since the next day it was sunny and warm and was my birthday in the states, where I was born so according to my mom was actually my birthday, I decided we should rent kayaks and go out to Ruby Island for a picnic.  This was a good decision.  Unfortunately the winds change quickly in Wanaka, so we were paddling against the wind both on the way too and from the island, but it was still a lot of fun.  We also found a nice spot where you can drive right onto the beach around the lake, so we spent afternoons here in the sun relaxing and reading, and even got in once though the water is very cold.

Christchurch to Fiordland

After three weeks of solo traveling I picked up a fellow adventurer in Christchurch:

Christchurch was... interesting to visit... the earthquake damage is pretty unbelievable and definitely shapes the whole experience of visiting.  Every other building in the city is in a pile of pieces of former building.  Luckily we stayed in a suburb called Sumner, which was a cute little beach town.  On the way to Sumner the road is being worked on following the damage, and you can see half houses on a hill that had partially fallen down.  Also on the night we stayed there we were woken up in the middle of the night by a 4.2 aftershock (pretty big!).  We learned that since the huge quake last year, they have had a pretty predictable pattern of small aftershocks and every once in a while a 6+ that causes even more damage (next one expected in March - don't think I'll be back down around Chch any time soon).

Thinking we only had 2 weeks to cover the whole South Island, we headed south the next day to Dunedin, which we walked around in finding a place to use the internet so we could look up where to go next, then headed on to camp at a smaller town a bit south.  On our way we stopped at the Moereke boulders, which are weird perfectly round rocks on the beach:

We continued South to the Otago Peninsula, where we went on a tour in these cool 8-wheel drive vehicles that took us over some pretty rough terrain:

I started out thinking it was too bad that it was a cloudy, drizzly day, but it turns out this is the best weather to see penguins!  The tour took us past a seal colony, where a ton of babies lived that had been born just a few months before so they were still pretty cute:

Then we went to a place where we could see beach but were still pretty far away so as not to scare away the yellow-eyed penguins.  Only a few thousand of them exist, and they are all in this one part of NZ, so it was pretty cool to be able to see them.  The places both where the seals and the penguins were are on protected land, so no humans have walked within their space in 12 years.  We saw a few penguins on the beach, and about 5 more up in the hills (too far away for a decent picture but it was cool to see them).  We also saw blue-nosed penguins, which are a lot smaller and hide in little holes in the sand, so we got to get pretty close to these guys:

Since the summer has been so cold in NZ this year, my start date for harvest got pushed off 2 weeks, so we had more time to explore!  We decided to go to Fiordland, supposedly one of the most scenic places in NZ.  It was cloudy, but still gorgeous:

Picton to Kaikoura

After the beautiful ferry ride to the South Island I stayed in Picton for a few days, which was gorgeous.  On one of the days I went down to Blenheim for the Marlborough Wine Festival.  Unfortunately it was cloudy and sprinkling all day, but it was fun to be there.  There was live music, ok food, and lots of wine to taste.  Buses back to Picton ran from 3-7 and I got on one at about 5:30.  There were maybe 15 other people on the little bus, 11 of which were from the same family.  The matriarch took the bus microphone and did some announcing for the rest of us.  This included introducing everyone, so I had to admit that I was traveling alone from California.  She thought it was a shame that I was all alone so she informed me that I would be coming back with their family for a beer and lasagna, which normally I might not do but the family was big and they all seemed nice (especially the step-daughter that was talking to me assuring me everything was ok even though her stepmom was a little crazy), so I said ok.  They had an amazing property that I had driven by the day before and gawked at, so I was even more excited to spend a little time with them.  They had recently bought it and were in the middle of renovations.  I didn't get any great photos, but here is one that gives a limited sense of the view:

After Picton I went down to Kaikoura, which has deep pools right off shore that makes it a great place for whales and dolphins to live and hang out.  There were also pretty good ocean views:

I camped by the water one night and woke up and saw multiple pods of probably at least 30 dolphins each swimming around, doing flips, showing off.  This is the best photo I got of them since I caught one jumping:

This was also Valentine's Day, so I took myself out to breakfast and then stopped at a town down south where I got a facial (felt amazing after camping and hostels for 3 weeks!).  And this was my Valentine's Day evening in a nutshell:

A glass of wine, a cup of instant noodles with an added carrot, and a book while camping.

Cook Straight

Wellington

First of all another fitting piece of hostel wall art (I’m seriously meant to be here):

After New Plymouth I stayed in Wanganui, which is a boring little town, especially in the rain, but my hostel had a nice view of this river:

I also had my first rugby-watching experience here.  The sevens, a modified version of the full game that the All Blacks always win the world cup in, were going on in Wellington while I was up the road in Wanganui.  In addition to the games, it was entertaining to watch the cameras scroll across the crowd, because everyone dresses up in crazy costumes!  I guess it's their version of Halloween too.  And NZ won the tournament, so they did a Haka - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JqnimvUMCAk&feature=related - there are plenty on youtube, I didn't know how to choose but this one is fine.  I guess it's a Maori war dance, and so it has to be led by a Maori member of the team.  It is always really intense, and usually at the end they stick their tongues way out, which might be where Pitbull got his signature move, Ally!

From Wanganui I went to Wellington, where I met up with a sister of a friend of a friend, her husband two kids (very cute little boys, one of which responded to an introduction to me with “plums,” .. “plums?”  “plums are like nectarines!”).  We walked around and came across a car show that was displaying the chitty chitty bang bang car!  It was pretty cool:

We had lunch, then they took me to another sister’s house, where I’m staying for the next couple days.  A real house!  Very cute with a nice living room and my own bedroom!

When left by myself with a fully equipped kitchen this is what I choose for dinner:

I started out at the grocery store picking up a small zucchini and a carrot but decided I needed a little more, so I found a small serving of peppered steak that I figured I could cook up pretty easily.  But then I went back by the veggies and decided to pick up a potato.  Then an onion looked good, and a bell pepper (which by the way is called a capsicum here; very strange).  So with all those things that sounded/looked so delicious, I decided I didn’t need the steak anymore.

Monday was Waitangi Day, the day the treaty was signed giving rule to England.  I learned that, despite what they tell you at Waitangi, things are not so peaceful regarding the treaty.  The translation of the treaty was not perfect from English to Maori, and the Maoris didn’t really know what they were agreeing to.  Apparently it turned out that they lost some rights, and have held annual protests about it ever since.

It was also Superbowl Monday, so when I came across a sports bar downtown that had the game on I decided to stop in and watch.  It is slightly less enjoyable here, since they just play New Zealand commercials rather than the hyped-up famous superbowl commercials of the US.  But it was still fun, and a good game, and of course everyone in the bar was friendly.  Not as many Americans as I would have expected, so most people who were rooting for a team were doing so somewhat arbitrarily, which was good since that’s what I was doing too.  But my team won!

Then I came back to the house I’m staying at and Anna had started cooking dinner!  So nice to have a delicious home-cooked meal half way around the world.  I’m going to cook for her Wednesday… probably either chicken parmesan or lasagna.  Today I'm going in to explore Wellington a bit more, and maybe stop in at the museum.

I had dinner with Anna and her sister and sister's family one night.  Her littlest boy (3 yrs old) took a liking to me, I think because I was wearing an orange shirt which is his favorite color (and mine!).  He was talking to me and saying the cutest things, the most memorable of which was asking why my hair was so long, and if I watered it to make it grow like that.

New Plymouth

What better thing to do on a miserably rainy day than update my blog?

And it’s been a few days.  A few cloudy, rainy days.  Most of one of them was spent driving, so that wasn’t too bad, and it’s still a beautiful country in the rain.  Speed limit:

Don’t worry, it’s in kilometers.  It’s also about how many dollars it takes to fill up my tank with gas.  And don't worry, I didn't take the picture... it's difficult to work a camera while driving on the wrong side of the road.  I am getting better every day at backwards driving though.  Every once in a while when I’ve been the only visible car on the road for a ways and then I see one coming at me from the other direction, I get scared for a second because I think they are in my lane, but then I remember I’m on the other side and everything is ok.

I learned a lot about the locksmith business when I took my dreaded key that took ten minutes to get my car to start in to Kiwi Cuts.  It must be a booming business in Northland because I had to go in 4 times before I caught the locksmith when he wasn’t out on a job!  He took my key and decoded it, based on 8 different spacing levels and 4 different depth levels, occasionally using a little magnifier.  He then entered this code into a database, along with my car year, make, and country of origin.  Unfortunately, no matches were found.  But I mentioned I had another key and he lit up, examined it compared to the first one, immediately determined there were slight spacing differences, and found a match with that one!  So he made me two brand new keys that work like a charm.  No more stress over that!

I’m still debating about whether the drive up to Cape Reigna was worth it… it was definitely cool to see the top end of the country, and where the spirits of dead Maori step down the roots of this little tree and into the ocean, and where the Tasman Sea and the Pacific Ocean meet… ok it was worth it.  A family asked me to take a picture of them and of course I obliged, then they asked if I wanted a picture of myself and I tried to say no, but they insisted and we agreed it would make mom happy.   They proceeded to take about 8 pictures, from every angle, with the lighthouse and ocean in the background, etc.  Here’s one:

Close up of the sign so you can tell how really in the middle of nowhere I am:

Camped in Uretiti again on my way back down, and caught this cool picture of the moon (top left corner) and clouds around sunset:

Yesterday in New Plymouth I walked around town and then found a park with some really cool plants and it was so green!  Since it was raining it felt like a huge rainforest.  My friend compared it to Jurassic Park.

In one section was this cool gazebo:

 Ok, off to figure out how to spend the rest of my rainy day here!