Chapter 11: Escape to the South (part 2)
Queenstown, Cromwell, Wanaka, Mt. Aspiring, Glaciers, Okarito, Kumara and Arthur's Pass, Aotearoa, December 7-15
Happy new year, everybody!
Thursday, December 7, 2023
When we were planning out our road trip, we had a terrible time deciding whether we wanted to go to Milford Sound. I had been before, when my parents came to visit ten years ago. It was absolutely magnificent, but it is far from pretty much everything else. The Milford road is also notoriously windy, narrow and slippery, and neither of us felt very excited about the idea of driving the campervan all the way to the fjords. We also really didn’t have the extra time needed to split up the drive – we already wished we had extended our campervan rental. Our solution was to book a day trip to Milford Sound from Queenstown, basically just pay somebody else to do the driving we didn’t want to do. It was a pricey decision, but we sort of considered it to be our Christmas presents to each other.
We didn’t opt to add in the picnic lunch provided by the tour, so we started the day in our campsite at dawn making breakfast and packing PB&Js for our lunch. We walked down into Queenstown and found the big tour bus we’d be spending much of the day in. Our bus driver was a real character, which I was glad for, since he kept us entertained for much of the drive, both ways! The drive out to Milford is about 4 hours each way, not including stops for tea, bathrooms and views. As the crow flies, it’s actually pretty close to Queenstown, but there are only a few places where the Southern Alps are passable.
We spent the drive listening to our guide talk about the landscape, nodding off, and listening to music. At the tea stop in Te Anau we had some of the best pies of the trip and an Afghan cookie, which I don’t think actually has anything to do with Afghanistan, but does have corn flakes cereal and a chocolate icing.
After hours of winding through the incredible landscapes, we arrived at the Milford Sound boat terminal, where we would catch our boat around the sound. Somehow, our driver managed to get us there a little early, so we had time to eat our lunch sitting on a jetty with a view of the fjord.
We boarded our boat, and everybody rushed to make sure that they ended up with a window seat inside. Naturally, as soon as the sun came out it warmed up and we all flocked up to the top deck. The steep walls of the fjord were crowded with waterfalls and vegetation clung on where it could. We didn’t see much in the way of wildlife, no dolphins or whales but we did get to see a Milford penguin! He was making his way down to the water from a boulder field and had to hop from rock to rock. It was adorable, and I was totally unable to get a decent photo of him.
On the way back to the harbor we went very close to (almost under!) one of the bigger waterfalls. Some people stayed up on the deck and got soaked, but we took shelter.
The ride back to Queenstown was mostly the same as the way there, nodding off, playing riddles with the driver and taking turns saying that we were so glad we didn’t do this drive ourselves.
Finally back in Queenstown 13 hours later and so happy to be out of the bus, we headed to dinner. Our plan was to eat at Fergburger, a Queenstown institution. On the walk over we had to pass 3 incredible-smelling Indian restaurants. We saw the long line for Fergburger, made a u-turn and stuffed ourselves with delicious curry.
Our hope was to do a load of laundry at the campsite that night, but it was closed by the time we got there. Honestly, after the day we had, I’m not sure we could have stayed up long enough for it to finish!
Friday, December 8, 2023
Haunted by the previous night’s decision, we woke up early to finish our laundry before checkout. On our way out of Queenstown, we made a pilgrimage from the Kiwi Birdpark. I first visited this bird sanctuary ten years ago, when I had a week alone in Queenstown, waiting for my parents to arrive. The experience I had there was really memorable, finally getting to see kiwi birds after six months in Aotearoa. I absolutely insisted that Al and I spend the morning there, seven though the price is about double what it was then. It was so worth it! We got to spend time with kereru (huge wood pigeons), kea (mountain parrots) and of course took our time letting our eyes adjust in the kiwi bird habitat and watching them run around.
After some quality time with New Zealand’s native birds, we picked up Fergburgers and ate them on the rocky beach of Lake Wakatipu. Much of New Zealand is fairly unchanged from the last time I was here, but Queenstown is a huge exception. It was very much under construction during our stay, but it was clearly in the process of a total revamp. When I visited before, it was all travel shops, mountain bike rentals and backpacker’s accommodation. Now, it’s like a luxury mall in the mountains, with a Burberry and a Dior. It’s been completely Park City-ified. It’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it’s hard not to feel some sadness for the loss of a grungy mountain town. All that said, sitting on the shore of Lake Wakatipu eating our Fergburgers, admiring The Remarkables and fighting off the seagulls, maybe it wasn’t so different after all.
On the way to our campsite for the night, we made a couple of stops. One was in Arrowtown, a former mining town that was holding an adventure racing convention when we passed through. The cottonwood trees were expelling their seeds, so it was almost like walking through a snowstorm. We admired the lupin along the creek and continued on toward our campsite. Our campsite was just outside of Cromwell, a town that grows much of the South Island’s produce, so we made sure to get some fresh apricots and raspberries.
Our campsite was in the harbor of a lake and was beautiful, but mostly not very notable. It was hot, then windy. After dinner we cuddled up in the van and sketched out a route and campsites for the rest of our van trip.
Saturday, December 9, 2023
We thought last night was windy. We were wrong. This morning was windy. Instead of trying to fight with the camp stove in the gusts, we headed straight to Lake Wanaka in the morning to get out of the wind. At Lake Wanaka, it was even windier. We made breakfast in a parking lot (camper van life), then found a cafe with internet to follow through with our campsite plans from the night before.
An Uber driver in Christchurch told us that the Edgewater Hotel in Wanaka has the best scones in the world, so we made sure to head there after we finished our planning session. As is so frequently the case with the recommendations we get, the timing just didn’t quite work out – they were sold out for the day.
Our drive for the day was through Mount Aspiring National Park. It was pouring, cold and windy much of our drive, but we were able to get in a few short walks on the way. One was through the rain forest, one had a pounding waterfall and another was a steep, heart-pumping climb up to a viewpoint in Haast’s pass.
After a long day of driving through the rain, we felt a ton of relief when we got to our beautiful campsite. That is, we felt relief until we got out of the van and our exposed ankles were immediately swarmed with sandflies. Sandflies are tiny, bloodsucking bugs that make no noise and show no mercy. The bites are sometimes so bad they draw blood and they itch for days, then leave scars. The west coast of the South Island is notorious for these little suckers, and we spent much of our remaining time in the region rocking the sandfly style, which is pants tucked into socks.
Note: I’m writing this 21 days later, and my last sandfly bites from this day are finally almost healed.
We were able to find a picnic table under an awning, where we made our dinner (Japanese curry) and chatted with some German campsite neighbors while we ate. Right after dinner we snuggled down the covers and counted how many sandflies had made it into the van (an uncountably large number).
Sunday, December 10, 2023
We’re pretty sure it rained all night, but thankfully the morning was mostly clear. Everything seemed to be glowing in that way that they do when the sun comes out after a big rain.
The itinerary for the day was pretty simple: drive, glacier, drive, glacier, drive, camp.
We’ve really enjoyed having our kitchen with us, and we took advantage of it a couple of times on this drive, once with cups of instant coffee at a beachside pit stop and another when we arrived at Fox Glacier and made a warm lunch in the parking lot before going on our hike. We walked through the forest, in awe of how green it is and admiring the diversity of ferns while discussing the books we’re reading (Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow for Alex, and American Prometheus for me). New Zealand is home to two glaciers which penetrate into the subtropical rainforest, which means that the moss covered tree ferns are neighbors to a severe glacial moraine. On the hike back, we passed by signs that indicated in what year the glacier had reached that point. It was harrowing seeing how much the ice had receded over the centuries, and how little we remember about when ice ages had happened on Earth.
We drove to the next town over, home to the Franz Josef glacier. A little hungry and a little tired, we had a rest in a cafe before continuing on to the next hike.
Franz Josef Glacier is more accessible than Fox, with a shorter but steeper walk to a viewing point. We were rewarded with a great view of the blue ice in the sunshine.
Once we reached our campsite, we were thrilled to see that although there were sandflies, there were nowhere near as many as the night before, and it was brilliantly sunny. I pulled all of our bedding out of the van and laid it in the sun to dry. Soon after arriving, Al realized that he had left his Kindle in the coffee shop, that they were long closed, and that he didn’t have his book loaded onto his phone. He wandered around the campsite trying to get enough service to download it.
Note: I thought he was being totally dramatic for doing this, like come on Alex just read a different book for the night, you can just pick it back up tomorrow. Since this happened, I’ve read the book he was reading (Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Levin). It was an excellent book; from page one I read like a woman possessed. I totally would have done the same thing in his position. He eventually got enough service on my phone to download it, so that’s what he used for the night.
We hadn’t been eating much meat, since trying to keep it stored safely in a cooler is more trouble than it’s worth, but since we had just passed through town, it was steak for dinner.
We read our books by the lake until sunset and went to bed. After the rainy night we’d had the day before, the sunny evening felt like such a treat.
Monday, December 11, 2023
Just a short distance from where our campsite was the Okarito slough, where a small kayak rental company operates. We got checked in and were complimented for our sandfly style socks and pants before heading down to the slough where our boats awaited.
Note: when I was a kayak guide, we never bothered teaching day trip participants how to use a spray skirt. A spray skirt is a piece of neoprene that goes around the waist and is pulled tight over the cockpit of the kayak. It’s great for cold or rough conditions, where water is likely to be splashed into the boat. The concern with spray skirts is that in the case of a capsize, there’s a risk of a spray skirt holding the person in the kayak, upside down and underwater. I don’t know if this is related to Aotearoa being colder than anywhere I guided, or the risk management policies of the university I worked for, or the general litigiousness of the US, but we’ve used spray skirts both times I’ve kayaked on this trip. When I was a guide, the participants were required to prove their ability to remove their spray skirt before we began the trip.
It was a beautiful paddle. Since we were paddling into a slough, we got to watch the water transition from a milky teal in the saltier ocean water to clear, tea-colored freshwater, stained from the tannins of decomposing forest material. The wind picked up later in the morning, so we really had to work for the last bit of our paddle!
Back at the rental shop, we were greeted with a hot drink of our choice and struck up conversation with another couple who had rented. We talked a bit about what kind of books we like to read, and Al mentioned that one of my favorite things to read are nonfiction books written by journalists. It turned out to be an inadvertent compliment because the husband of the pair was a climate journalist and had written books on the subject! We talked for a long while with them and it turned out that he knew people that Al worked with at Google and was good friends with Scott Carney, an Outside Magazine contributor whose book The Wedge I had finished just a couple of weeks prior. With contact information and reading recommendations exchanged, we finally headed off.
We made a short backtrack to retrieve Al’s kindle and headed up the coast to our accommodation. The campsite for the night was wonderfully hippie-ish, with a yoga class that night and an ecstatic dance session the night after. We talked to lots of the other travelers there, including a musician who does sound baths and a prolific hitchhiker. After we did a planning session, we saw a downside of the hippie-ness we had enjoyed up until that point — anti-vax flyers displayed in the lounge
Tuesday, December 12, 2023
Happy third anniversary, us!
Our drive took us through Arthur’s Pass, one of the few passes in the Southern Alps. It’s a steep, windy road, so we really didn’t plan on doing anything but getting to our campsite. We stopped for views a couple of times, including some incredible fields of lupin and dramatic views of the snow capped mountains.
We arrived at our campsite in the early afternoon, and it proceeded to rain the entire rest of the day. The site was a pretty barebones DOC site, with pit toilets (they’re called “long drops” here), a beautiful lake, and nothing else. We passed the time reading our books and drinking endless cups of tea. We did have two different duck families stop by, one with a bunch of babies and one with a bunch of teenagers. They were a joy to have, quacking and falling over themselves over the tiny bits of bell pepper I hand fed them.
It was a gorgeous, drippy, low energy day. We were both sad it was our last night in the van, but equally ready to have consistent access to showers and a place to get away from the sand flies.
Wednesday, December 13, 2023
The big goal of the day was to switch out our modes of transport. Everything else was secondary.
The first of of those secondary things: we had the time to Tāwhiti/Cast/Castle Hill. The sound bath guy at our previous campsite had told us not to miss this place, describing it as “powerful” and “special” and man, was he right. The photos I took there look kind of out-of-scale and overly saturated, but that’s exactly how it looked and felt.
The second of the secondary things was a pie. We passed through the town of Sheffield, which we heard has some of the best pies in New Zealand. When we passed through earlier, they had already closed for the day. We leapt out of the van, got our pies, and got back on the road. They were great pies, but honestly, pies just don’t have that much variation. They’re pretty much all good. Some are a little better and some are a little worse, but they’re all good.
We dropped off our van and picked up our rental car with minimal drama. Weeks earlier, we had applied for a relocation car rental. Lots of travelers fly into Auckland and get a one-way car rental, dropping off their car in Christchurch, or some other South Island city. Because of this, rental cars tend to accumulate in the South Island, so the rental companies will offer cheap or free rentals for people who will bring the car back up to Auckland. We got matched with a company whose needs were compatible with ours, so we had a 9 day rental for a couple hundred dollars, plus they were reimbursing us for a tank of gas and the cost of the inter island ferry. What a deal! Our perfect match was a tiny Toyota Yaris, which felt like a dream to drive after two weeks driving a big old van around the mountains. The acceleration felt amazing, and we made it to our accommodation for the night way faster than we had expected.
Our plan for the next two days was just to get clean and rested, so we got some Thai food takeaways and lounged as hard as anybody ever has.
Thursday, December 14, 2023
We slept in, made pancakes for breakfast lunch, and did laundry. Our motel had some beautiful hot tubs, so we spent some time soaking. We read, wrote for the blog, planned, checked on our budget, and took care of ourselves. Since it was still Hanukah and we happened to have potatoes, I improvised something like a kugel (it turned out more like hash browns) and served it with canned dal makhani.
Friday, December 15, 2023
On this day, we made the jump back up to the North Island! To catch our ferry, we packed up and headed out on the early side, especially because we had two important stops to make. One was at Nin’s Bin, a completely iconic roadside stand that sells lobster and nothing else. The other stop was for a pie for me, since I’ll die if I eat lobster. We played the gratitude game while we ate our breakfasts overlooking the sea lions basking in the sun.
The inter island ferry takes a good few hours, so it was an opportunity to catch up on some personal admin when I wasn’t feeling too seasick.
We spent the night in a barn in Hautere, about an hour north of Wellington. We had some not-very-good pizza for dinner, then slept like rocks.