Fjordland and Milford Sound

Our first glimpse of Fjordland. The glaciers created steep cliffs and U-shaped valleys.

We packed up the van after our night at Lake Te Anau and headed north into Fjordland towards Milford Sound. This was a bit daunting because the sandflies at the lake were rather intense and we had heard that the area we were entering had the worst sandflies in the country. As we entered the first major valley and caught a glimpse of the mountains, we got the feeling that something special lay ahead.

I once had a conversation with my brother Preston about this area after he visited years ago. I asked him what the single best spot in NZ was and he replied, "Milford Sound." I asked him why and he said something along the lines of, "I dunno, there are just a lot of steep mountains and stuff." I remembered wondering at the time what was so special about that.

The thing is, he was right. There just isn't any way to impart to you what this area is like. Everywhere you look, and I do mean everywhere, mountains rise straight up for more than a mile. You read that right. One mile, straight up. It's like something out of a fantasy novel. The cliffs are so sheer in most places that no earth clings to them; all of the rainwater (and there's plenty of that: it rains almost 200 days a year on average) cascades down the cliffs, creating waterfalls nearly a mile high.


Other waterfalls originate from the glaciers which are still perched atop these massive mountains. It was all I could do not to drive off of the road as I craned my neck out the window, trying to get a look at the mind-boggling scenery.


There are no real towns in this area of the country. This makes good sense because there's just enough flat land for a single road to snake through the mountains, and the sandflies are indeed awful. The main destination for people visiting fjordland is Milford Sound, which isn't really a sound at all because it's a fjord. Sounds are big valleys carved by rivers which fill with seawater; fjords are big valleys carved by glaciers which fill with seawater. The guys who named this place took their best guess but they happened to guess wrong; the name stuck anyway.

Once we arrived at Milford Sound we booked passage on one of the many scenic cruises in the area. The captain acted as the tour guide and did a wonderful job of teaching us about the geography of the fjord. We saw a "hanging valley" formed by one glacier emptying into an existing fjord; this created a waterfall 500 feet high which sounds impressive except that the wall of rock next to it continues straight up for another 4,700 feet or so. The fjord itself is half a mile deep, meaning that the glaciers which carved these valleys had to be impressive indeed.

Quinn checking things out on the cruise.

Above: The 500 foot high waterfall is that tiny looking thing near the bottom of the picture. The waterfall comes out of the "hanging valley" and you can see its characteristic U-shape. Look closely and you'll see a 3-story cruise ship at the bottom right of the pic, which shows you the scale.

It's tough to make out, but the horizontal striations in the cliffs show where the glacier pressed against the rock.

Amy and Quinn on the cruise.

After our tour we headed back south towards the coast, camping as soon as we reached flat land. The campsite was gorgeous; we were right next to a beautiful stream and surrounded by a beech forest with those monstrous mountains looming in the distance.

The view from our campsite.

Quinn and me before the sandflies hit.

It was here, in this idyllic setting, that the funniest moment of the trip occured. Around dusk the sandflies came out in force. They were terrible. If you opened the door of the van even for a second, a dozen of those bastards would invade and bite everyone in sight. We therefore decided to stay in the van until morning.

This was cool until Amelia announced that she needed to pee. It sounds like a little thing, right? Just take the kid outside for a minute and let her pee. This would have resulted in dozens of painfully itchy bites for everyone in addition to a sleepless night spent swatting at mosquitos and sandflies. We therefore decided to let her pee in a piece of tupperware which we used to store cleaning supplies. Amelia did a fine job peeing in the tupperware but she neglected to inform us that she also needed to poo; we discovered this in due course and the resulting situation was so bad that we couldn't help but laugh.

Our camping spot. Pic taken prior to the Tupperware Poo Incident.

Next up: the Catlins, a bluegrass festival at the bottom of the world, and a close encounter with a sea lion.

Wanaka, Queenstown, and Te Anau

A panorama of the view from the town of Wanaka. You can see a storm in the middle of the picture (click on it to enlarge).

As we drove away from the perpetually waterlogged West coast, the clouds and rain disappeared and we were treated to some fine summer weather. Our first stop was Wanaka, a small town nestled in what used to be a gold mining area. The gold rush in NZ occurred around the same time as the one in the States, and many towns just dried up when it was over. A few, like Queenstown, hung on and eventually came back to life via the tourist industry.

Wanaka is sort of up-and-coming as a tourist destination but still retains its small-town charm (Queenstown, while gorgeous, has been taken over by the tourists).

Amelia checking out some of the locals in Wanaka.

We spent two days relaxing in Wanaka and soaking up the scenery before making the short drive to Queenstown. Most people who visit NZ make a beeline for this place because it's located on the edge of a pristine lake surrounded by impressive mountains. It's the adventure capital of the country and it's where bungy jumping was invented. All day long you can hear the roar of jetboats and watch people parasailing. I'd recommend this spot to anyone visiting the country but we stuck to the less adventurous stuff because of the kids.

It was while we were in Queenstown that Quinn developed his still-present habit of helping to push the stroller. This slowed us down a bit, so we tried to carry him instead. He explained that this was a poor idea and we eventually explored the entire town like this:

Quinn literally walked about 2.5 miles like this before giving up.


Amelia and Amy posing with the founder of Queenstown. He was a gold miner and he must have liked sheep.


Quinn at the Queenstown botanical gardens.


Quinn posing with a really big tree at the botanical gardens.


By this point we had been on the road for a few weeks. It was fun watching the kids adapt to living in a van; they didn't seem to notice that anything was amiss. Amelia got quite creative and decided to make a tuba out of our water hose:




Quinn checking out the lake with the Remarkables (the local mountain range) in the background.


Me and the kids at the lake with the botanical gardens and the Remarkables behind us.

After Queenstown we headed towards Fijordland. As you may have gathered from the name, Fijordland is a big area in the southwest part of the South island which is made up of fijords. It's kind of weird looking at it on a map because there's only one road in the entire area, and no towns to speak of. When you finally make it into Fijordland you quickly understand why this is, but I'll save that for next time. Our last stop before heading into the wilds was a town called Te Anau. It's well known as the launching point for people heading into Fijordland, but it's beautiful in its own right. We camped that night at Lake Te Anau, watching storms blow across the other side of the lake. It was astounding being practically alone in such a setting.

Me and the kids playing with rocks at the edge of the lake.

Sunset at Lake Te Anau. Otherworldly.

The West Coast

Ask a Kiwi about the West Coast and inevitably you'll hear about what a wild place it is. The coast is isolated and beautiful with lots of steep mountains, but it's sparsely populated. I imagine this has something to do with the heaps of sandflies and the rather excessive amount of rain that falls there. OH MY GOD DOES IT RAIN. Some places average 25 feet of rain per year. This had me worried as we headed to the coast because I didn't want to be stuck in a van with two kids and a bunch of sandflies while it stormed all day long.

We stopped first in Hokitika, known around here as the center of the jade trade. Known as pounamu to the Maori, jade is a really hard stone valued by the Maori for its use in adze blades, jewelry, and weapons. Jade forms 60 miles below the Earth's surface because it requires a lot of pressure to form, so you only find it in places where plate tectonics are really going apeshit, i.e. New Zealand. It's very popular in jewelry around here and you'll see large boulders of the stuff in prominent places, where people touch it for luck. After checking out the local jade factories and street vendors, I found myself wishing I could find a local river with a good supply and go collect some myself. At the end of the day, my kids and I made a nice discovery: jade was lying around wherever lots of rocks could be found. We scrambled around a gravel parking lot that evening, the kids and me picking up dusty gray rocks and spitting on them to see if they were jade. It made quite a sight, but we found some good stuff.


We left Hokitika and headed south down the coast, driving along a rugged and beautiful rainforest-choked road. Our next stop was at the Franz-Joseph glacier. Let me back up a bit; the reason for all of the aforementioned rain is that the steep mountains cause the humidity in the air to condense. At the bottom of the mountains, this rains down and creates the rainforest. At the top of the mountains, huge snowfields form and thicken until the pressure forms a river of ice, a.k.a. a glacier. There are over a hundred glaciers in this part of the country, but only a few of them come all the way down to the rainforest (I've heard that this is the only place on Earth where you can find a glacier in the middle of the rainforest). You can't get too close to these bad boys because they'll kill you, as some hapless tourists found out about a week before we visited.

Amelia and me checking out the Franz-Joseph glacier.

Waterfalls lined the steep walls of the valley on the hike to the glacier.

Amy and the kids about a kilometer from the glacial terminus.

This was about as close as we got. The ill-fated tourists decided to walk right up to the face and Darwin intervened.

After our walk to the glaciers we traveled down the coast a bit further to a town called Haast. On the way we saw some great scenery; here's a picture from Knight Point:

I hope you enjoy this picture. I donated a pint of blood to the sandflies while taking it.

On the way we had to detour around a wee landslide:


After having a few days of fine weather, the heavens opened up. We therefore found outselves in Haast, stuck in a van with two kids and a bunch of sandflies while it stormed all day long.

After leaving Haast we headed back inland, through the Haast Pass. Though we were tired of being rained on by then, the scenery was still beautiful. Everywhere you looked, clouds covered massive mountains with waterfalls cascading down the sides.

Typical West Coast scenery.

Beech Forest, Haast Pass.

Blue Hole, Haast Pass. Gigantic trout teemed in these pools.

Forest, Hast Pass.

Up next: our jaunt in central Otago.

Life Can Be Pretty Rough Sometimes...

Though, thankfully, now is not one of those times. Well, ok, maybe it is with respect to my bank account and the global economy, but I'm going to postpone thinking about that for a bit. Amy's parents are in town and we're heading off to the South Island to show them around for a week.

It's hard to believe, but I imagine this will be our last trip down South for a few years. I don't have much vacation left and we're planning to use that to see parts of the North Island a bit down the road. We've reached the point now where we need to make a list of stuff we really want to do before we head home. Wild.

Oh, by the way, I haven't mentioned that I signed a contract to work at the Naval Hospital in Portsmouth, VA. We'll be heading back to the States in mid-May and I'll start work in June. This trip has been fantastic (and it ain't over yet) but we can't wait to see everyone in a few months!

Time to work on that flip-flop tan some more.

Arthur's Pass

After our rest in Akaroa we started to hit the road for real. Since we'd already seen the northern end of the island we decided to head across the middle of the island instead, crossing over the Southern Alps via Arthur's Pass. The Southern Alps are some pretty serious mountains and I was holding my breath to see how the campervan would handle the long climbs. I had also been warned about "those roads on the South Island" more than a few times. As it turned out, White Bird campervan was up to the challenge and driving in Wellington is harder than driving on the South Island. But on with the story...

Our first stop after Akaroa was actually back in Christchurch. We dropped off some excess gear and then headed to the local wildlife sanctuary. As with our last visit to the zoo, the rules were a bit more lax than we were used to. This meant that we were able to feed the giraffes and get really close to the rhinos. Feeding time for the lions was also groovy; they starved them for a day prior to feedings (it's good for them, I swear) so they are really motivated when the meat shows up.

We left the zoo late in the afternoon. The kids were falling asleep and we needed a place to camp (aside: we weren't the first people to think about driving around the South Island in a campervan. Everybody does this, and locals got fed up with people trashing the popular spots. Ergo, there are now some rules about where you can and can't camp. Your choice is to camp in a pay site, crammed next to other campers but with amenities like electricity and showers, or "freedom camp" in a remote spot where you don't think you'll be bothered). We pulled out a map of Christchurch, located a road near the zoo that looked pretty remote, and headed that way. Before long we found a gravel parking lot for an all-terrain vehicle park that looked suitable.

White Bird Campervan at the ATV park.

The dirtbikers showed up right as we were cleaning up from dinner. The first dude was driving an old Ford Falcon Ute (only in NZ is the El Camino still alive and well) with a horn that played exactly half of Dixie before petering out. His mates weren't far behind, and we got to see an interesting slice of Kiwi culture that evening. It all worked out in the end because Quinn somehow slept through the noise of a half dozen dirtbikes ripping through the parking lot, and nobody kicked us out of there.

The next morning we headed for Arthur's Pass. We didn't snap any pics of the pass itself because we didn't want to stop (the kids wake up whenever the van stops) and the camera was in the back of the car. Hey, it was a learning process. You should check out this pic, though, because the pass was amazing.

We soon passed Castle Hill, the local rock climbing spot. I drooled when I saw it: a bunch of limestone boulders a few hundred feet tall in the middle of a field, all on top of a gorgeous mountain range. I'd like to head back there some day...

Castle Hill; see horses in front for scale.

We did a lot better with our choice of camping spot that night. By this point we realized that it was important to have chosen a place to stay by early evening, so we stopped shortly after passing Castle Hill. To say that we found a remote spot is an understatement.

Van on the left.

Quinn checks the place out.

Amelia helped out by washing the bumper.

The next day we packed up and moved on, stopping for a short hike before arriving on the West coast. The West coast is known by Kiwis as a wild and rugged place, which makes it pretty interesting by my standards. That's a story for another day, though...

Amelia and me hiking back from seeing a waterfall.

Editor's note: I know, I've repeated some pics. That should stop soon as I catch up on my sleep and move on to the more recent stuff.

Akaroa

And thus it began: our epic journey around the South Island. Chapter one involved picking up the campervan in Christchurch and spending a day provisioning before camping at a not-so-fancy campground near the edge of the city. Looking back through the pictures, I'm not surprised that we didn't take too many at this stage in the game. We faced a number of questions: should the kids sleep separately to avoid waking one another? Would the beds be comfortable? How does the electrical system work? Would this end in divorce?

Lunch in the van, day two.

Day two: our first road trip. We drove about 2 hours to the small coastal town of Akaroa, founded by some Frenchmen a couple hundred years ago. French settlements are pretty rare in these parts, and the town has retained some French heritage as well as significant charm. It is, of course, beautiful.

Heading to town.

We spent two days here before heading back to Christchurch. At this point we were still getting our technique down with the campervan and it was nice to stay in the same spot for more than a day. The majority of our trip involved moving every day (which may sound easy with a campervan, though in reality in involves a bit of work).

Downtown Akaroa and the hills beyond.

Quinn on the beach.

We eventually settled on a system where Amy and I alternated sleeping spots; one night with Amelia in the top bunk and the next with Quinn down below. To make extra sure that Amelia doesn't fall from the open-ended bunk, we slept backwards with our heads tucked at the end of the narrow upper compartment. It was cozier than it sounds and this was definitely the night Amy and I both look forward to as Quinn is a restless and often violent sleeper. We couldn't trust the kids to sleep together because there are too many dangerous things for Quinn to get into, and they'd wake each other up anyway.

The view from our campsite. Yeah, the hike back up was interesting.

We started with a pattern of driving during the kids' naptime, and kept the drives shorter than 2 hours . This allows Amy and I to see the scenery during the day while theoretically letting the kids sleep through the roadtrip. At first, this worked out fairly well, giving us 90 minutes of peace but usually ending in about 20 minutes of hell once the kids awoke. By week two, the kids had adapted unbelievably well and were little road-trip machines.

Casa de Lovelace, aptly dubbed "white bird campervan" by Amelia.


After a few days we headed back through Christchurch on our way to Arthur's Pass. While in Christchurch, we stopped at a wild game preserve at the edge of town. The best part about this place (as with the Wellington Zoo) was the low-key approach. We were able to get very close to the animals and the kids got to feed giraffes for the second time since our arrival in NZ.



We left the game preserve pretty late and the kids were falling asleep in their carseats- this did not bode well as a late afternoon nap for them means a looong night for us. We hastily found a spot to park the van, in the parking lot of a dirtbike park at the edge of town. It was just as glamerous as it sounds, and gave us a nice view of an interesting segment of NZ society as the dirtbikers filed in for a late-evening tear around the park.


ATV park EXCITING! Let's hope the camping spots improve from here...

Ta Da!

Well, we pulled it off. We're safe and sound back in Welly after our trip to the South Island. One month, two kids, one campervan, 2,830 km (for those of you living in Liberia, Burma, or the USA, that's 1,758 miles). We are a bit out of touch; I have no idea who won the college football national championship or which teams even played in the Super Bowl.

I no longer have any excuse not to post on the blog, so expect a revival of sorts. The first post should show up later on this week.