The Catlins

One of the many deserted beaches in the Catlins.

We headed south after leaving Fjordland, making a beeline for the southern coast. This part of our trip would lead us off of the typical path taken by most people visiting the South Island. We were heading into a really remote area known as the Catlins.

As we approached the coast we stopped at some limestone caves to have a look. Amy and the kids decided to stay behind and I headed in alone to have a look around. That move ranks pretty high up there in the Stupid Things I've Done category but thankfully it all worked out all right. I couldn't get my camera to focus in the darkness of the cave but I found graffiti there from the late 1800's and some really neat limestone formations. After scrambling through the caves for 300 meters I found myself staring at a huge underground pool of water which completely blocked the exit. I had to turn around and try and reverse my steps (harder than it sounds) and ended up popping out of a third entrance to the cave. Whew.

The entrance to the cave. The kids and Amy went in about 20 meters, enough to spot some glow worms and convince Amelia that she was not going to take up spelunking.

After spending an uneventful night in a small southern town, we grabbed some provisions and headed down the coast into the really remote areas. As we approached the Catlins reserve, traffic was stopped by an errant flock of sheep:


By this point in the trip, we could see Stewart Island, the third of the major New Zealand islands. Didn't realize NZ had 3 major islands, did you? Most people don't talk about it much because it's essentially uninhabited. The whole thing is a nature preserve and the weather...well, you can probably guess what the weather is like being located that far south.

Given our location, we were taken completely by surprise when we came across a bluegrass festival being held in the middle of a sheep pasture.


It was surreal listening to Johnny Cash and an assortment of Appalachian music being sung in a Kiwi accent in South Nowhere, but everyone had a great time. It was laid back; there was no admission fee and the men's bathroom was a sheet of plastic strung between two stakes in the middle of a pasture.

You can make out the stage on the left and some of the local residents (sheep) on the right.

Amelia and me in between dances.

Quinn enjoying some hummus while sporting Amelia's hat.

After a relaxing afternoon of music we continued on to a beach in the Catlins. We camped on top of a hill overlooking the Southern Ocean. The views were really nice and the wildlife in this area was impressive.

The view from our campsite.

The sun came out the next day and we headed to the beach. Amy and I got our feet wet just to see what the water was like; it was painful but we did get a good laugh out of it. The kids then went to work digging a big hole.


Soon a sea lion swam up out of the ocean and started cruising around the beach. You can see him in the background of this picture:


It wasn't long before we had to scoop up the kids because the sea lion liked the look of their hole. He looks sweet enough in the pics but sea lions can be fairly nasty if you get too close.


This wasn't our last run in with the local fauna. Sea lions regularly visited the beach and a rare species of tiny dolphin also came in remarkably close to shore. The dolphins occasionally play around with people brave enough to swim in the frigid water.

Amy keeping an eye on another sea lion.

Right next to the campsite was a spot that I'd been looking forward to seeing; a petrified forest from the Cretaceous. 270 million years back, some flooding had covered a forest in silt and the entire thing became petrified. The ocean eroded away the covering rock and you can now walk around and look at the stumps and logs when the tide is out. It's still possible to make out the growth rings in the wood. Amelia really got a kick out of this.

Amelia checking out a petrified log.

Soon a thick fog rolled in and blanketed the area. It made for some really neat pictures, though.

One of my favorite photos from the trip; Amelia checking out the petrified forest and the coast.

Quinn and Amy playing in the pools at the petrified forest.

The sunsets here were nothing short of spectacular. Here are a few photos I took of the Southern Ocean at dusk:





Up next: back towards civilization. Dunedin and the butterfly exhibit, the extraordinary Mount Cook, and our return to Christchurch.

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.