14th April - Franz Josef, 43°S 170°E

We experience all types of weather on the journey to Franz Josef and it was raining hard with low cloud when we get there. We also pick up another hitch hike, a young German girl who was working on a local farm mostly milking cows. She had been food shopping which with hitch hiking takes all day.

Despite our expectations we wake up to a clear and sunny sky and we can see the glacier from our backpackers hostel/motel (free veg soup every night!). We've booked an 'Ice Experience' tour which involves flying to the glacier in a helicopter, strapping on your crampons, and then spending a few hours having a guided tour of the glacier. As you can imagine it’s cold on the glacier but the clothes we have been given keep everyone warm. John, our guide, a glaciologist (that’s handy) from Bournemouth is already on the glacier wearing shorts and a t-shirt making the rest of us feel a bit soft. We all dramatically increase our knowledge of glaciers and everything associated with them while John sends us through holes in the ice and a narrow gap that Karen nearly got stuck in, escaping moments before her panic reached unmanageable levels. The glacier trip included free admission to outdoor hot pools which we took advantage of - a delightful mix of pleasant and far too warm.

16th April - Queenstown, 45°S 169°E

After leaving Franz Josef we stop off for a photo of the Fox Glacier and decide that our glacier is far superior. The drive over the Haast Pass to Queenstown is spectacular and after a while we decide that there must be no more stopping for photos or we’ll never get there.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Queenstown has a Skyline Gondola like the one in Rotorua except this one is a lot steeper. We want to go on the zipwires down the hill and save money by walking up the hill rather than going in the gondolas - it turns out to be further and steeper than it looks from the town. The zipwires are good, the last one we do is the steepest (and therefore fastest) tree to tree zipwire in the world (!) and you get up to around 50 mph as you go down it. To stop people crashing into a tree at that speed they have added a net at the bottom that you stop at, wait for the net to be lowered and then are unceremoniously winched in for the last 20 metres.

On the way from Queenstown we stop at a small place called Arrowtown, an old gold mining town. A walk takes us to a panoramic view of the town from a nearby hill. Back in town the Arrowtown Autumn Festival (don’t pretend you haven’t heard of it) is in full swing and there are life size straw effigies (of local celebrities?) all over over the place.

19th April - Clyde, 45°S 169°E

We have decided to ride the Central Otago Rail Trail, 150km of disused railway track normally completed in three days, we opt to do the most scenic 90km in two. We spend the night before the ride at the small town of Clyde at the inland end of the trail. Our accommodation is called The Workshops and is a large garage, complete with inspection pit, that has been converted into a B&B. There was no one around when we got there but it seems common not to lock things up here and there was a note telling us to let ourselves in.

The rail trail is very well organised - your bags are moved round for you and we and the bikes are picked up at the end of our second day and taken back to where we started. We stop at a cafe beside the old workshops of Hayes Engineering, left as they were when the company moved to Dunedin in the 1950s. Hayes invented all sorts of things but it is the Hayes Permanent Wire Strainer (for tightening wires on fences) that made their fortune. You can still buy one now and it is recognisably the same thing that was patented 100 years ago. After some tunnels and viaducts we have a long haul across a plain before getting to Wedderburn, our stop for the night.

Wedderburn is in the middle of nowhere and if you don't fancy eating at the Wedderburn Tavern then you're going to go hungry. Luckily the pub is very good, principally because Cheryl, the landlady, is capable of doing five things at the same time. We are in there early and meet a number of farmers who come in for a drink on their way home, everyone must have a tab because we don't see any money change hands. A couple of minibuses full of sheep shearers stop so they can get a takeaway crate of beer for the evening. When he finds out that we're from the UK, one of the locals shares a cartoon he's seen with us: 'The Iron Lady - may she rust in peace'.

The second day of the bike ride starts colder and windier than the the first and we wrap up well. The rail trail has revitalised the central Otago area and there's not far between places for cyclists to eat or sleep. Our trail ends, after more viaducts and tunnels, at Hyde. There is a small cafe there with no indication of what they sell so you have to ask "Do you have soup?" and so on. What they did have is a NZ speciality, cheese rolls. We had heard of these before we saw one and were a little disappointed to discover that they are a stick of cheese wrapped in sliced bread and then heated before serving. We saw some award winning cheese rolls where the sliced brown bread had a secret ingredient spread on it before rolling that made these rolls the best in the area. Our plan had been to head to Dunedin on the coast after spending one more night in Clyde but after talking to some other cyclists we decided to head to Oamaru instead.

20th April - Oamaru, 45°S 171°E

Oamaru, home of NZ's steampunk HQ. Steampunk is a type of science fiction which looks to a future where technology has stalled in the Victorian era, a place of steam powered spaceships piloted by skeletons made of scrap iron. The steampunk HQ on the quayside has a punked steam locomotive outside that belches flames and smoke. We are both quite taken with this and enthusiastically play with the art - pushing levers for smoke, winding winches, drive the train and so on.

We visit another gallery (mainstream, THE most boring according to Phil) and then test the local beer before heading off to Bushy Beach, a short drive away to see the yellow eyed penguins come ashore between 4pm and 6pm - we wait 10 minutes before deciding its quite cold and we’re not that interested in penguins and anyway we have 3 comedy shorts being premiered in Oamaru tonight to get ready for. These plays are put on by the local am-dram group, something or other Players, and its very much that feel. The first play about Lady Godiva was awful, both acting and script. There is a short interval before the next play and a chap in brocade tells us that the Dairy (think corner shop) is open for ice cream and cold drinks but will be closed by the next interval, we control ourselves and sit tight thinking we will probably leave at the next interval for the pub. The next play about three characters backstage at a theatre is simpler and better for it, although we’re not rolling in the aisles. The last play was by far the best (acting and script etc) strangely set in Pennines and the funniest bit for us was the attempt at the Derbyshire accent by one of the actors (the rest stuck with Kiwi -very odd to hear when they said ‘nowt’ and referenced home as Sheffield) and she kept saying ‘top of garden’ missing out the ‘the’ but without the intonation and treatment of ‘of’ that all northerners know is critical to indicate the ‘the’ is missing.

On the way to Oamaru we stopped at Moeraki to see the spherical boulders there. The boulders are very like giant Maltesers, smooth on the outside with a honeycomb centre. They come in all sizes but it’s only the ones that are too big to fit on the back of a ute and take home for your garden that remain. There was some information that said they are concretions but it didn’t satisfactorily explain the honeycomb centre or the remarkable roundness.

 

 

 

 

During our time in New Zealand and Australia we (Phil) couldn’t help but notice how sad their mains sockets appear (left - cheer up mate, it might never happen). With a design that looks like it owes something to Edvard Munch and Marvin, the paranoid android.

Compare and contrast with, for example, the much jollier Danish mains socket (right). Someone should start a campaign to cheer up antipodean sockets.

12th April - Nelson, 41°S 173°E

We had a couple of hours before the ferry set off for the South Island so we spent the time looking around the Te Papa museum in Wellington. It’s a great place and introduced us to the paintings of Rita Angus among others. We could easily have spent days rather than hours there.

The ferry terminal was clearly signposted on the way in to Wellington and we assumed it would be the same on the way out. Unfortunately there’s no obvious way of getting to the ferry terminal from the city and we ended up driving 8 miles past it and then 8 miles back again, leaving us one of the last cars. We were put on the train deck next to (surprise) some trains and had to reverse all of the way on to the ship. Going upstairs (there must be a nautical term for this - ‘above’?) it was a little worrying that wherever you went on the ship you could always see at least two sick bag dispensers.

It’s overcast and very windy for the crossing, the wind giving the ferry a significant list for most of the journey. This is a shame as this is reported to be one of the most scenic ferry journeys in the world sailing through lots of islands and dramatic views. Half way across we read how our ferry was a cut’n’shut, a 30m section had been added to the middle 18 months ago, presumably by people who knew exactly what they were doing?

We are approached by a young French man while on the ferry asking if we’re going to Nelson as he’s looking for a lift. We say we are but our fun-sized camper van isn’t really set up for passengers and he should try for something with a seatbelt first. He comes back to us later saying that he’s asked everyone on the ferry and we’re the only ones going to Nelson so we arrange to pick him up outside the ferry terminal. Unfortunately, because we were on the train deck we come out in a different place to everyone else and it’s only thanks to the wonder of mobile phones that we track each other down. Xavier (the normal looking person in the photo) has been in NZ for several months doing various jobs like picking apples and thinning apple trees. He is good company, telling us among other things about the various scams that employers use with temporary workers, and the drive to Nelson is over in no time.

Nelson is a small, arty town on the north coast of the South Island. We met a Kiwi cyclist in Luang Prabang who said he had done his research and that Nelson was the best place to live in the world based on things like climate, culture, sunshine hours and so on. When he heard we were going to NZ he said we should pop in to the Saturday market where he always has a stall (not, it turns out, on the Saturday we went).

There’s something to be said for his choosing to live in Nelson and we both really like the place by the time we leave. It is close to the Abel Tasman national park and its coastal path, most easily accessed from boats that cruise up and down and drop you off in the sandy bays along the coast. We have a great day for it and walk a short section of the path. At the north end of the park there is a basic (really basic) government campsite with 1000 pitches that is so popular over the Christmas holidays that they have to draw lots to see who can stay.

Nelson is full of good places to eat and we do our best to get round them all in our time there. We also go to see King of the Gym, a play about old and new approaches to teaching and how the non-PC, directive-ignoring teacher wins through in the end. We had some qualms as it started but ended up enjoying it.