From Fiordlands

Monday, 22nd January, 2007
Te Anau, South Island
8:01 PM

Provo and I are sitting in a "Surf-n-Wash" on the main street of Te Anau-- you can do your laundry while you go on the internet. Someone was logged on before me, and I accidentally hacked into someone else's gmail, deleted what I took to be spam, and then realized what happened too late to go back and repair the damage--whoops! The last two days have been fun, and we put 867 kilometres on our rental car before turning it in in Queenstown. We picked up the car on Sunday morning in Picton-- it was the funniest little car, a Holden Barina, pretty much the smallest car that you can fit 4 doors onto. Funny thing, though, we couldn't figure out who to get the boot open, so had to cram both our packs into the backseat for the whole trip. Driving on the lefthand side is not as weird as you would think- once you're on the road, it of course seems the normal thing to do, or else you'd die from a head-on. Although you might die from a head-on anyway, Kiwi drivers are totally insane. The roads are usually tiny and really curvy, and bridges even on the main highways are only one lane. Everyone passes on corners and cuts corners and basically tries to run everyone else off the road. In defense of our own lives, we've started learning to drive like the locals, though hopefully without endangering as many lives. The weirdest part as a driver in this country is to sit on the righthand side of the car, and to have the blinkers ("indicators") on the righthand side of the steering wheel and the windscreen wipers on the left. Can't tell you how many times one of us has turned on the windshield wipers in an attempt to signal a turn.
Yesterday we drove all the way from Picton to Lake Tekapo, in the alpine country. We came through such amazing landscapes- different all the time. Down here, you're in the Shire one minute, then in Rohan, and then suddenly you're in the middle of a valley surrounded by snow-covered peaks. Highway 1 follows the coast from Wharanui to Christchurch, and we pulled of right by the ocean to ogle the sea lions that were camped out on the rocks 20 feet from the highway. We drove through loads of tiny tunnels, and took a break in Kaikoura. Kaikoura is apparently a center for whalewatching, and the coast there is spectacular. We came through loads of wine country as well, there are vineyards everywhere in that valley, it's really beautiful. As we came over Burkes Pass, we came into a high plain with peaks rising up on all sides, and every colour of lupine imaginable, in wide rainbow banks six feet out on either side of the road. I somehow don't think pictures would do it justice.

We're both glad we decided to rent a car- we're on our own timetable, and in the long run it actually comes out cheaper. Last night we stayed in Lake Tekapo, this adorable little town on the shores of a huge blue-green alpine lake, with a wee stone church on the shore and the southern alps rising up at the other end. We were hard-pressed to find accomodation, but while driving around an avenue full of B&Bs, an older lady hailed us from her window, and told us that a chap with a hotel down on the waterfront had a studio free and that we should hurry down before someone else got it. It was only slightly more expensive than a backpackers, and it was nice to have a little more privacy and room to spread out. We were right on the edge of the lake, and walked down to the tiny church to take pictures. Provo has a function on the timer of her camera that takes ten shots in a row, so we set it up to do that and then kept moving around into funny statuesque positions, then laughed ourselves silly at the result.
This morning we woke up to incredible sunshine (it was gross when we came into Lake Tekapo last night) and packed up and hit the road by 9:30. We came up to Queenstown, which is an incredible drive through the Otago Valley and the Kauwarau (??) Gorge. For any Lord of the Rings geeks out there, we came through the valley at Twizel where the charge of the Rohirrim at the Battle of Pelennor Fields was shot. That whole valley is incredibly desolate and remote in a really beautiful and challenging way. Besides a short stop to switch drivers (during which we were serenaded by an irritated sheep with a bass voice), we drove pretty much nonstop until we came through the gorge into Queenstown. Queenstown is supposedly the Adventure Capital of the World, with bungy jumping, skydiving, whitewater rafting, etc. advertised everywhere on the main street. The city sits on the shores of Lake Wakatipu, with the Remarkables rising up directly on the other side of the lake and the really really steep ski hill with a gondola rising up right behind the town. Most of our time in Queenstown was spent running errands-- picking up our hut reservation tickets from the Department of Conservation, booking transport to Te Anau and to and from the trailheads, putting our non-backpacking items in storage, buying some last-minute food for the hiking trip, grabbing lunch at an indian place, and returning the rental car. One-way rentals rock, by the way. We accomplished all that in about 4 hours, and then hopped the bus to Te Anau. There were only four of us on the bus, so we had plenty of room to spread out, and Provo and I stretched out with our legs in the sun, hoping to get a little more tan :)

The drive out here to the Fiordlands took about 2 1/2 hours. The first hour was spent driving on a little highway squeezed in between the shores of Lake Wakatipu and the Remarkables. The Remarkables are a mountain range that are, truly, remarkable. The rise straight up out of the valley floor, and are made mostly of rock, with nothing growing on them. Their slopes can't possibly be scale-able, and they are very very craggy and saw-toothed. You can see the whole ridgeline from Queenstown, and it seems to defy any other range to challenge their starkness and strange stony beauty.

Rain hit just before we reached our toilet stop at Mossburn, but seems to have cleared up a bit here. We are lodged at a Holiday Park, which has camping, RVs, and backpackers and is right on the shores of Lake Te Anau. We head out early tomorow morning for the Routeburn Track, a 3-day tramp that crosses from Fiordlands National Park into Mt. Aspiring National Park. We'll come out into the Queenstown side, so my next check-in should be from there on Thursday evening.

Best from the high country!