Into the Misty Mountains

Saturday, January 20
sometime after 10 PM
Picton, South Island

The Portland-based Surf-n-Tramp Team covered a lot of ground today. We flew out of Auckland at 10:30 this morning and arrived in Wellington an hour later. Wellington is the capital city of New Zealand, and sits on a beautiful harbour at the south end of the north island. As soon as we got in we sorted out our transportation for the rest of the journey- a series of one-way rental cars, which is actually cheaper in the long run and gives us much greater travel freedom than relying on bus and train for the rest of the journey. We pick up our first car down at the ferry terminal here tomorrow morning-- driving on the lefthand side of the road will be an entire adventure within itself.

Wellington is great, I wish we had time to spend at least a couple days there. As it was, a really nice shuttle driver from the airport dropped us at a downtown backpackers (as hostels are known here) to stow our packs in lockers and book the ferry, and then we had the whole afternoon to kill. We walked the two blocks up to Parliament and saw the amazing state buildings and the Beehive, which is the actual Parliament building. It's a crazy glass structure shaped like, well, a beehive. We had lunch in a pub and then walked down the waterfront to Te Papa Tongarewa, the Museum of New Zealand. Te Papa is only about five years old and is absolutely beautiful. It sits right on the waterfront and is free and was really beautifully designed- the building uses a lot of different materials and shapes, wood and metal and glass and a lot of shapes that evoke the ocean and sails. We spent a couple hours exploring it, I learned loads and made it through two floors of exhibits. Here's a few things I saw/learned:

1) The bones of Phar Lap, one of the best racehorses of all time, born in New Zealand.
2) A beautifully and intricately carved wooden Marae (ma-rai), a Maori meeting house that was handcarved in the 1850s
3) I learned that the Maori words for placenta and Earth are the same
4) I found out that New Zealand was originally Nieuw Zieeland (or somesuch), first charted by the Dutch explorer Abel Tasman in the 17th century.
5) There are sheep-shearing competitions. Who knew?

After Te Papa, we wandered the shopping district for awhile, then headed back to retrieve our bags and grab the shuttle to the wharf. At 6:00 we checked our bags and walked up a bonafide gangway onto the Arahura, one of three Interislander ferrys that sail the Cook Strait. It's huge, holds probably 100 cars and several hundred passengers at full capacity. There are 20some-odd miles of open water between Wellington and Picton, and when the swells get up to 15 and 20 feet, you want a real live ship, not some puny boat that's going to get tossed around easily. The waves were only up to about 3 feet today, so though we definitely could feel the sway and looked like drunkards trying to walk about the passenger decks, there was no seasickness and you noticed the motion more with your eyes than your stomach. I realized today that I have never been truly at sea before. But today I was in the middle of a stretch of water where I could see no land in any direction, at least for a little while. The crossing took 3 hours, and we got sunset on the way. Jean was right- the south island is even more beautiful than the north island, which is saying something, since the north island is nothing short of spectacular. At about 8:15, I looked up and saw dark mountains and cliff faces rising out of the mist and water, and sun breaking from behind them. Then we sailed into the narrow sound, sometimes no more than 50 yards between the lifeboats on deck and the trees on shore. The closest thing Provo and I could come up with do describe what the last hour of sailing was like is to equate it to Alaska and what pictures of Prince William Sound and Skagway look like: steep, green mountains covered in trees sliding down into the ocean, with no civilization in sight-a feeling of being totally isolated and remote, out in the water with dramatic and beautiful wilderness on all sides.
We came into berth at Picton at nightfall, it was really really cool to stand out on deck in the warm air and see the tiny little town nestled in next to the water with steep mountains rising up immediately behind it. The only reason Picton is on any map is because it is the ferry port for sailings from the north island. It's a little burg with a lot of backpackers, car rentals, a ferry terminal, and not much else- it's just a jump-off for the rest of the island.
Tonight we are lodged in a really cute little Mom-and-Pop backpackers, a converted house with a little fluffy dog running around, free tea and coffee, and a really cute old couple who runs it and keeps it really cozy and home-like.
Time for bed now, to get an early start south tomorrow morning- we don't know where we'll end up tomorrow night, but we do know that we're heading towards Queenstown and that we'll be seeing amazing country, but I'll bet that even that isn't going to prepare us for what's in store.