Ch. 60: Falling in Love with the Earth Again in New Zealand

After Canada I spent a week driving around New Zealand's glorious South Island with my friend Alex. He was great fun to travel with. Here we are:

We were utterly blown away by the beauty of this country. A series of long golden vistas, never less than stunning, every day, every minute of our journey. The only other place that's ever lifted my spirit so powerfully was South Africa. In New Zealand I fell in love with the earth again.

Part of the beauty was the seeming absence of man. The south island was empty, except for the sheep, who always looked astonished when we drove past, and the deer, who looked even more startled than the sheep at seeing a human in a car. (Early settlers to New Zealand introduced deer, which promptly caused an environmental disaster, and now they are trying to exterminate the wild deer and raise venison commercially).


So there were sheep and cattle and deer and, here and there, a few very friendly people. (Why do New Zealanders have a reputation for being cold? We found them to be just lovely.)

Driving was a joy. The roads were excellent and the distances relatively short and the few other drivers we encountered all stuck prudishly to the speed limit of 100kph, so we zoomed past them in our smart black Mazda that went from 100 to 150 in a few seconds at the barest touch of the gas pedal. There were no cops, so we really TRAVELLED!

Oh, but there was one thing on the road: bucketloads of carrion. Every car length or two a squished fluffy thing on the tarmac. Now this surprised me because New Zealand has no native mammals and while I knew that rats and rabbits had been introduced (more ecological disaster), many of these flattened animals looked bigger and more exotic than a bunny. I later found out that possums, ferrets and stoats had also been introduced (more ecological disaster; 40% of New Zealand's terrestrial bird species have gone extinct), although judging from the roads it seems they've all died recently in car accidents.

Anyway, I can't begin to properly describe the beauty of this country, so I'm gonna do it in pictures and video footage. You get to see our journey backwards because that's the way I loaded the pictures and it's too damn time consuming to switch them around.

Oh, but before I do that, I just have to report on the one exceptionally ugly thing we did encounter in New Zealand: the picture of the Queen on their $20 note. She has eyebrows like an elderly Palestinian and stumpy awful teeth, and it looks like she's been drinking blood. Check it out:

And now, on with the picture show!

First you get to see Alex bungy jumping in Queenstown. (I'd done it before, so I decided to give myself a "pass" as the first time I screamed like a stuck pig all the way down.) Alex was no better. I thought he was going to swallow his tongue. This is before:
During:
After:
We also went horseback riding in Queenstown:

This is Rick, who was riding with us:
I had to take a photo of him because of his absolutely outrageous sunglasses! He bought them in Alice Springs of all places. You gotta totally admire a man who can wear those sunglasses with such confidence.

Driving from Fiordland to Queenstown:

This next photo is my favourite of the whole trip. The vista that unfolded in front of us as our car rounded a mountain made us break the car in sudden amazement. I felt like crying for the beauty of it. Just look at the way the mountains in the distance are just different shades of light. It looked elfin, magical. It was magical. I felt blessed when I saw this.

Hiking in the mountains of Fiordland. A breaktaking day:

Driving in Fiordland, a World Heritage Site, in the south-west "corner" of New Zealand. The empty road cuts between the mountains:


A chasm in the forest floor showing a blue river tumbling below:

Me suffering beauty overload:
Mitre peak in Milford Sound in Fiordland:
Along the road we found a kea, which is the only alpine parrot in the world and which lives only in New Zealand's South Island. Very inquisitive bold birds. It tried to eat our car. Liked the rubber piping.

Driving to Milford Sound from Te Anau



Alex feeding the ducks in Te Anau, deep in Fiordland:

The power station buried deep in the mountains near Te Anau. We were 1km underground, apparently. Check out how their safety hats blew off when they blasted with too much explosive!
Doubtful Sound in Fiordland:

Dunedin, a little piece of Scotland transported Down Under:

Dunedin even has it's own Scottish castle:

Checking out the wildlife in Dunedin:

Albatrosses are amazing birds. Wingspan of up to 3 metres! They can spend 5-6 years at sea, never putting foot on land. They can live for up to 60 years. They can fold their enormous wings up like a sheet of A4 sliding into an envelope. We hoped to see swarms of them wheeling above our heads - I'd read about it - but we were too late in the season, apparently. There were just one or two lazy-ass chick stragglers still hanging on:


Not much better with a zoom lens:
We took the Taieri Gorge train journey from Dunedin. Spectacular! So romantic!
My ideal house, so pretty, in the middle of nowhere beside the train tracks:

Driving from Christchurch to Dunedin we went through Mackenzie or "high" country and visited Mt Cook to see the glacier. The beautiful blue lakes are caused by glacial melt: tiny pulverized pieces of stone suspended in the water. Breathtaking!


Alex was obsessed by sheep. He took over a 1000 photos (thank goodness, because I'm so damn lazy with my camera), but I didn't understand why he took so many photos of sheep. I didn't enquire why though. Perhaps it was a case of when in New Zealand, do as....



Check out the video that follows to get a true sense of the wild beauty of the place:


The glaciers of Mount Cook:



Outside Christchurch we the Banks Peninsula, formed by volcanoes that erupted continuously for 2 million years (just imagine!). We did a harbour cruise, where we saw Hector's dolphins, the smallest of the dolphin species and one of the rarest. I'm giving you a picture, even though pictures of dolphins never turn out, never give you the magic feeling that arises when you see them for real in the wild.

We also visited Akaroa - such a pretty little town, once a French settlement (!!!!!!! I was very surprised to hear the French were ever in New Zealand! Who knew?)