North Island - last week in NZ

Over the last week and a half, my experiences and the places I’ve visited have been folded over one another like some kind of origami kiwi. It’s been an exciting but kind of emotional send off from New Zealand.

After leaving Wellington I drove up to Taranaki, which I visited with mum backin November. My original plan was to climb Mount Taranaki with Carina and Angela; a combination of fresh snow on the summit and Carina being unwell put paid to that. Instead I travelled up on my own and, after a nice sleep and a quick surf I carried on up the coast towards Raglan, New Zealand’s premier surf spot.

On the way I made an unplanned stop when I saw signs to Mike’s Organic Brewery. Always up for a brewery tour, I popped in to see what they were up to. I’m really glad I did. The brewery is owned by Mike and his family, who are incredibly knowledgeable and passionate about brewing. They literally work in the shed, which they are slowly expanding, and much of the equipment is adapted from dairy industry hardware. This doesn’t stop them producing some really tasty drops. Ron (the son), showed me and three other people around, describing how they brew and what they are currently working on in detail. We also got to taste a whole selection of different brews at each stage in the brewing process. After that I decided to take some time to enjoy the sun in their garden before carrying on with my drive!

I arrived in Raglan after dark. I checked into the Raglan backpackers, an awesome hostel with rooms arranged around a central courtyard filled with hammocks and a hot tub. It was a really sociable place and while I cooked dinner I found a couple of people to go surfing with the next day (having a car gave me the trump of being able to offer lifts to the breaks).

On Sunday the swell was pretty small, so we drove to an exposed beach called Ruapuke. The route along an unsealed road around a mountain made it feel like a proper surfing adventure. One of the people I who came along on Sunday was an American called John and we discovered we were at a similar level of surfing and so became regular surf buddies. On Monday we went to the much closer ‘main’ beach and fitted in both a morning and afternoon surf.

By Tuesday we went one even better than this. We started with a surf on main beach and once we were out of the water decided to drive round to see Manu Bay, one of the famous Raglan breaks where serious surfers hang out. The conditions looked so good and not too intense so we ended up getting back to wetsuits and jumping in the water for a second time before lunch. Late in the afternoon we then went back to main beach for a third surf…exhausting but such a good day!

John checks out the surf at Main Beach

Surfer at Manu Bay

More surf at Many Bay

And again

Wednesday came round all too quickly and it was time to move on again. As I left Raglan I drove to the see the Bridal Veil Falls, around 50 metres high and another impressive waterfall. Rather than getting back on to the main road afterwards, I ended up on 30 kilometres of unsealed road winding through the countryside by the coast. It left Lafayundai very dusty and can't have done her suspension any good.

Bridal Veils Falls

When I eventually rejoined a main road, I drove down to the Waitomo Caves. These are a network of caves filled with glow-worms and underground rivers. The tours take you down into the caves to go ‘blackwater rafting’ – essentially sitting in a rubber ring paddling down these rivers in the dark and jumping backwards off underground waterfalls.

I arrived in Taupō, a lakeside town right in the centre of the North Island and met up with two Germans, Alice and Philine, who I had got to know in Raglan. They had hoped to do the Tongariro Crossing (which I did in January) on Thursday, but the weather was against them so instead we took a walk to some waterfalls, hot pools and a geothermal site called ‘craters of the moon’.

In the afternoon the sky suddenly cleared up so I rushed to book a sky dive. Taupō renowned as a place to sky dive. This wasn’t my first tandem jump as I had also done one in South America; I’d enjoyed it enough then to want to repeat the experience. I wasn’t disappointed as this jump was even better than my first one as I didn’t get distracted by feeling nervous and we had more time in freefall. I don’t think it’s possible to adequately describe the experience of sky diving, but it is absolutely amazing.

Huka falls

Craters of the moon

Group before me getting ready to set off

One of the group before coming in to land

That week would have made a great finale to my time in New Zealand, however I had more good times in store. I spent Friday night at a bach in Martinborough. Em, who painted Queenstown red with me, organised a weekend away for about a dozen of our (mostly English, mostly Ministry of Education friends). It was lovely seeing them all and then quite emotional saying goodbye and driving off on Saturday morning. 

Dinner in Martinborough

On Saturday I had lunch with Helen and Harry, who by coincidence had ended up leaving NZ at almost exactly the same time I was. It was St Paddy’s Day so I also managed a few Guinness’s with my flatmates Gabby, Matt and Ali who took over my room – although it was a quieter affair for me than last year in Wellington.

My flight was at ridiculous-o-clock on Sunday morning, so I was lucky to be able to stay with Helen and Harry at an apartment owned by Helen’s relatives half way out to the airport. The view over the lights of the Wellington as I waited for my taxi this morning was a lovely final image of a city I’ve loved living in over the last year.

South Island - Part 3 (Wanaka, Queenstown and Milford)

My last post was written sitting in Wanaka, a lakeside town inland from the West Coast that I travelled down last week. The drive from Franz Josef to Wanaka had been impressive, through a landscape so rugged that the road was only opened across it in 1965.

I spent a pleasant afternoon and night in Wanaka, talking a walk along the edge of the lake and tasting some wines at the Rippon Vineyard. The next morning I made an early start to get on the road towards Queenstown, unfortunately I chose the less breathtaking of the two routes, so by South Island standards the scenery was nothing noteworthy.

In Queenstown I was due to meet up with Em, who I know well from DfE in England and who has just started a similar year at the Ministry to the one I did. She was lucky to make it down for the weekend as the North Island, including Wellington was hit by a ‘weather bomb’. This was a new Kiwi-ism for both of us, but it involved storms that grounded nearly all flights and delayed her plane.

If New Zealand is a country of adrenaline packed activities, Queenstown is undoubtedly the capital. Every corner you turn offers a jet-this, bungee-that or para-the other. We wasted no time after we arrived as our hostel had a flyer advertising some low cost helicopter flights. Our luck was definitely in as after initially looking like it was fully booked, we eventually got seats, then got upgraded to a better flight. For around £70, we were whisked up into the mountains surrounding the town, where we landed above the snowline to take some photos. It’s an incredible way to travel, especially in such a scenic area.

From the helicopter ride we went straight in search of our next thrill, which was a jet-boat ride down a narrow canyon. The boats run off two powerful engines and speed along with just a couple of inches of them in the water. The ride takes you right up close to the walls of the canyon and involves brilliant 360 turns that left us covered in spray.

We got back into town too late in the afternoon to head out and visit a winery, which was our original plan. Luckily Queenstown has this covered with a shop-cum-bar where you sit in leather armchairs sampling over 80 different wines. I even discovered (and then tried) New Zealand single malt. We then met up with a friend of Em’s from England who was travelling with his mate and the four of us sampled Queenstown nightlife. We finished the night by getting a Fergburger, a local institution that gets recommended by anyone who has travelled to Queenstown and that lived up to the reputation.

Unfortunately the next morning called for an early start. Fortunately we were off to Milford Sound and we had decided on having someone drive us there rather than driving ourselves. Usually a coach journey of 5 hours each way would fill me with dread. The scenery of the journey is so amazing that it didn’t end up being tortuous, particularly with the interesting commentary from the guide and frequent photo stops. In the end, the journey is just a warm-up for the cruise on Milford Sound (which is really a fjord carved by glaciers). Steep walls of rock rise out of the water and climb high above the boat on either side. The scale is so huge it’s hard to judge, with 150 metre waterfalls looking small until you sail up so close that the spray hits you. We even got to see a pod of dolphins that appeared right beside the boat. The photos below give some sense of how beautiful it all was.

Mountain pass over to Wanaka

Rippon vineyard

Grapes at Rippon

 Queenstown

View from the helicopter

Jumping out into snow

On a mountain (in shorts)

Coming back into Queenstown

Shotover canyon - site of the jetboat ride

The jetboat

Paraglider floating above Queenstown

The Remarkables Mountain Range

Milford

Getting up close to the waterfall

I’ll leave things there for now. I’m currently in Kaikoura, having driven most of the way back up the East of the South Island. Tomorrow I take the ferry back over to the North Island. Here are the last few sections of my drive.

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West Coast - Part 2 (Franz Josef)

Yesterday I didn’t have the time to upload pictures from my hike on the Franz Josef Glacier.

The Franz Josef and Fox Glaciers are the big tourist draws in the area. You can look at, photograph, hike on, climb up or be helicoptered onto them at a price to suit almost every budget. I chose to do a full day hike, which gave a bit over 5 hours actually on the glacier and the chance to walk quite far up the accessible section.

The glacier has been in retreat over the last few years, leaving behind a steep-sided valley littered with moraine. This is because the snowfall in recent winters hasn’t been enough to push the front of the glacier further down in preparation for melting during the summer months. The guides were quite concerned about what the next few years would hold as even over the course of this summer the glacier has retreated significantly and a large whole had just opened up in one part of the face. Apparently it was almost unrecognisable from how it had looked back in October and there was a risk that the route they maintained onto the glacier would become unusable if the retreat continues.

Despite all of this, the glacier remains an impressive site. As you walk along the valley floor you see a bluish white form up ahead in the valley, but it is almost impossible to judge the scale. It’s only as you get closer you realise what an immense wall of ice you are confronting.

The tour company provides a full set of kit, including crampons. In addition to the guides with each group, they also have a selection of guides along the route cutting out steps and paths with pickaxes and chainsaws. The result of all that hard work is that the group gets pretty far up the glacier and gets to walk through steep crevices of ice and even tunnels of ice. It was pretty hard to capture all of this in photos, it was a spectacular sight and experience.

The whole day was tiring, but the cost included entry into the hot pools opposite where I was staying so I soaked away the effort before a nice big meal in the evening.

The group getting ready at the start of the day

One of our guides (called Richard)

Aside from the glacier there was other stunning scenery

The glacier from a distance (notice the people in the bottom right for scale)

Crampons

Top of the visible part of the glacier

Walking down again

I'm in Wanaka today, after another big drive. Here's a map showing the route I've covered so far

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