Nancy & Neil tour New Zealnd's South Island by car.

A Tour of New Zealand's South Island
May 6th, 2003

We will always remember our stay in New Zealand as having been spent working on our sailboat, Active Light, for 5 months (!) and sightseeing and touring for only one month. During that single month (March 2003) we circumnavigated New Zealand's South Island by going down the east side through Christchurch to Invercargill, and up the west coast through the fabled fjordlands and Southern Alps. We had such a wonderful time, tent camping out of our trusty Daihatsu car (affectionately known as the White Gnat), tramping, eating, visiting antique shops, and meeting new people. We are really looking forward to doing the same thing again in Australia this December. The big difference will be that we are resolved to go touring for four to five months, . . . and work on the boat for only one month! Tent camping from a car really works well in New Zealand because there are lots of "caravan parks". Almost every town of any size will have at least one, and we were never turned away, no matter how early or late we arrived. They all have a communal kitchen where we could cook our supper and breakfast. Many even furnished cooking utensils. Usually you could find toasters for breakfast and a hot water machine for tea. The kitchens were usually clean, as were the showers and restrooms, called the "ablution block". Costs for a tent site was always around US$5 per person per night. A caravan site cost the same (for a camper van). For only a couple of nights we took a "cabin", which usually had no kitchen area nor bathroom, for around US$20 per night (two persons). Then there were the regular "motel" rooms, complete with bath and kitchen for US$30 for two and up. After spending a day closing up the boat in the yard at Riverside Drive Marina in Whangarei and packing the White Gnat, we headed south for Auckland on motorway "1" about 1100 hours on March 4th. We stopped in Auckland on the afternoon of this first day and had a glass of wine with our friends, Simon and Kitty Van Hagen, returning the Autohelm steering unit they had loaned us in Tonga. Pushing on south, we were stuck in an Auckland traffic jam for an hour at 6 PM. We drove pretty far that first day, arriving at a campground in Huntley, between Auckland and Hamilton just at dusk. We were not yet experienced campers, so it took us quite a while and many exclamations of surprise and confusion to set up our new REI tent in the dark. Neil joked that had a film crew been present, the footage could have been submitted unedited to "America's Funniest Videos" or, better, used in one of the old Benny Hill shows with great success! We were laughing hard at ourselves. That first night was not so wonderful because we forget to bring pillows and we both woke up with neck cricks about midnight, but after that first night, things got progressively more comfortable. A week later, we were sleeping very happily in our tent. Much praise is due our REI Thermarest mattresses. They both insulate you from the ground and smooth out the lumps of even the hardest terrain, even though they are only a little over an inch thick.
Neil rolls up our tent the first morning after at the caravan park in Huntley. The campgrounds usually had nice lawn areas for the tent campers.	Second night out. Sunset, a book, a beer and snacks, and a tent which went together with considerably less confusion.
We basically raced south down North Island to Wellington, not even stopping to take many pictures. We did stop in Hamilton to buy pillows and to make our ferry reservations (to go to South Island) two days ahead of time, as we were advised. This year, the ferry between North and South Islands cost US$140 each way for a small car and two people.
View of Mount Tongariro in Tongariro National Park, North Island.	Nancy at Raukawa Falls on the Mangawhero River.
We stayed overnight in Wellington, a large port city, at the southern tip of North Island, in a frumpy youth hostel called "Downtown Backpackers", as we had to be at the Interislander ferry early the next morning. We had a nice walk into town, got a good look at a gang of southern hemisphere punk rockers picking a fight with a bicyclist, and had a good meal in an Indonesian restaurant. We spent a less than restful night in our small private room because we were so excited about crossing Cook Strait next day.
The Interislander ferry runs several times daily between Wellington and the small town of Picton at the top of South Island.	Our second day on South Island, we took a detour into the hills following signs pointing to "The High Country Festival". This traditional English brass band was playing as we arrived. They were a pretty good band.
Neil in the blue shirt in the foreground, listens to a country music group while eating an underdone chicken kebab at the High Country Festival.	Nancy, proud of being the old logger's daughter that she is, was impressed with the quality and extent of tree farming all over South Island.
We will remember our crossing Cook Strait as being wet, windy, and overcast. The crossing takes about three hours. From Picton, port town on the northern tip of South Island, we drove leisurely down the east coast, sometimes not covering even 100 kilometers per day. We stopped at every interesting view for pictures, sampled the wares at many Tip Top ice cream stores (New Zealand ice cream is good!), ate frequently in pubs and small eateries, and began to stop at two or three antique stores in every little town in search of bargain-priced Shelley tea cups for Nancy's sister, Merle. We visited a cheese factory store, the Ashford spinning wheel factory in Ashburton, and many beaches.
This beach north of Christchurch was littered with small white polished stones.	These beach rocks are called the "Moeraki Boulders", north of Christchurch.
We spent two days in Christchurch, visiting the beautiful city arboretum, the Christchurch museum and cathedral. This is an English town, and all the much better for it. We stayed at a "Top 10 Holiday Park" caravan park just inside the city. At this point, we wish to comment that New Zealand drivers like to drive fast and expect you to do the same. Their usual overt and unpretentious friendliness does not extend to other drivers nor pedestrians, no matter their nationality.
Nancy poses beneath a huge eucalyptus tree in the Christchurch arboretum. We wondered how the many imported trees here grew so large in such a young country? New Zealand settlement by the English is less than 200 years old.	Nancy in a reconstructed English style street at the Christchurch Museum.
South of Christchurch, the countryside was all rolling hills, sheep pastures, and hedgerows. The hedgerows are huge, typically twenty feet high and twelve feet wide. And they are manicured! They serve primarily as windbreaks for the sheep and cattle. We saw millions of sheep, each one cuter than the previous. Nancy never failed to laugh at Neil's endless comments like "Hey, there's a cute one!". Blessed is the man whose wife laughs at his stupid jokes.
Sheep country!	By this time we had not yet learned to take panoramic shots with our new Canon G3 digital camera.
More sheep country south of Christchurch. These sort of views are quite typical.	The third one on to the left of the center group is quite a cute one. She has a pink ribbon tied around her neck.
Manicured hedgerows.	These hedgerows are usually made of some species of pine. This one is in need of a trim. They stand out in the middle of nowhere. Occasionally you will see one that has been left untrimmed for many years, overgrown into large scraggly trees with no coverage from the wind at the bottom.
The White Gnat began to miss and stutter a bit when laboring uphill, all three cylinders and 1000 ccs pulling hard to carry us and all our overloaded camping gear. So we stopped at a small town garage in Milton and had a tuneup that included oil, new points, sparkplugs, retiming, and a carburetor adjustment for US$50. As you can see from the sky in the photos, the weather began to deteriorate as we approached Invercargill. We stayed there two nights, camping in occasional showers in our tent. We had bought a new high tech tent from REI in Portland, Oregon. We were apprehensive as to how it would do in the rain because the design we selected is very well-ventilated, thinking ahead to hot nights in Australia and South Africa, but it did really well. We often had to roll it up wet in the morning, but it dried quickly as we put it up the following afternoon. We stayed absolutely dry and comfortable inside. The only downside to tent camping in caravan parks is having to get up at night to walk over to the ablution block to "ablute".
New brake pads for the White Gnat in Invercargill. Later, we were glad we did this when we got into the Southern Alps going up the west coast.	This prehistoric South Island lizard is called the "totara". Related to the iguana, they live to be several centuries old, mostly because they simply never move. We found this one in a west coast museum.
Acting on the advise of a caravan park owner, who helped us regarding west coast routes, we had the front disk pads on the White Gnat replaced in Invercargill, costing US$50. Also, there we found great seafood chowder, the movie "Chicago", and visited about seven antique shops. Almost every town had a supermarket much like the USA Safeway chain. These are called "Pak 'n Sav", "Woolworth's", "Countdown" and "New World". They are all the same world over, except here the checkout person asks "Is that th' lot?", meaning "Will that be all?". It took us a while to figure that one out. We would shop almost every day for breakfast and supper fare. We enjoyed meeting other travelers in the caravan parks where we stayed. There were few American tourists, lots of Germans, some English and Japanese, French, and Scandinavian peoples. We met only one other "yachtie" couple who crossed the Pacific by small sailboat. When people found out that we had sailed to New Zealand, they were full of "Oh, but weren't you afraid of storms at sea?" type of questions. We would laugh and reply, "That's not what you have to worry about! A better question would be 'How did you ever get enough sleep?'". Interestingly, it was the young people in the caravan parks on the west coast that turned out to be the least talkative, both to us and amongst other youths. We do not know the reason for this. We had no really bad experiences anywhere, save for feeling a bit "uncomfortable" watching the TV news (every caravan park had a reading room/TV room) every morning and evening as the coalition forces pushed their way toward Baghdad. No one ever confronted us nor openly criticized us as Americans, but the New Zealand press services seemed terribly biased and critical about the US involvement in this war.
Gemstone Beach where we searched for jade and greenstone bits washed down from the foothills of the Southern Alps.	Typical coastal scenery shows the beginnings of the west coast mountain ranges.
Meanwhile, back in the Gnat, having turned the corner at Invercargill, we were at 46 degrees 21 minutes South latitude. This would be about 40 nm farther south of the equator than Nancy's home town of Carson, Washington is to the north of same. We were now heading up the west coast of South Island. For the first hundred kilometers, the scenery was of a rather bleak, coastal range. This soon changed as we entered the area know as "Fjordland". This is an area much like the southwestern coast of Chili and the inside passage to Alaska, where high mountains are close to the coast which is indented with deep, beautiful fjords scooped out by huge glaciers sliding down to the sea.
In New Zealand, people raise elk and deer as commercial ventures. You will often see venison offered on the menu in restaurants and in the supermarkets. We found these elk in a well-fenced pasture near the highway south of Manapouri.	Lake Manapouri, near Milford Sound, was one of our favorite campsites. The views were great and everything about the caravan park itself, the kitchen, the reading room with no television, even the restrooms, were all designed and decorated in a sort of tasteful "nouveau-Mother Earth News" style that we found very attractive. We stayed here two nights.
At Lake Manapouri, we took a day to hike part of the Kepler Track. Normally this would take three days, but we were not set up for backpack camping. There are a variety of "tramps" one can take, multi-day tramps to Doubtful Sound and Milford Sound being two of the more famous. People come from all over the world to make these hikes. You are required to make a reservation with the Department of Conservation (the DOC) months, even years in advance. The number of people on the track is limited and tightly controlled. And there are fees, but the scenery is so beautiful, it is really worth trouble and expense.
Neil pauses in a wooded section of the Kepler Track. We stayed three nights in this immediate area, two nights at a beautiful camp on the shores of Lake Manapouri, village of Manapouri, and a last night in the bigger town of Te Anau, where we had a pretty good meal in a Chinese restaurant.	Nancy poses in the morning sunshine on a sand fly-infested portion of Lake Manapouri, just below on of the DOC camping huts. We are beginning to get into the Southern Alps, as you can see by the mountains in the background.
We met a young Japanese tour guide at the end of our hike, who took this picture for us. We gave him a lift back into town, but the White Gnat almost did not make it up the hill out of the valley with three of us and all of our camping gear. We cannot remember his name. Right photo, Nancy on the suspension bridge over the Waiau River at the beginning of our hike.
Neil's sister, Virginia, gave us specific instructions to visit the famous Milford Sound, so the next day we started out in the White Gnat on the 110km detour. It is really a fjord because it was caused by glacial plowing. Everyone who has taken the 3-day tramp out to Milford Sound says the scenery on the walking trek is much better than the drive that we took. Even so, the scenery was gorgeous!
Nancy stands in the morning sun in Eglinton Meadow on the drive to Milford Sound.	Typical scenery on the way to Milford Sound.
This photo does not depict how deep this chasm is nor how large are the water-sculpted rocks.	New Zealand's ubiquitous ponga ferns.
Nancy liked this little stream on the drive to Milford Sound.	Nancy and Neil on the bow of a Milford Sound tour boat.
We stopped about every other kilometer to take pictures of a waterfall, mountain view, or of the prolific New Zealand ferns.A boat tour out into Milford Sound is a must. The day we went seemed like perfect weather, but we were told that it is even more beautiful when it is raining because all the waterfalls are really flowing. South Island was in the middle of a drought and subsequent energy crisis because water levels were so low at the hydroelectric plants.
Two views from the tour boat of waterfalls and mountains in Milford Sound.
Just outside Milford Sound, we poked our noses out into a very peaceful Tasman Sea. Right photo, looking back east into Milford Sound, you can see why Capt. Cook passed it by in 1768, thinking it just another indentation in the coast.
Deer on a farm alongside the highway. These little fellas will soon be offered up as venison steaks at the local Pak 'n Sav. Right photo, Stirling Falls in Milford Sound from the tour boat.
Continuing on up the west coast, we thought the best was over after Milford Sound. We were wrong! The country seemed to get more beautiful each day as we drove slowly north.
Near the town of Fairlight, we came across the "Kingston Flyer", a steam-driven train that has been restored as a tourist attraction.	Outside of Queenstown, which we thought was a terrible tourist trap, we found this lovely vineyard, one of many, on the banks of the Shotover River.
At Kawarau Gorge, this suspension bridge is the site of A. J. Hackett's original bungee jumping enterprise. They claim to be the inventors of this sport. We watched as two East European teenagers tested their bravery and their pocketbooks in this exercise. It cost US$80 per jump. They each jumped twice in about 20 minutes.	Neil reads, waiting for his supper, in a typical caravan park in the town of Cromwell. Notice the foulweather jacket. It gets chilly in the evenings on South Island, even in the late summer month of March.
The lovely couple pose beside Lake Wanaka, on the way to Haast Pass.	The Makaroara valley, between Wanaka and Haast Pass was, to us, the most beautiful portion of the entire trip.
This site, called the "Blue Pools" on the Makaroara River, was only a short walk from the highway. Right photo, Nancy poses beside the highway just as we squeezed through the summit of Haast Pass. From this point is was all downhill to the coast again and pretty much the end of the Southern Alps.

Above, you can see two views of the Tasman Sea from the coastal highway north of Haast. This country is so very beautiful! The weather continued to be perfect every day. We were so lucky. We next visited two famous South Island glaciers, Fox and Franz Josef. We were lucky enough and perhaps foolish enough, to walk right up to the face of Fox Glacier even though there were signs warning of danger due to falling ice. Neither of us had seen a glacier up close before, so we had to do it. We were impressed with how dirty and gravel-laden the ice was. It gets pretty cool up close to the glacier face.
Nancy in front of Fox Glacier. The glacier face is still a deceptively long way away.	Nancy under an ice arch at Fox Glacier. Neil is enjoying the new digital camera. You can tell because he is taking most the pictures for a change.
This view at Lake Matheson, near the glaciers, is called the "View of Views", probably one of the most famous and frequently photographed sites in New Zealand.	Nancy on the forest walk at Hari Hari among a grove of ponga trees, actually a very tall fern tree. The trunks are frequently used as fence posts and even as logs in early Maori dwellings.
We had become friends with a fiberglass specialist in the boatyard back in Whangarei named Allen Dodds. He owns a company named Osmo-Sys and has the reputation for being honest and providing flawless work. Allen had advised us not to miss the coastal walk at Hari Hari. So, we stayed overnight at the Hari Hari caravan park and next morning drove out to the track. It was a three-hour walk, first through forest, then along the beach (with much boulder hopping to avoid the waves even at low tide), and then you come to this knob or hill, right on the coast called the "Doughboy". There are several hundred steps built right up to the top of this protuberance, and the view from there is truly worth the climb. Our new digital camera can take video movie shot (avi files) and we took one from atop Doughboy to show you all the wonderful panoramic view from there. But, . . . the movie file turns out to be over 12 Mbytes in size and we did not think our very generous sponsor and host, Donobi Inc, would appreciate our linking to files that large, sooooooo, . . . you'll have to settle for a much reduced panoramic view which we took from the beach very near Doughboy. You can get to this by clicking on Doughboy itself that Nancy is looking at in the left photo below. The peak in the middle of this is Mount Cook of the Southern Alps. The trek on the third hour of the walk from the Doughboy lookout back to our car was memorable because the path simply disappeared into the lagoon. Apparently there has been some erosion of the lagoon coastline here, so we found ourselves wading in our new boots through foot-deep salt water. We saw not another person for the entire five hours we on this trek.
Nancy rests during our Hari Hari walk and looks at Doughboy in the distance. For a better view, click on Doughboy.	These are called Pancake Rocks at Punakaiki, looking south a short drive North of Hari Hari.
About this time, the dear White Gnat failed us. We were headed north on the two-lane highway "1", going uphill on a sharp right-hand turn. On the left was a sheer rock face drop to the Tasman Sea (great view, though) and the little car just died completely a few feet short of the top. There was no shoulder. Big logging and gasoline trucks came zooming by. We got out and pushed the car over the crest and coasted downhill to a place where there was a little turnout. All of Neil's (limited) abilities in the automotive arena failed to get the little car started, so he caught a ride to a telephone and called AA. In New Zealand, AA stands for Automobile Association, a group which Nancy had fortuitously insisted we join upon purchasing this car. ("You were right, Dear!") Within 40 minutes, a tow truck was there to carry us in to Westport, the next town north, . . . at no charge. Even this turned out to be a good experience for us, because we met Pete and Ann Hancock at the Melbourne Hotel. They offered us a nice room at a reasonable rate and introduced us to Montieth's ale, and plyed us with excellent food from their restaurant. They fed us whitebait fritters as a bedtime snack, let us send email from their computer and even burned a CD of the photos from our digital camera so we could take more pictures. They were really nice to us! If you get to Westport, go see them. The car problem turned out to be a dead coil which was fixed by John at Richardson Motors for a very reasonable fee. We liked the Melbourne Hotel so much we stayed an extra day just poking around town. We visited the Coaltown Museum, which was very good.
Nancy on the longest suspension bridge in New Zealand, over the Buller River.	Neil still enjoying his afternoon beer after setting up the tent in a caravan park in Montueka on Marlborough Sound, top of North Island.
So, two days later we were on the road again, leaving the coast and heading back east toward the ferry at Picton. The scenery and the weather continued to be great. We had this view of a log yard as we drove into the port town of Picton, where we caught our ferry back to North Island the next morning.
Log yard in Picton. Note the size of the logs compared to that of the sailboats moored in the harbor. Pretty big, huh, for 2003! All these logs are plantation grown. There is no longer any cutting of virgin forest in New Zealand. Nancy, the old logger's daughter, comments on their uniformity of shape and size.
On North Island, we took a different route going back. We were impressed by the increased pace of life and traffic after a leisurely month on South Island. From Wellington, we drove north to Napier, stopping at an average of seven (7) antique shops per day, all without a single Shelley cup "find". Oh, gosh! We visited Lake Taupo and many of the thermal sites in that area and spent a final two nights out in Roturua, where our tent was pitched on the world's only thermally heated campground. The ground under our tent was warm the next morning due to thermal spring activity. We enjoyed the thermal spring-filled hot tubs at this caravan park, too.
Possums in New Zealand were imported from Australia to introduce a commercial fur trade, but like almost every one of mankind's attempts to mess with nature, things didn't work out too well. Possums are now New Zealand's greatest pest, with some 70 million of them devouring 21,000 tons of vegetation per night! They make a very frequent roadkill, as this Possum World display in Napier depicts. This was the funniest little place to visit.	Craters of the Moon, just north of Lake Taupo is one of the many thermal sites in this area of North Island. Some of these sites are used to generate electricity.
Huka Falls north of Lake Taupo, a favorite spot for local kayakers.	Diamond Geyser at Hidden Valley (Orakei Korako), north of Lake Taupo.
Bubbling mud pool at Orakei Korako.	Maori meeting house in Roturua.
In Roturua, we visited several museums, an old church with lots of 19th century Maori carvings in it, and we toured a village buried during the eruption of Mount Tarawera in 1886. Roturua is a center of New Zealand Maori culture. The Maoris are the first known settlers in New Zealand, arriving around 1200 AD, some 600 years before Able Tasman and Captain Cook. At half a million people, they constitute approximately 14 percent of the current population. The Maori have a rich culture, they are intelligent and interesting people. They were traditionally quite skillful warriors, giving early New Zealand settlers a great deal of trouble, allegedly never being defeated in battle by British troops. If things looked bad, they simply executed a hasty retreat. Maori soldiers served with distinction in the Mediterranean theater during WWII. If you want a taste of Maori culture, try to view the excellent recent film, "Whale Rider".
Maori carving in a museum at the Buried Village.	Rainbow trout in a stream at Buried Village in Roturua. We wished Nancy's sister, Linda, could have been with us to see these and the beautiful flowers.
After Roturua, we decided we were tired of being on the road and anxious to get back to work on Active Light so we drove all the way from Roturua through Auckland to Whangarei in one day, arriving at Home Sweet Boat in the late afternoon, this not neglecting stopping for our daily quota of at least six antique shops along the way. And that's the story of our trip to South Island. We will post another shorter web-letter before we head out to Fiji chronicling the work we performed on Active Light during our New Zealand refit.
Nancy and Neil S/V Active Light (Still on the hard in) Riverside Drive Marina Whangarei, New Zealand