NEW ZEALAND TRIP

To see the photo galleries please go to my New Zealand Flickr page.

Culture Shock | Ladies Clubs | Riccarton Bush | Botanical Gardens | Sumner and Victoria Park | Harry Potter and Brighton Beach | Westland Trip | Interlude | North on the South Island | Oamaru

Arrival

The plane doesn’t leave until 7:30 in the evening.   For most trips we are used to setting the alarm for some disturbingly early hour then racing around the house in an I-should-still-be-asleep haze, hoping we aren’t forgetting anything until the taxi cab honks telling us it’s time to navigate our luggage down some stairs in a night rain.  So 7:30 feels like the height of luxury.  And it is until about 3:30 or so.  After that time drags.  We’d done all the last minute things we can think of and are down to repeatedly consoling the ever-more-suspicious cat and we still have another hour to wait before it makes any sense to go to the airport.  Finally around 4:30 we call a taxi, wait outside in Austin’s 100+ heat until it arrives, load up and head to the airport for what turns out to be a very smooth journey to Christchurch, New Zealand.

The first leg of the plane trip is from Austin to Los Angeles.   An American Airlines flight with tiny seats, no free snacks, and everyone intensely focused on their handheld devices.   American Airlines does have the Sky Mall catalogue, though, which I always find amusing. I am obsessed with those dating service ads.   This particular flight also has a wonderful cloudless view of the American Desert.  The long late evening shadows bring the mountains and canyons into sharp relief and I spend most of the flight staring out the window newly aware of how much open space our country still has.

I am perhaps overly excited to see the LAX airport. I love how different airports are from each other.  Yes they all have an over-priced food court and the ubiquitous announcer’s voice blaring out that this is the last boarding call but that uniformity of structure allows for the uniqueness of culture to show itself.  Going to Harrisburg’s airport is not the same as going to Wichita’s.  At least half of the people sitting around waiting for a flight in one airport are from the Appalachians, in the other they are from the prairies. This shows.  Austin’s urbanity is glaringly apparent at baggage claim if you have just flown out of Colorado Springs but not if the last airport was LaGuardia.  And that’s just domestic flights.  Since I’ve never flown in or out of the fabled LAX before, I am so eager to see how it’s LA-ness will show itself that I haven’t really bothered to focus on the fact that we’re going to New Zealand yet.

Kaitlin and I crowd the airplane window to see LA’s millions of matchbox houses come into view.  I point out the size of the freeways.  The plane lands on a runway very far away from the airport. We are told to get our carry-on baggage and wait for a bus to take us to the International terminal.  Buses come and then drive through what must be the world’s longest maze of airport tarmac at 5 miles an hour giving us a great chance to see the inside of cavernous airplane hangars where airplanes were being serviced. Finally we arrive! LAX International! Perhaps I shouldn’t have gotten quite so excited. I think we must have missed the main airport so I’ll hold off judgment but the best I could say for where we were was that it had bathrooms and a drinking fountain.

By the time our Qantas flight is finally announced it is 1:00 in the morning Austin time and I am feeling it, but there is something invigorating about getting on a trans-Oceanic jet-liner.  The flurried hush of everyone finding their seats, stowing luggage, furtively looking around to see if there are any babies or small children near them, then pulling out the un-activated game console to push the buttons randomly.  Kaitlin was separated from us but got a window seat. She settled down happily while we pushed on further toward the back of the plane. Score! Just the two of us on a window aisle right next to the bathrooms!

It is a very smooth flight. Qantas service is impressive, their food good for airplane food, comfortable seats, bearable movies, and I figure out how to play the console’s version of solitaire. The large number of children and infants are remarkably well-behaved, all three of us get enough sleep and, as we step off the plane into an Auckland morning, it appears that we escaped having much jet-lag.  Best of all was waking up to find myself in a quiet and dark plane humming though the black night tens of thousands of feet above a vast ocean.  I flip on the trip locator and see that we are just now crossing the intersection of the International date-line and the equator. The plane slips over and a day of my life vanishes into the weird magical date-line calculations and the stars in the sky are jumbled.
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Mild Culture Shock, Major Time Travel: The Auckland airport is small but efficient. We go through customs, where Paul gets a lecture for not declaring his hiking boots and then wait in an airport café until it is time to check in for our flight from Auckland to Christchurch.  These people denominate their money in dollars and speak English! I’d never before traveled so far to have everything be so similar although there was a bit of confusion at the coffee counter.  “Long black,” “short black” and “flat white” face me on the menu board.  I get a long black which seems most likely to be a cup of coffee, pay for it and go to the condiment section of the counter to add some half-n-half.  The lady behind the counter is quite proud that there isn’t any. “We only use skim milk in our coffee in New Zealand.” I do what I can with this chalky feeble substance and go to join the others, my hopes dashed of being in a country where I can both order coffee in English and just-the-way-I-like-it.

We people-watch until enough time has passed to be able to check in for our flight to Christchurch. Then, bags rechecked, boarding passes gotten, security passed through, we wait for another few hours in a holding pen of sorts.  The room, which is cut off from the rest of the airport, slowly fills up with people heading to Christchurch, or Wellington, until it is quite full.  Flights from Wellington or Christchurch disembark here too so occasionally a couple more hundred people enter and mill around a bit before leaving for baggage claim. By the time we get on our last plane, and then off of it at Christchurch, we are quite ready to be done with traveling.

It’s been 26 hours since we left Austin when Paul’s colleague J. greets us with a wave at the bottom of the Christchurch airport stairs. We hurry down to meet her and another man from the university named B. It’s a quick walk out to the parking lot where our stuff is loaded into a university van and we are off to where the university is housing us. I am very impressed, and rather terrified, of J.’s driving skills. She keeps turning around to talk to us, for whole long sentences at a time, while the van keeps moving on at speed, not running into anything. She even manages a corner with her back to the windshield chatting on with us about something which I consider to really be a bit much.  Finally it occurred to me – she wasn’t driving, B. was! They drive on the left side here so the driver sits on the right side of the car.

We get to our house and the van driver says good-bye, pulling out of the driveway and heading off on the wrong side of the road as if it was the right thing to do.  J. gives us a key and we open the door to enter the 1970s.  I have not been so close to the 1970s since the 1970s.  The pot holders, the burnt umber glazed dishes, the red dial radio on the small square fridge, the gold velour stuffed living room chairs with their large cushion buttons, the flat nubby brown carpet, the dubious fabric patterns on the heavy drapes. There is a copy of The Thornbirds on the bookshelf. The phone is too old to have an answering machine. We explore around a bit. The house is bigger than our house in Austin although a ridiculously large amount of it is taken up with the bathroom. There is one room for the shower, another for the toilet, and a third for a sink and bathtub. Each has its own door off the hallway. The house is wonderfully outfitted regardless of the decade – we will have all the soup strainers and wash cloths we can possibly want. Someone has even thoughtfully filled the fridge with enough food to make a meal or two. Even so we ask J. where the nearest grocery store is and she says it’s close enough to walk. This is heartening as we don’t have a car.  She asks if we’d like to go now and we say yes.  25 minutes of brisk walking on busy city streets and we are at a large grocery store remarkably like one a person could find in Texas.  J. says good-bye to us here. We thank her and rather desperately hope we can find our way back as the jet lag begins to settle down around us like an evil fog.

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Internet and Ladies Clubs: There are few electrical outlets in this house, only one timepiece, and no Internet.  The electrical sockets are an Australia-New Zealand design with three prongs in the shape of a capital Y while all our plugs are the incompatible North American kind. We walk the mile to the store and buy three adapters at $15 each. Not to complain but there it is.

Paul comes back from teaching and calls the Bank of New Zealand to make an appointment to open a bank account. We find the electronic safe, test it about 50 times, put our passports in and close the door. The safe which has cheerfully opened the last 50 times refuses to open again. While Paul calls BNZ and cancels the appointment until we can track down a locksmith I continue to try to figure out our Internet situation. I get a connection, but only Facebook and the Marriage Ref come up.

The phone works though it bubbles and cracks and it is occasionally impossible to hear things for a word or two but it does ring and make connections.  It rings twice with older women on the other end of the line instructing me as to who is going to pick us up for the Newcomers Welcoming Society the next day.  Not “Did we want to go?” but when we should be ready.  As a matter of fact Kaitlin and I don’t particularly want to go but during the phone calls I totally fail to escape the social net. The situation promises to fit in well with my newest life philosophies– “This too shall pass” and “Come on, it’ll be fun!”—so I half want to go just to see if I’m right.

The next morning it has been arranged that we meet the woman to drive us to the Ladies Club at 10:10. We have gotten ourselves enough electrical plug converters and some extension cords and power strips but seem to have run out of toilet paper. I rush out to be able to get back from the store in time.  Gratefully I see that it is only 9:45 when I return and go to change into something properly Ladies-Club-like. Halfway into a shirt I hear a knock on the door. “Kaitlin!” I yell, “I’m getting dressed!” she yells back. I do at least have some clothing on when I come out to tell the slightly discomfited denizen of the Ladies Welcoming Club that we will be right there. As I slide into the backseat of her gray car set to take us to the house where the club will meet today it occurs to me that the phone probably beeped and cracked right over the “to” of “10 to 10.”

The club, which is about 30 years old, was started to welcome women from abroad to the University of Canterbury, and to the city of Christchurch. About half of the 20 or so women in the room are hostesses, all with white hair and dressed formally, the other half are newcomers although that term must be broadly applied. Only Kaitlin, myself, and a woman from Virginia Tech who came to New Zealand the week before were really new. There is tea, coffee, and very good local spring-water which the neighborhood uses instead of city water, cookies, sweet bread and Brie with crackers. The conversation is banal but cheerful and very abundant. When people aren’t asking us where we are from they are telling us about the February earthquake which seems to have unsettled their world to a grave degree.  The club does its job well: we come away with lots of useful tips about good walks, restaurants, upcoming festivals, and what to expect weather-wise.  Overall my philosophy is vindicated – the meeting did end and it wasn’t un-fun.  Kaitlin and I even decided to give it another try – next week we have a date to go walking with them.

Back home we still had no real Internet access. Paul and I walk our laptops over to his department’s computer technician who rather instantly fixed the issue by installing a piece of Internet-access software. Then he and I went around and around confusing each other as to whether I could continue to work on my wedding files for WLP. The final answer was no. There is only one undersea cable laid from the US to New Zealand making broadband too expensive to economically retrieve my files. This was a bummer. I LIKE photo editing and I HATE to tell people I can’t do something they are counting on me to do. But at least I now have the Internet capacity to send an email to say I will be letting people down. Thankfully we have a small earthquake that afternoon to take my mind off of my work situation.
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A Rash of Mild Adventures:

Riccarton Bush: The next day is July 14^th and most of the world heads off to see Harry Potter. There are posters all over Christchurch of grim wizards looking out of crumbled ruins with the words “It All Ends” written near the bottom.  We decide to hold off on going for at least a few days to give the crowds time to thin. By this time we have lots of places we want to see around Christchurch collecting in our travel wish-bowls and are antsy for a day free of the constraints of stocking the fridge, connecting to banks and email, and social obligations.  We won’t get one yet—Paul teaches in the morning and there is a bank opening appointment at 1:30—but Kaitlin and I are determined to make something of the morning at least. A member of the Ladies Club mentioned that there is a place called Riccarton Bush within walking distance of our house where remnants of the original New Zealand forest ecosystem remain. Kaitlin and I plot out our route on the map and head off.

Our walk takes us through an up-scale neighborhood with minimal earthquake damage. The day is chilly but fine and it is fun to be out on an adventure even if it is a terribly tame one. Riccarton Park is easy to find but we are befuddled by the fence surrounding it. At the Ladies Club we were told that part of what makes Riccarton Bush special is that there is a predator fence built around it so that the island’s native flightless birds have a chance against the imported cats, dogs, rats, and other predators the white settlers busily brought in around 1840 but this fence would keep a cat out for about .5 seconds. We go through the open gate and walk past a stream full of ducks all very much in possession of the ability to fly. There is a large old house closed due to earthquake damage, and a few people walking by with their dogs on leashes.  Eventually the park ends opening up to a city street full of shops and restaurants.  We decide we must be missing something and retrace our steps. This time I think to look behind the large old house and find a massive mesh fence with a double gated entrance; one green button to get us into a fence airlock, then another opens a door into the actual enclosure. Walking through the second door is a bit like Alice falling down the rabbit hole. Suddenly one is inside of a different world. A timeless dark green quiet world. A few birds call out with strange calls but for the most part the vine-covered woods are silent. A narrow path heads through the tangle.  We don’t talk as we walk slowly through the green. Now and then a small bird flits through the trees but we don’t see anything too extraordinary and nothing flightless. There is a moss covered boardwalk for part of the trail much to my satisfaction.  The ground below the boardwalk is muddy and soft with grass clumps growing in the damp, just shy of being an actual marsh. The fenced in area of native bush is magic, but small. We soon reach the end of the trail to come back out into the staid duck and dogs-on-leash world of the larger Riccarton Park.

After a minute to collect ourselves we check the time and calculate that we have enough to explore busy Riccarton Street for an hour or so before I have to return for the bank appointment. Riccarton Street is lined for several miles with small shops, Asian and British groceries, and restaurants. There is a mall too, but we bypass everything in search of our first New Zealand fish-n-chips eatery.  Theos Fish–n-Chips was another Ladies Club recommend and we quickly find the store’s distinctive fish shaped logo. We order two fish-n-chips platters which gets us about five times the amount of food we need. What we can’t eat I wrap up in the layers of butcher paper it was served to us on, and stow away for later. It is time to retrace our steps back through Riccarton Park and the nice neighborhoods to our house, the bank, and an evening of reading Bill Bryson’s Down Under.
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Botanical Gardens: Paul’s first free day! We lay our plans after
a casual waking up and making of breakfast to the tinny sounds of surfer music
playing on the kitchen’s small red radio. The sun streams in through the large
windows promising a crisp bright day. First we’ll catch a bus to Hagley Park
to buy bus discount cards at the main city bus station then visit the Botanical Gardens.

Hagley Park is huge. We get off the no. 3 at the park’s edge and walk down a straight grassy avenue of trees. As I walk I notice a man getting off a bus. The bus driver tips his hat to him and the bus doors close as he leaves the vehicle. Tall grass grows all around the bus he has just left and there is no sign of it having moved anywhere for a long time. Kaitlin and I look at each other then step off the path to investigate. The parked bus is Christchurch’s new main bus station as the brick and mortar one has been too badly damaged in the February earthquake to remain open. There are many signs of similar ingenuity in maneuvering around the inconveniences of remaining a working city whose heart has essentially been shut down. Most of the city center, just over the street from the Botanical Gardens at the edge of Hagley Park, is boarded up. Cathedral Square, the art museum, city service buildings, are all shut off from pedestrians and residents, to be replaced with cranes and rubble.  Public toilets are now port-a-loos, bus stations are renovated buses, city services have moved more firmly onto the web.  We are sad to have missed the old Christchurch of course, but surely a city that can adapt so readily is not completely down for the count. I hope that they use this as their moment to get their own version of a Sydney Opera House, or Oslo’s Aker Brygge district going as I think a brick for brick rebuild of what was there before is going to impossible with the new earthquake building codes.

After we get our bus cards we head for the Botanical Gardens. They are so cool! Huge trees and a special section called the New Zealand Garden that specializes in native plants. The recent earthquakes have forced the closure of the Victorian era glass
greenhouses but the central café is still open. The café is warm and
full of life when we enter. There are many windows around the large central
room keeping the gardens always within view. In the very center of the room there is a fire burning inside a glass-walled fireplace. Aside from our table and a large table of elderly
people across the room who contentedly look like they come here every day, all
of the other tables are filled either with families and small children or with
mother’s day out type groups of young mothers and infants.  The room fairly swims with infants and toddlers. We get somewhat dizzy as we eat our lunch watching the extraordinary level of activity going on about 2 feet from the floor.

That evening we have been invited to go to a local pub where professors like to hang out. Everyone would prefer to hang out at the Staff Club, a grand old building close to the university surrounded by sports fields and gardens, but it has been closed after the
earthquakes so this place will have to do. The pub is already quite crowded by the time we get there opening the door into a thick atmosphere of noise and warmth.  I spend a good deal of my time talking to a professor of electrical engineering who looks eerily like Willie Nelson. He buys me a pint and cheerfully tells me earthquakes stories. Paul gets caught up with some other Geography professors and Kaitlin sits on a stool surrounded by a band of male electrical engineers hanging on her every blonde word.
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Sumner Beach: The next day is Saturday and we use it to take the no. 21 bus to the end of the line to Sumner Beach.  Sumner is a far flung suburb of Christchurch with a center street of shops and restaurants and impressive McMansion-y sized houses dotting several steep hillsides. Some of the houses were built too close to the edge of the cliffs overlooking the sea and dropped straight off the side when a section of the rock cleaved off in a recent earthquake. The government has lined the highway with shipping containers to protect passing vehicles from rocks still falling from the newly shorn cliff-sides.  The town looks nice and the large houses probably have amazing gardens but we are most interested in seeing the ocean and head toward the beach as soon as we get off the bus.

Sumner’s beach is made up of fine gray sand. There are ultra-white seagulls darting in and out of the gentle ocean waves to grab at the small crabs that are uncovered as the sea pulls itself back in a low tide.  The sea looks peaceful, sweet and deceptively warm in a South Pacific-y way.   I am told that even in summer few people swim here because the current comes off of the Antarctic coast. At one point there is a huge boulder which the sea has carved into a honeycomb of caves.  The tide is low enough that the sandy bottom of these caves is dry and I have fun poking around in them.  I notice that no one else is doing the same and wonder why since the ground is firm and the ocean is hours away from rushing through. Then I remember how no one takes the elevators anymore either. Some places are bad places to be in case of an earthquake.  No earthquake comes thankfully. We have a good lunch at an Indian restaurant then catch the bus back to Christchurch.

Victoria Park: Sunday Paul and I visit Victoria Park, a hilly, forested area at the south edge of town, while Kaitlin stays home to protect her knees from the park’s steep hiking trails. It was nice although many of the trails were closed due to rock slide concerns created by the recent earthquakes. We catch views of the Southern Alps, the ocean, and a very large bird that turns out to be a New Zealand pigeon. Also see.

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Harry Potter: In the middle of the night Paul gets up and manages to make more noise and ruckus getting on his bathrobe than I would have believed possible. I sleepily roll my eyes and go back to my dream. In the morning he tells me that it wasn’t his bathrobe making all the fuss so much as a 4.2 earthquake just 10 kilometers away.

Paul wants to spend most of the day working on a paper and preparing for his University of Canterbury class lectures so we pare our day’s adventuring down to seeing Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part II like the rest of the world. We saw Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part I in Norway when it came out last November. When we left the theater after seeing Part I we walked out onto the half-lit cobblestones wet from a Bergen fog. Still immersed in the moody tone of the movie we passed the creaking ships of the Bergen harbor as tall women dressed in high winter boots and black coats walked by, their reflections flickering in puddles as they passed. Now, we leave the Riccarton Mall into a sunny Christchurch winter’s afternoon. Kids on skateboards pass us on the right as a bright green bus barrels past. To see The Deathly Hallows in Christchurch feels a bit like reading Watership Down at a summer BBQ. We head to Theos for some fish-n-chips.

Brighton Beach: Paul teaches on Tuesdays so just Kaitlin and I head out to see Brighton Beach, the last place on our sights-to-see-around-Christchurch list.  Bus 21 takes us to Hagley Park where we switch to a Southshore no. 5.  The no. 5 takes us past a neighborhood that was much harder hit by the earthquakes than where we live. In some blocks every other house is torn down to the foundation. Around the flat concrete foundation slabs the earth has a horrible gray grainy appearance that I’ve been told is the aftermath of liquefaction. We are driving through the flat alluvial plain that the Maori told the original city founders was no good to build on. If the earth shakes in just the right way the soil turns to jelly and bubbles up. There are stories of people’s first floors half filling with the stuff.

The battered neighborhoods appear to be working class. Between the bus radio ads blaring, “buy now, pay later!!” the news reports focusing on the current battle against proposed capital gains taxes, and the memory of the palatial homes dotting Sumner’s cliffs I feel like we are much closer to the US’s class-based system than Norway’s community focused approach.  Our shared British pedigree is more noticeable than I would have thought considering that we broke ranks with our original colonizer long before New Zealand was a gleam in the Empire’s eye.

Brighton Beach is at the end of the line. We get off at the base of an impressive modern library which appears to have made it through the recent quakes unscathed. There is a concrete balcony coming off of the library’s second floor which connects to a long, high pier going out into the sea which Kaitlin and I head for instinctively.  After the pier we walk on the beach for a long time. The walk towards Sumner is quite pretty with Sumner’s cliffs making a nice backdrop for the ocean waves. Then lunch at the library café and a long walk on the beach going the other direction.

The bus ride home is rather more full of ruffians and bad behavior than I would have thought possible in this city of Ladies Club teas and countless examples of genuine good humor.  The driver, who can barely stand the time it takes for someone to get on the bus, heads off at such a tear that the poor person who has just got on is thrown backwards and desperately grasps the first seat they can find. There is not much patience with those getting off either.  An elderly man takes a little too long getting off and the driver begins to make his bus-stop getaway before closing the door almost knocking the man to the pavement. This gets a young man in the back thoroughly fired up and there is more yelling and swearing than one expects coming home from the beach. Meanwhile a cute baby in the seat in front of us smiles at me engagingly as he smears a container of butter all over the seatback.

The next day is Wednesday which means the Ladies Club meets in the morning. There is also a university sponsored cocktail party in the evening.  At the party we are notified of a quasi-mandatory department Welcoming Tea the next morning. After that, Friday holds a dinner invitation with Geography colleagues.  I’m not sure I’ve ever attended so many functions and organized gatherings in such a short time before and am uncertain if I like it or not.

Our plans to start our first exploratory trip around New Zealand’s South Island Friday morning are scuttled by the dinner invitation for Friday evening which we really can’t refuse.  The invitation has been extended by the woman who helped to bring Paul to the University of Canterbury by nominating him for the an Erskine fellowship and only Friday will work because that is the one day her two kids can both be in Christchurch.  It is quite hard to lose a day but Paul makes good use of it at the office and the evening’s get-together is nicer than I anticipated. The family lives right next to Victoria Park!  Their dining room has a large picture window looking out over the city which shines brightly against the night while we eat a meal inspired by J’s extensive time spent in Latin America followed by the best dessert wine I’ve ever tasted.  Conversation centers on earthquakes and international academic hiring trends.
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Westland Trip

Saturday morning and finally we can start exploring! We set the alarm for 6:00 AM to be able to easily make the 7:30 airport bus. At the airport we shuffle our suitcases from the bus to the airport terminal where we call the rental car company and they pick us up in a shuttle and take us to their office. It feels a bit odd to travel via the airport when we aren’t flying, but it works. Once there, Paul hands over his driver’s license for inspection, signs papers, and is instructed on how to put the snow chains on if they are needed when we cross the Southern Alps. All this takes until after 9:00.

Kiwis drive on the left side of the road, intimidating, but we have a plan. Paul is set as the only driver so that only one of us has to get the new rules ingrained, Kaitlin sits in the front seat to say “left” if he even looks like he’s about to mess up, and I am in the back with strict instructions not to squeak nervously every time we enter the highway. This works pretty well. In fact, aside from the left-hand-side business New Zealand traffic laws and signage so closely match ours that driving turns out to be much less trouble than Paul feared, even if he does flip on the windshield wipers every time he reaches for the turn signal.

Our route takes us over Southern Alps via Arthur’s Pass, south on route 6 past the town of Hokitika to Westland Tai Poutini National Park, home of the Franz Joseph and Fox Glaciers, then back north to Punakaiki and finally back over the Southern Alps to Christchurch. We have built in a lot of unknowns including how far we will get in each direction, where we plan to stay, and which pass over the Alps we want to take on our return to Christchurch.

The scenery is fairly placid from Christchurch to the base of the mountains. There are several wineries just outside of the city which interests us. The average bottle of wine in the local grocery store here is top quality back in Austin and if we catch the store having a wine sale the prices can go as low as $8 American for some really good stuff. Besides wineries there are fields with sheep or cattle or occasionally a bunch of sheep and one lone mortified cow. The rest is small towns, simple houses, and lots of empty space in-between.

We quickly reach the base of the mountains and start climbing towards Arthur’s Pass in more rugged looking high country than one expect to find from just looking at a map. We stop at a trailhead to Castle Hill and walk around as long as we think we have time for. The place looks suspiciously like something out of the Lord of the Rings and Paul shouts something about Aragorn and Boromir until he is shushed up by his aghast daughter. We can see from a trail guide posted at the parking lot that there are many several day hikes going through the mountains and wish we had the time, season, and camping equipment to do at least one.

Arthur’s Pass is a very small town, trailhead, and visitor’s center, but not actually a mountain pass. That’s several kilometers further to the west of town. We stop briefly at the visitor’s center where we discover Keas. These are football sized green mountain parrots that like to hang out in parking lots close to the snowline where they eat the rubber stripping off of cars. When they fly the underside of their wings are bright red and when they walk they waddle like a cartoon parrot in a Pixar movie. They are enchanting but you have to hustle them away from your car.

We probably should stop for food at Arthur’s Pass. Or at Otira. Or Kumara. But the guidebook promises a good fish and chips shop at Hokitika and we fix this in our heads as the place for lunch no matter how long it takes to get there. The inevitable result of this fixation is family unhappiness. Paul, who was too busy packing and studying a manual of NZ road rules to eat breakfast, is now starving. Karina, consigned to the backseat with strict instructions to let Kaitlin be co-pilot, has been too cold for about 4 hours as the rental car’s heater doesn’t quite reach all the way into back seat. Kaitlin, told to navigate, has read the guidebook and helpfully found us a good place to eat. Paul wants food and wants it now. Karina wants warmth and wants it now. Kaitlin wants to find the fish and chips shop which has apparently disappeared since the guidebook was written. We do get fish and chips but in a take-out-only poor excuse for a store with NO HEAT and Paul orders a “paua burger.” Paua is abalone in Maori and is something he liked the first time he was here, 25 years ago, but what he gets now smells like a pile of rotten kelp. Kaitlin puts up with us because she has to, and eventually we move on to Whataroa.

We decide to spend the night in Whataroa just because that is the town we hit when it is beginning to get dark and we need to stop for gas anyway, but I’m glad we do. The only hotel worth mention is the White Heron Sanctuary Hotel and the woman behind the counter gives us a good deal on a hotel suite since we’ve come in the off-season. When she opens the door to show us our rooms we are again treated to an interior design from another era. After she leaves I go around chronicling the interior by camera while Paul and Kaitlin desperately attempt to warm the place up by turning on a very feeble space heater, a heat blowing fan device that leaves us underwhelmed. After this we go on a short drive to find the walk the hotel mistress told us about. The White Heron Sanctuary walk is very short but quite nice. No more than 10 minutes start to finish it takes us through our first rainforest of the trip and a wetland with views of the Southern Alps at sunset. We walk the boardwalk several times then go back to the hotel to watch an hour or so of rather odd Maori TV before we turn on the electric blankets and go to bed.

Sunday: It’s my birthday!! I get up before anyone else and tiptoe, shivering, into the kitchen/living room area of the hotel suite to make myself some tea and see if I can warm the place up a bit more. The thing about the heater fan-like object is that it travels. When it is turned on it sort of jiggles forward across whatever surface it is on until it reaches the cord’s end. The cord is too short to reach the floor however and, this being NZ, there is only one free plug in the whole two-room space and that plug is on the backsplash of the kitchen counter. If I don’t plug the heater fan in and set it on the kitchen counter I freeze even under two blankets. If I do turn it on it vibrates across the counter surface to the edge and plunges off. I try to forestall this inevitability by putting various objects in front of it to block the thing’s path, but really, this is one determined heater-type thingy. Finally a very large container full of water does the trick. I notice that even after an hour wedged against the front of the heater the water is still quite cool. I’m sure I’m getting too old for this as it must cause wrinkles. At least there is a microwave to heat up some Nutella we brought along to a spreadable temperature.

Paul and Kaitlin wake up. By this time I’ve mastered the heater-thingy, and am happily on to my second cup of tea and microwaved Nutella biscuit. They sing me happy birthday and Kaitlin, when I mention I can make her hot chocolate, gets so happy at the very thought that I feel it’s bound to be a good day. We leave quickly and turn the car heaters up high enough to thaw out the back seat. It’s not that New Zealand is terribly cold, it’s just that the Kiwi concept of an acceptable way to mitigate low temperatures is so different from ours.

Westland Tai Poutini National Park is about an hour south from Whataroa. The park holds the Franz Joseph Glacier that several people at the university cocktail party told us we really must see. We are less excited about seeing the glacier, having been in Norway so recently, than about having a chance to see the South Island’s Westland temperate rainforests up close. Ever since we came down from the mountains we have been driving past dense rainforest but there aren’t any access points into the wilderness and the 10 minute White Heron trail only increased our interest. The brochure on the Franz Joseph glacier promises many trails though, and we set out early to catch them before the weather turns foul as it is supposed to do.

The drive to Franz Joseph is very pretty: flocks of sheep in green meadows with white capped mountains looming close behind them alternating with dense rainforests of tree ferns and other tropical looking plants. We stop at a tourist café in the town of Franz Joseph for a quick breakfast.

It takes a while to get to the park and I decide it would be prudent to use the facilities before we set out on a long walk. There is a public restroom at the end of the Westland Tai Poutini National Park parking lot with four bathroom stall doors and a middle aged woman is standing in front of them. As I approach she tells me cheerfully that they are all full. “I have four daughters, sorry mate.” A man’s voice comes from the furthest stall, “I’m not your daughter, I’m your husband!” it says indignantly. “Oh right.” She says just as cheerfully, “Three daughters.” The next to the last door opens and a young girl comes out. “The door doesn’t lock Mummy”, she tells her mother. “Yes right”, says the Mom to me, “The door doesn’t lock and she won’t have flushed. Sorry about that, in you go now!” A few moments later from inside the unlocked bathroom stall I hear the Dad say with no small note of exasperation in his tone, “You have to take your gloves off when you go potty!!” I meet the family later on the trail but they avoid eye contact.

First we hike the Peter’s Pool trail then we do the glacier walk. Kaitlin’s knee is holding up wonderfully. It is much nicer to be hiking with her now, post-knee operation, than in Norway when we still didn’t know quite what was wrong and if it could be fixed, and if we were making it worse having her hike around with a backpack on. There every step on a trail seemed like we might be really messing something up. Here, with the doctor firmly recommending as much walking as possible as a form of physical therapy, it is a pleasure.

Of the two hikes, Peter’s Pool is our favorite. The Pool trail leads through thick forest to a bridge giving a great view of the glacier. We have started out early enough to catch the walk at sunrise when the ferns are still covered in frost and there is a light sheet of ice with giant crystals on a small pond. The glacier walk in contrast has almost no forest as the trail goes quickly from parking lot to the gravel of the glacier’s flood plain. Once on the flood plain it becomes very windy. VERY WINDY. We can barely hear each other talk and have to lean hard into the wind to make any progress. The walk isn’t very long really but the wind makes it feel like we’ve been battling the elements for ages. It often occurs to us to wonder why we are doing this but only Kaitlin has the sense to quit and turn back. Paul and I struggle on until the trail’s end at which point we say, “Yup, snow.”, and battle our way back to the car.

From Franz Joseph we turn the car around to head north, returning briefly to the same café where we had breakfast to pick up a lunch of meat pies in flaky pastry shells, a common New Zealand lunch thing, then drive back past the sheep in their fields and Whataroa’s White Heron Hotel, back to the dubious Hokitika where Paul and Kaitlin want to see the carved jade shops which are the town’s specialty. I chose to see the the Tasman Sea instead which is crashing down on a beach near to where we park the car. The tide is rising underneath a stormy sky. There is a brisk wind which whips the waves larger and larger until they land on the black sand and rocks of Hokitika’s beach with a ferocious boom of white spray. I evade the waves until one point, far down the beach, where the tide rather instantaneously reaches all the way to a wall of sand dune cliffs, a fact I learn too late to stay dry. I am dowsed but the camera miraculously escapes damage, which makes me happy enough to pass on being forlorn about my wet chilled condition. I stand on the beach dripping until Paul and Kaitlin return from jade shopping.  Then I grab the keys from Paul and head to the car to get some dry clothes throwing a dozen warnings over my shoulder about the tricky waves.

The day shifts from afternoon to early evening as we drive several hours north on highway 6 from Hokitika to Punakaiki. The road is quite dramatic as it follows the coast along a line of cliffs high above the shore.  We pull the car over and stop several times to look at a gothic sky dark with hovering clouds over a high tide made fiercer by a strong west wind.  All these stops make it late evening by the time we reach Punakaiki.

We’ve heard that the rock formation called Pancake Rocks near Punakaiki have blowholes that bellow and spew if one is lucky enough to catch the place at high tide with a strong west wind and we decide to have a look although it is almost dark. There is only the light of a crescent moon under a cloudy sky by the time we finish walking the short trail through rainforest leading to the rock formations. Enormous booms and crashes come from somewhere off to the left and a large silvery column of ocean vapor rises out of the dark at intervals but we remain at the forest’s edge the way a sensible tourist remains far from a Yellowstone bear.

Returning to the car, we decide that after the extreme chill of last night’s hotel we will move up the ladder of accommodation quality and pay the money for real warmth.  The Punakaiki Resort, just a few hundred meters from Pancake Rocks, is the fanciest place we’ve seen yet so we head there.  The resort is twice as expensive as the White Heron, with half the character and charm, but we want heat so we lump it.   After we pay and settle in, it becomes apparent that it doesn’t matter how much money you pay in this country – they just simply don’t believe in getting a room solidly warm.  The resort does have location going for it though. We are so close to the ocean that I let the deep roar of the waves send me to sleep. It’s been a good birthday.

In the morning we are lucky enough to wake up in time to catch the next high tide while the wind is still blowing hard from the west. We scramble out of bed and drive back to Pancake Rocks to see the blowholes as the sun rises.  This time we actually venture out to where the path goes next to blow holes and over natural bridges. Pancake Rocks is quite impressive: sculpted horizontal layers of rock formations with vertical sprays of water shooting out of hidden holes.

The rest of the morning is devoted to walking the trails around Punakaiki.  One walk leads along a river through rainforest, the other goes to a secluded beach cove. Both walks are very beautiful, and the day is sunny and clear.  Instead of sand, this area has very unusual material like small black and white beads which Paul likes.  He wades out into the waves for a long time. It is hard to leave but we have to if we are going to make it back to Christchurch by nightfall so we say goodbye and drive back over Arthur’s Pass and across the Canterbury Plains to the city.

Back in Christchurch it has been snowing.  A 15 year record snowfall blankets the city.  Almost 6 inches in some areas and the city, which can go for years without any snowfall, is in a state of panic. The roads, which have been fine all across the mountains of Arthur’s Pass, remain drivable as we come to the car rental agency. We clear out the car and finish the paperwork of the vehicle return before finding out that the city’s entire bus system and the airport where we were going to wait for the bus has been shut down by the snow.  Taxis also might be a hard sale.  We wring our hands a bit at this news but the man at the rental agency offers to drive us to our doorstep at no extra charge before we can get too concerned about how to get home (he has a 4-wheel drive).  There are no other cars on the slushy streets as he drives us to our house.  We thank him profusely then unlock the door and hurry to unpack and turn all the heaters to maximum high.
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Interlude: Because of a scheduling oddity involving a University of Canterbury student holiday we have only two days in Christchurch before our next trip.  Paul is supposed to teach on Tuesday but the other professor who is team-teaching the course with him canceled class on the presumption that we wouldn’t make it over the mountains due to bad weather. This is quite a disappointment because he feels like he barely has enough class days to make a reasonable course offering as it is.  Not having to prepare for the canceled class does give him more research time however which he eagerly takes.  I have a feeling that when we are gone he may stay holed up in his office until it is time for his plane to leave for LA.

With the city under a blanket of snow Kaitlin and I are interested in seeing what Riccarton Bush looks like.  I put the clothes from the Westland trip into the washing machine and draw up a grocery list. We can walk to Riccarton and then loop back via the grocery store. This is a great idea except that the day of the Christchurch snowfall the people of the city seem to have been too snow-addled to bother to sweep the snow off of their driveways and sidewalks. All day the snow melted into slush then refroze into solid ice.  It takes about twice as long to get to the park as it would sans ice sheet and when we get there it is closed.  We rattle the gate’s latch a few times then start sliding in the direction of the grocery store.  At the store we meet up with one of the women from the Newcomers Ladies Club who is very interested in knowing where we went on the Westland trip and how we liked it, as she and her husband are thinking of going. I tell her I’ll email the specifics and we all slide home.

In the evening of the second day we repack and reset the alarm clock. We’ve checked the weather several times to confirm that our best bet for next week is to head north rather than south.  We have been planning a trip to the Catlin Coast along the southern tip of New Zealand since we found out we would be coming to this country but as the time grows closer to head out the weather reports for that area look grim. Rain, snow, and gale force winds.  I’ve grown attached to the southern route but am swayed by Paul’s cajoling common sense. Golden beaches really might be nicer than frozen hotel rooms and fruitless searches in the rain for an ATM machine. So tomorrow we start our trip to the Northern half of the South Island.
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North on the South Island

I wake up before Paul and Kaitlin and make myself a cup of tea. I have some internet stuff to attend to: banking, blogging, emails to people letting them know I will be gone, and one last sweep through the news headlines. The sky is still dark outside when I wake them up for a repeat of last trip’s early-exit-from-Christchurch routine.  We take the bus to the same car rental agency this time getting a silver Nissan – just as boring but somewhat more comfortable in the back seat. This is important to me as we again have Kaitlin ride in the front to remind Paul about driving on the left although he seems to have almost mastered the skill at this point.

Unlike the Westland trip, where we drove west over the rather bland Canterbury Plains for a long time, our route to the north takes us quickly into the pretty countryside of the coastal area between Christchurch and Marlborough. We see lots of fields of sheep and cows, broken up by vineyards and the occasional tree farm. We stop for a bit at a nice picnic area but for the most part are constrained to press on to Kaikoura. The landscape is pretty but more preoccupied with agricultural concerns than with giving tourists from America walking trails and lookout points.

Kaikoura is a moderately built up tourist town, centered around the twin attractions of seal colonies and whale watching.  We cancel our plans to take a whale watching tour when we find out it will cost us over $400 and take up the whole afternoon. No south coast penguins, no north coast whales.  We take a break for lunch at an unremarkable cafeteria where we get meat pies and bad coffee and Kaitlin and I explain the plot of the novel Water for Elephants in a wandering and slipshod fashion. Our last shot at seeing cool sea life is the Kaikoura seal colonies and after lunch we get in the car and drive down to the first seal colony to investigate.

You just pull into a parking lot, park the car and get out – there they are, big beautiful New Zealand Fur Seals all over the shoreline rocks, lulling about, lazing in the sun their cat-like eyes winking slowly as they seem to smile.  The fact that we were charmed by the lazy quality of the animals in front of us must have showed on our faces because a New Zealand woman came up and rather sternly told us that the seals were not lazy, they were digesting.  After this admonishment, she goes on talking rather compulsively about how we must go see the baby seals that play in the waterfall up the road. (We said that we would.) “They aren’t stealing the fisherman’s fish!” she tells us firmly. (We never said they were.)  Then she talks at length about how horrible the Christchurch earthquakes were and we agreed.  All in all, she guaranteed that we would be coming back to Kaikoura before our trip’s end because while she was talking I kept looking around thinking, “This has to be one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever been. I’d like to be able to enjoy it.”

On the way back to the car, I see two things: a sign warning us not to touch or move the seals (who would move a seal?) and several food trailers pulled up along the beach offering fresh cooked seafood at reasonable prices. We are most definitely coming back.
We do see the baby seals playing at the Ohau Waterfall’s pool, but the nursing season is almost over so we only see six babies rather than the hundreds that sometimes come to play at the pool.  The walk to the waterfall passes under a large concrete train bridge. One is crossing the bridge as we walk under it. As I stop to listen to the train wheels’ loud rumble I reflect that this would be a most unfortunate moment for a large earthquake.

We leave Kaikoura and continue north to Nelson.  This is still farming country but something is off, like when milk starts to turn sour.  The land looks like it has been worked too hard and there are whole hillsides of clear-cut forest reducing the land to trampled bracken and raw dirt. And there is something more, something disjointed and cranky about the ground we are covering as we pass Blenheim and then turn off to Marlborough Sound.  Later a woman we meet describes the area as ‘geological fruit salad’ where the Indo-Australian Plate collides with the Pacific Plate but neither one has yet established dominance.  The mountains and hills are pushed this way then that way, leaving a jumbled mass of rocks and clay and silt below the thin layer of farmable topsoil in a chaotic crumble that I was happy enough to leave behind.

We stop at a picnic area south of Nelson to take a short break from driving.   The rest stop is at a curve of a large river, very nice in the quiet evening.  We look out at the river for a while then turn to go back to the car.  From the wooded edge of the parking lot walk three wekas, brown flightless birds about the size of footballs.   They aren’t afraid of us and one comes quite close to investigate.

The evening’s sunset grows stronger as Paul drives the car on to Nelson.  Kaitlin and I keep making chirping noises along the line of, “Stop the car! Look at the sky! Oh my God!!” while Paul the driver says, “I’m TRYING to find a good place to pull over. I can’t look right now. What? What??”  Finally the road cedes a good pull-off spot and we get out to watch a truly spectacular sunset light up the sky.

By the time we reach Nelson it is dark and our view of the city is a string of lights around the black bowl of an ocean bay at night. Paul turns on to highway 6 and starts driving toward Richmond hoping to find a motel. We stop at the first one we see and take it even though we probably could have gotten a better deal if we’d tried harder.  The room is certainly adequate with a full kitchen, two bedrooms, and bathroom.  It is also moderately warm.  We walk down the street a bit and stop at a Hell Pizza franchise where we order a “Lust” pizza and take it back to the motel.  We eat it while watching a truly moronic movie called The Morgans. Then bed.
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I get up hours before Paul and Kaitlin, happy that I’ve thought to pack some half-and-half as I quietly make myself a proper cup of tea. I pull out my embroidery to continuing working on the Las Vegas-at-night panel I started in the car yesterday. Paul gets up and we rumble and grumble at each other about how to plan the rest of the trip. He is concerned that the weather reports say tomorrow’s weather could turn to rain and wants us to be near Nelson for that, I am concerned that we are whizzing past amazing places like Kaikura toward blah just because that is our original plan and request a possible course correction. Our mutually increasing frustration is exacerbated by three things: 1. We suddenly seem to have no adequate maps at hand. 2. The hotel manager told us last night, as if he was telling us a welcome thing, that the only way to get to today’s destination of the beach coves of Abel Tasman National Park is by commercial water taxi. He gives us a brochure promising diesel fumes and noise for $64 per person and such limited winter routes that we would have to strongly contort our outing to match their drop off and pick up times. 3. The water taxis sounded so non-relaxing and unadvisable to me that in that night’s dream I gave away my bank and credit cards to a stranger to use, “Only if you really need to.” We go around and around for a while, mainly looking for maps, ending with my getting a concession to loop back to Kaikura at the end of the trip and Paul getting promises from Kaitlin and me that it wouldn’t be his fault if the trip turned out poorly.

That bit of negotiation settled we pack up and leave Nelson for Motueka, the town with the water taxis and the Abel Tasman Coastal Track trailhead, figuring that a stop at the town information center and a bit of breakfast will do us good. We stop at a small yuppie-gourmet grocery and restaurant and order a full New Zealand breakfast of hash browns, fried tomato slices, sausage, mushrooms, bread, fried eggs and coffee and are told to wait for it in the establishment’s ‘dining room’, an outdoor patio covered in plastic sheeting with a free-standing fireplace set off to one side. Outside the patio are several signs demanding that people not move the furniture. This is amusing to us until we enter the enclosure to find that the seating has been set up so that only one table is remotely close to the stove and that that table is occupied. The meal takes quite a long time to arrive. The morning temperature is in the lower thirties (Fahrenheit). We spend the time collecting our winter clothes from the car and eavesdropping on the conversation of the warm people. When breakfast arrives it is hot and good, but it can’t quite offset the chill.

After breakfast we drive to the Motueka information center. Here, cold and dubious, we encounter a singularly uninformed information guide. We ask what are the different the ways to get access to the Abel Tasman beaches and she confidently hands us the same water taxi brochure given to us by the man at the Nelson hotel. Is there an alternative method than by water taxi? She flounders. Her expression gives the impression that she’s never been asked this question before in her life. “Do you have an image of some of the more remote beaches so that we can see what the water taxi would bring us to?” I ask to keep the conversation going. Pause. “Perhaps on a postcard? Or maybe in a brochure about the park?” I attempt further. She walks around a bit looking at postcards but doesn’t find the beaches I’ve asked about. “Can you tell us about some of the nearby towns?” This question is way too puzzling and I quickly drop it. “Can we walk in from the north?” This seems doubtful. “Can we walk in from the south? I see a trail near Motueka here on this posted map. Can you tell me anything about it?” “The first 40 minutes aren’t all that good.” I give an internal Marge Simpson groan, thank her and walk back out into the chill cloudiness. Paul’s brow lowers. “Well”, I say with a good deal of hopeful bluster, “Let’s drive to the trailhead and just see. Come’on it’ll be fun!”

We find the trail and it is lovely. The Abel Tasman Coastal Track, which would take several days hiking to complete from one end to the other, starts with a boardwalk over a wide expanse of tidal wetlands. There are many unique shore birds and bird calls. After a good 20 minutes’ walk the boardwalk stops and a dirt track begins, leading up a ridge covered in dense forest. 10 minutes later we find our first sandy beach cove. The beach has many round basketball sized reddish boulders dotting the fine grained golden sand. Mollified we pull out food supplies from our backpack and sit down on three boulders for lunch. There are several more beach coves within easy walking distance, (they seem to come every 15 minutes or so) but we turn back after just one more because Kaitlin’s knee, while holding up very well, can’t be hiking up and down steep hillsides in search of beaches coves for hours on end.

We return to the car and start the drive further north toward the town of Takaka where we plan to spend the night. Between us and Takaka is a large upland land feature called Takaka Hill. The road over this “hill” is extremely curvy and steep and it takes us over two hours driving time to get up and over. Paul sees a walking trail sign and spontaneously pulls over at a trailhead near the top of the area’s summit. Inside the car we rummage around gamely pulling on boots, hats, gloves, sweaters, and coats, then open the car doors which nearly blow off in a surprisingly stiff wind that has suddenly kicked up. Pulling the doors shut we sit back down in the car. There are a few moments of doubt as try to convince ourselves that we really do want to go on this walk. Eventually optimism at our own hardiness wins out and we again battle with the wind to get free of our vehicle.

Almost as soon as we start walking the wind dies down and we find ourselves in a deserted still tundra-like landscape of bracken and sharp edged black rocks. We find several round holes about two feet in diameter and frightfully deep; reminders of Takaka Hill’s underlying karst topography. We aren’t technically in tundra, but it feels like it. After our recent mix of Westland rainforest, Christchurch urban, Abel Tasman wetland, and Kaikura ocean, a tundra landscape is unexpectedly delightful.

We get back to the car as the sun is starting to move lower in the sky. Evenings fall fast on the 45th parallel in winter and another gorgeous sunset appears to be building itself up by the time we finish driving down Takaka Hill’s relentlessly curves. When we get to the town of Takaka we chose the second hotel we find. The lady behind the hotel reception desk is quite nice and effortlessly informative. She points to postcards of intriguing looking places to see tomorrow and tells us how to get there. “There are some nice beaches at the north end of Abel Tasman near here. The road directly in is no good this time of year but if you go just west of Pohara you’ll be happy.” We ask her about a good place to eat and she recommends the local pub just down the street then answers a question I am very curious about: Yes, the riotiously colorful and impressive sunset unfolding outside the hotel reception room’s window is unusual. We should have seen the one last night. We thank her, pay, bring our stuff into the hotel room and organize a bit, then walk to the pub.

The pub is the unexpected highlight of the day. There is a fire burning in a fireplace set in a corner of the room, several tables full of locals fully enjoying it being a Friday night, a rugby match playing on a big screen TV and two friendly barmaids. We order 3 chicken schnitzel dinners at $20 a piece thinking we we’ve ordered 3 sandwiches at $7 a piece and two beers–a Speights and a Mac’s Gold. The table nearest to the fire is free and we take it. Our meals come and I quickly figure out the cost difference with a slightly raised eyebrow but soon let it pass; the beers are good, the fire is warm, the rugby game is engaging, the laughter and rowdy talk of the full tables is comforting, as is the fact that an unkempt, grey-bearded man of inconclusive mental stability can come in, stuff the fireplace with logs, order a beer, and sit with the rest of us watching the rugby game while talking to himself without anyone seeming the least bit put-out.
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Saturday. This is the middle day of the trip and the furthest north we will get. The half and half is still holding out and I make myself a morning cup of tea as well as a pot of coffee to put in our traveler’s mugs for later in the day while Paul looks at a map and ponders driving distances. We have been hoping that we can have the luxury of spending the whole day in and around Takaka and staying at this same hotel tonight but as he calculates it becomes clear that it really would be better for the rest of the trip if we at least get back over Takaka Hill before we stop for the night. So we pack up before we head out to see the day’s sights.

Our first stop is Waikoropupu Springs, the largest freshwater springs in New Zealand, a place of special significance to the Maori. We walk to the springs as the sun is rising. The native forest on either side of the boardwalk is a result of the Golden Bay area’s attempts to re-establish their original ecosystem. Australia and New Zealand had gold rushes around the same time as the US was with similarly devastating consequences for the environment. The reforestation project around the springs has been so successful that the only feature that tips us off to the fact that this was once mining country is a rock wall channel, now thickly covered with moss, built in the mid-1800s as a sluice. Waikoropupu Springs itself is a pond that weaves in and out of the tropical vegetation with water that is deep, clear, quite actively roiled, and incredibly beautiful. We stand on the viewing platform for a long time watching the birds that flock around the fresh water, including quite a few cormorants which are fun to watch, then look down to the swaying fresh water plants that grow beneath the bubbling water’s surface. The air is full of bird calls.

Breakfast! We return to Takaka for a breakfast of meat pies , pastries, and coffee in a cavernous but sunny and nicely decorated café that I suspect was once a movie theatre. Like the pub last night the café is busy with local traffic. People drop by each other’s tables to say “hi” and the guy behind the counter seems to know everyone. There is a sign by a large table giving the days and times it is reserved for different clubs. Overall I get the impression that Takaka is a touch like Spring Green with its mix of oddballs, farmers, artists, some successful businesspeople, and esoterics, all living in a beautiful landscape loved, but not really known, by outsiders. Interestingly the Golden Bay area has the largest population of German settlers in New Zealand, both established families and people still coming in–German expatriates who relearn which side of the road to drive on and stay. There is a smaller town, Collingwood, of about 200 people halfway up Golden Bay and the last town before the South Island ends at Farewell Spit, which the guidebook and some Takaka residents, play up as being a more intensely private and unusual artist’s colony than Takaka. I am very curious about it but we don’t have time to visit.

After breakfast Kaitlin wants to see some of the shops. We stop at a glass bead store with really nice, if out of our price range, jewelry. The woman behind the counter has her glass beading equipment turned on and is busy making a necklace for a customer in Australia. Watching the glass on the end of her stick turn from an odd shaped blob to a beautiful bead is hypnotic. As we chat it comes up that she used to be an embroiderer. I am always a bit diffident about showing people my embroidery – it seeming so self-indulgent – but it feels right this time so Paul runs and gets my latest skirt I’m working on and she has fun looking at it. She takes a picture and tells me to expect it to show up on her art blog but it hasn’t yet. She also tells us about a nice beach area near Pohara suggesting we stop there when we drive in that direction to see The Gorge. There are many more interesting looking shops to explore but, again, our timeline doesn’t allow it if we are going to see The Grove and still make it to the other side of Takaka Hill by nightfall, so we say good-bye to Takaka and move on to Pohara.

We overshoot Pohara Beach as we pass the town ending up near to the north end of Abel Tasman National Park where we pull off from the road to park under a stand of tall pines growing on a very steep hillside above a good-looking beach. We get out and see a small cut through the brush going down the hill to the sand. It is a very steep hill. Too steep for Kaitlin unfortunately who wisely decides she should stay behind but swears that she doesn’t mind if Paul and I go down. Since she is a teenager desirous of alone time as much as of adventure I agree to this and slide and curse down the loose dirt of the narrow trail after Paul. We land on yellow sand, dust ourselves off and have a look around. We are on a lonely stretch of beach, made up of the soft sand and reddish boulders. In the distance there is a rock promontory which I head for while Paul lies down for a sunbath. I see an impressively large dead sting ray washed up on shore, and a new variety of sea gull. The beach is very quiet, the waves are small and the seagull flies away. After I reach the promontory I edge around it to explore the next cove. As I come around the corner I see the enormous belly of a very large and very naked man sunbathing on what he apparently assumed was a deserted beach. I decide it’s time to rejoin Paul. We look around a bit more then return to the road via the trail, a thing easier to write about than to do.

We reunite (Kaitlin has been happily writing while we were gone) and turn the car around in search of The Grove. The Grove turnoff is poorly marked and we have to search around for it a bit but finally see the sign and turn off. I can’t find anything about The Grove’s geology online but if I guess at it I’d say that the area’s narrow limestone channels are the remains of an ancient cave unearthed over time. A cave on the surface with huge trees and ferns is a magical thing and I can see why the web sites and guide literature about the walk have waxed so poetical. The magic of the place was neutralized somewhat by an element of SNL however. I think the Louds must be on a New Zealand vacation and walking just in front of us. This family is so loud, from barking dog, to yelling boys, to squeaky synthetic pants, that we dive off to the side of a rock wall to let them get far ahead of us and find another hiker back there biding his time until the loud family moves on. We wait until eventually there is a terrific car door slam and a great crunching of gravel as a car loudly leaves the parking lot leting us know that it is okay to venture back onto the trail where a bubble of magical timelessness has reformed in the now-quiet woods.

After the Grove we retrace our route past Takaka and up Takaka Hill to the trail we walked on the day before. This time we walk much further, first just to be walking, then because finding a good place to sit down and eat a late lunch is harder than one might think. The grass is soft and springy but damp and the rocks are abundant but all sharp as a giant’s poorly made arrow head. I finally find a spot and we settle down in a sheltered dip in the land for apples, hard rolls and cheese, balancing on some not-too-accommodating rocks. We take a long look around before packing up the meal’s leftovers and heading back down the trail to the car. The middle of winter is very colorful here: the sky is a clear blue and windy with only enough chill in the air to need sweaters, the grass is lion’s mane yellow with many black rocks poking out of it. There is some green too from various bushes and coniferous trees: stoic, detached, shades of green that are welcome after days of bright Irish green sheep pastures, and the raucous greens of South Island forests.

It is a long curvy drive down Takaka Hill. Paul turns off of highway 60 onto 6 at Motueka taking note that this was the town where he picked apples decades ago. We are on our way to Murchison, a small town on the Buller River. The destination point is a little ambitious and we are tired by the time we pull into a likely looking hotel parking lot after dark but the first place we look at is good enough for us and we settle in with a little time left in the evening for a well-rounded dinner of white wine, Takaka grocery store muffins and camembert. Then Bryson and bed.
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Trip day four is pleasantly between destinations: Takaka is behind us, and we have two full days to reach Kaikura which isn’t very far away. We have permission to dawdle. We pack up slowly and start to head out of Murchison with plans to catch breakfast in some other town along our way but as we are leaving Paul points out a brilliant blue square building with a sign saying Takeaway Tearoom. He tells us that this is the kind of tearoom there used to be all over New Zealand in the year when he was picking apples. Of course Kaitlin and I now will only accept a Takeaway Tearoom breakfast so he parks the car and we get out two blocks from where we started from. This feels a little silly but then it’s a relaxed travel day and we don’t need to get very far.

In its own way the Murchison tearoom is as neat as the pub in Takaka. It reminds me of the old fashioned drugstores one can still occasionally stumble across in the American South: the ones with a lot of chrome and a counter with red-seated bar stools and a waitress in a pink uniform asking you in a gruff voice if you want fries with that. Think coffee and meat pies rather than soda and hamburgers and you have the idea. There are chicken and cranberry, mince, steak and cheese, and lamb and mint pies in a heated chrome-edged self-serve case. We pick out what we want, order long blacks then sit down to breakfast. The pies have flakey crusts sort of like a cross between filo and croissant dough and are delicious. Paul, who has mentioned the dismal state of New Zealand cooking for the last few decades, concedes that matters have improved. That or else this is an extraordinary tearoom a hypothesis Kaitlin and I promise to test as we continue the trip.
From the Takeaway we again try to head south on highway 65 but decide to go west on highway 6 for a bit instead to see if we can see anything of the Buller River Gorge. The forested, gently mountainous area around Murchison is quiet now but we’ve been told that in the summer this is a popular sports fishing and river rafting destination with South Islanders. I like this area of the country. It feels homey and quiet and uninterested in charging you for anything more than what is on the price tag. Highway 6 runs beside the Buller River but where the river forms a gorge must be quite a bit further west than we want to go so we turn back after stopping a few times to look at the wide, fast moving river. So, rather late in the morning by this time, we finally leave highway 6 to turn onto 65 going toward Lewis Pass and the Maruia Hot Springs.

Highway 65 takes us through some very pretty country. Unlike Takaka Hill’s crazy curvy road we have an easy drive through a broad valley bordered by low mountains. Most of the upland is wooded with, cow and sheep pastures in the valley. We are starting to put away the miles when I see a dirt road and ask Paul to turn off and park beside the roadside so we can walk down it. As we walk an electric fence separates us from a long, narrow frost-covered pasture bounded by a stream. On the far side of the stream is a park-like woods. Sun rays slant down through the park’s trees making the green grass at their base look unobtainable and inviting: a secret retreat protected by electrified wire and frost. I keep stopping to take pictures of this magic-seeming land while Paul and Kaitlin walk on without me.

Our walk down the dirt road doesn’t take too long and soon we get back in the car heading toward the Maruia Hot Springs Resort. Hanmer Springs is where many people go for hot springs but between the guidebook and brochure pictures the town seems a bit too Aspen-touristy for our liking so we aim for the less busy Maruia Springs instead. We see a sign for the resort and Paul turns off into a parking lot near a large building. We walk in, pay, and are given instructions for where to change into swimsuits. To get to the changing room we walk through the main building’s Japanese restaurant, across a small outside Japanese garden, and into another building also of Japanese design. The hot springs are 3 smallish rock lined pools on the other side of the changing room. Two pools are quite hot and one is frigidly cold. There is a Japanese bath too using water siphoned off from one of the springs. An extended family of Iranian immigrants is already sitting in the hot pools, the cousins daring each other to jump in the cold pool. We get in and are instantly warmed by the dark sulfurous water. The view is of white peaked mountains and blue sky. After a while I try to sit in the cold pool but don’t get any farther in than the bravest of the Iranian cousins which is about knee height. It is very cold. Then back to the beautifully warm hot spring and its enveloping cloud of steam. When we leave the pools to get dressed and move on we feel completely, totally good.

The afternoon is passing by the time we leave the Maruia Resort. In the parking lot we pull out a map to find a good stopping place for the night. Waiau looks like it is both near enough to where we are now and where we want to be tomorrow that we choose the town as the day’s final destination then start driving toward it on a road bordered by dense forest. Kaitlin starts to work on a Sudoku puzzle while I embroider; the trees making a dark green curtain on either side of the car. The three of us are quiet, each thinking our own thoughts, when I look up and see a sign that says “Waterfall”. We haven’t heard of anything noteworthy along this route and may not even want to stop – the day seems like it has been full enough and it is nice to be driving along in the quiet pleasantly warmed by our soak in the hot springs. The pull of an unknown trail is strong however and at the last second we decide to pull off. The woods are very pretty as we get out of the car to look around. A stand of huge redwood-like trees grows at the start of the trail, their trunks covered in thick moss. We are delighted to be walking alone on a gently inclined track through a muffled world of moss and shade when we come to a long, steep stair built into the hillside. Kaitlin decides she doesn’t want to put any more wear onto her post-op knee and says she will stay on the lower trail even when Paul and I cajole her to come up with us. We know she is just being sensible but it is hard to think of her missing what might be up there. She shakes her head one more time and heads back to the redwood-like grove while Paul and I climb the stairs and continue on. The trail ended at a truly breathtaking waterfall. The kind of over-the-top rainbow glinting silvery spiral of water shooting over a moss covered rock face one only sees on cheap fantasy posters of waterfalls as a child in the poster store at the local mall. We stand and marvel, wishing Kaitlin was seeing it too.

There is about an hour of daylight left when we pull into Waiau. We stop at an aging multi-story hotel on the town’s only business street but discover that they don’t have rooms for three. The woman in charge of the hotel desk goes to the downstairs pub to confer with some people who talk for a bit before they all direct us to the outskirts of town where we are supposed to turn into a parking lot at a sign that says “Work Camp”. [ When we do this we find ourselves at a yellow and blue wooden building built in a square around a courtyard of dead grass. The place once housed agricultural workers before being turned into a campground and cheap hotel. The work camp operator is very talkative. He tells us the history of the camp which was set up in the 1930s to house Indian migrant workers hired to rid cropland of invasive plants, and about how the winter hoteling season has been going – pretty good since a lot of church groups have been through. There are a few good walks nearby if we are interested the one to the river being closest and just down a dirt road. If we are willing to use campground bathrooms, separate from our rooms and cold as the outside winter air, we can have two adjoining rooms with a fridge, electrical outlets and heaters for well under a hundred dollars. We poke our heads into the charmingly simple rooms and say yes to the deal then pay, bring our suitcases in, and bundle up to take an evening walk to the river as the sky begins to turn red and orange in sunset.

We are hungry and chilled after the river walk. The downstairs pub of the town hotel seems like the best place for dinner so we retrace our steps and order three large meals and some Mac’s Gold beer. The pub has two slot machines in one corner and a rugby game playing on a flat screen TV. As we eat the place begins to fill up with a motley assortment of locals. The atmosphere is friendly and low-key like in Takaka and we enjoy ourselves. When it is time to return to the work camp our wood-lined rooms seem cozy. We read a chapter of Bill Bryson’s Down Under before bed.
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The morning brings some mild regrets that we so quickly agreed to outside bathrooms. Our rooms are cold too and we pack up quickly planning to re-walk the trail to the river then have breakfast. We load up the car and start walking but Paul and Kaitlin take just a few steps along the dirt road before they declare themselves to be freezing and without interest in seeing frost covered fields and an icy river. I am not so cold however and am eager to see the river again that had been so pretty and peaceful yesterday evening. So they stay back in the relative warmth of the work camp rooms while I walk over the frozen dirt road to the round gray rocks that line the banks of the river. It is nice to be alone, my breath coming out in white puffs that disappear into the pale blue morning sky.

When I get back from the river walk we return the key and find another bright blue Takeaway Tearoom for another great breakfast of flakey crust meat pies and coffee. Meanwhile back in the U.S. there is an unseemly debt ceiling debate going on in congress. The country is wobbling as the Congress waits until the last possible day to make a sub-par deal on our debt. Then the campaign season will begin and a further layer of power-politicking slime will spread over the public’s consciousness. We discuss the day’s route then turn to conversation about the state of the world and the U.S. economy. The U.S. dollar is currently weak against the New Zealand dollar. This is worrying for a country dependent on tourism and exports to the U.S. Waiau is a wonderful escape but not a complete one.

Leader Road takes us out of Waiau toward Kaikoura. It is a small road that cuts across some mountains we thought were very pretty when we drove past them on the way toward Nelson on the first trip day. The road choice doesn’t disappoint – it IS a very pretty drive but even though we are on the lookout we don’t find any good places to pull over and take a walk. We get excited at a sign that says “Greater Kaikura Walking Trail” but are confused when we follow the sign to someone’s driveway. After some hesitation I go to a private house’s front door to make enquiries. A strikingly beautiful silver haired woman dressed in colorful robes answers my knock. “Come in, come in.” she says scattering cats as she ushers me inside. I enter a mildly messy room with smoky incense filled air and drawn curtains. She explains that we are indeed at the trailhead for the Greater Kaikura Walking trail but they are closed for the season to do repairs. Apparently private walking trails are common in New Zealand. People who own beautiful pieces of land maintain trails where hikers spend the night at guest cabins sited at convenient intervals. You pay premium prices for the privilege of walking but get the benefit of privacy, guaranteed lodging, and the land owner’s economic interest in maintaining the natural state of their property. She gives me some brochures and before seeing me to the door she mentions a nice beach just down the road we might like to walk along.

We drive to the beach and walk up and down it for half an hour or so. It is a perfectly good beach – fine pale sand, nice waves, blue sky – and no one else on it in either direction as far as our eyes will see.

We leave the deserted beach and continue on to Kaikoura where I have the supreme satisfaction of getting to stop at the seafood trailer I’d spotted the first day of the trip. We order our food to go and pack it into a daypack for a picnic on the (public) Kaikoura Peninsula walking trail that starts close to the Kaikoura seal colony. A beautiful day for walking and a wonderful walk: first a steep climb from ocean-level to the top of high cliffs, great views of the Kaikoura Range, snow-topped mountains overlooking the ocean, then views of a wide rocky platform covered with seals some 50 feet below (Paul counts and figures there are hundreds of seals) as we walk along the grassy trail above. The trail passes through a large grassy field full of cow patties but no cows. We stop for lunch close to the cliff’s edge. Kaitlin and Paul lie in the grass after the meal talking while I walk on down the trail for another 20 minutes or so. The grass walkway goes on and on (like many trails in New Zealand it has been built for people to do a several day hike) and it is hard to turn around but finally my internal clock tells me I must if we are to get back to Christchurch in time to return the rental car.

The drive from Kaikoura to Christchurch is pretty and fairly direct. We stop briefly to explore another riverbed full of apple sized round rocks. The late afternoon sun turns a line of winter tree branches a gleaming red-gold. I take a few pictures before getting back in the car. We get to Christchurch by 5:30. There is no snowstorm this time and the buses from the rental car agency to our house are running smoothly. We return the car, catch a bus 5 minutes later, get home, and unpack.
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Oamaru

The days are counting down until Kaitlin and I need to board a plane and return to Austin for her scheduled second knee surgery, the start of her senior year of high school, and my work. After we leave Paul has two more weeks to stay on in New Zealand alone while he finishes teaching his class at the University of Canterbury before he too will fly home. We have one work week left together in Christchurch and a last three day weekend to see more of the South Island. The week passes quickly. Each morning Paul heads off to his university office while Kaitlin holes herself up in the living room either studying for the Spanish SAT or reading her next book, Flatland. I do some household maintenance stuff like grocery shopping and laundry but mainly just work on the blog and putting our trip photos online. Every evening we have fresh fish for dinner and read a few more pages of Bryson’s Down Under. On Wednesday Kaitlin and I meet briefly with the Ladies of the Club to say thank you for all the help and friendliness they provided during our short time with them. We don’t stay for the whole get-together though because we have our own date – one last trip to Brighton Beach.

We indulge ourselves at Brighton – a meal at a good Indian restaurant, a long walk up and down the beach stopping frequently to count and comment on six different seagull species, and hot chocolate with marshmallows at the library café afterwards. But the most interesting part of the day is the bus ride home. Since Brighton Beach is the end of the line the bus is empty when we board. Kaitlin and I choose separate rows so as to both get a window seat. We are confident that we won’t have anyone sit in the seats next to us as our whole time in Christchurch the buses have been at best a little over half full. Our assumption is soon proven wrong however as large groups of people are waiting to get on at just about every stop the bus makes. We are at standing room only well before Hagley Park. Roughly a third of the passengers appear to be either learning disabled or mentally ill. The other two-thirds of non-learning disabled, non-mentally ill passengers aren’t uncomfortable with this like they would be in the US. All three groups talk to each other, share snacks, and tell jokes, as if there was no difference at all. At home Paul said he’d seen the same phenomena when he lived in the country before. Some of his co-workers were learning disabled and no one seemed to think a thing of it. They were invited to a party like everyone else, expected to join the table at lunch, got yelled at if they did something wrong… I would love to see the US population adopt the same attitudes.

The first day of our last long weekend comes quickly. We have August 5th, 6th, and 7th yet here in New Zealand, then, on the 8th, Kaitlin and I fly home. We have been checking the weather forecast all week with crossed fingers and by Friday morning it looks like luck is with us – we can finally head south without fear of bad weather. Friday starts very early for me when I am gently shaken awake at 3:00 in the morning by a mild earthquake. We have had so many small earthquakes over the past month that I don’t even bother to check how big it was on the Christchurch earthquake web site. Instead I start packing for our mini-trip my mind spinning to-do lists for when I get back to the States on the 9th. I can barely remember the feel of a Texas summer heat. There will be allergies to contend with, and wonderful Tex-Mex food. Kaitlin will start school and have her second knee surgery. The oven needs to be replaced. I can’t wait to see the kids I work with again…I think on things like this until Paul and Kaitlin wake up at a more reasonable hour and join me in trip preparations. Their enthusiasm is all for our more immediate future and it brings me back to today’s plans. First we will visit a nearby town called Akaroa with one of Paul’s Geography colleagues, then pick up a rental car at 3:00 pm to drive to Oamaru.
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David, who comes to pick us up around 8:30 is an odd bird but a good sort and the day, while conversationally strained at times, goes well. We load into the car and he drives us to Akaroa via the scenic route. The drive is very pretty in a misty Scottish highland sort of way. At one point he pulls over so we can get out and see Akaroa Bay, formed by a volcanic explosion some 20,000 years ago. The blue water surrounded by misty green hills is picture postcard beautiful. Akaroa itself is a small gentrified town on the bay. We do some shopping for wool sweaters for Paul then have lunch at an upscale restaurant. After lunch we plan to find an easy walking trail leading out of town to perambulate along in a genteel manner as we digest lunch and discuss academic matters. This seems like such a good idea that I’m confused as to why we instead go scrambling up a steep damp hillside on what may or may not be a trail to end up at a graveyard. It’s a segregated cemetery – one part for Catholics, one for Anglicans, and one for Dissenters. There is a lot of earthquake damage with many of the tombstones toppled over and bright warning tape cordoning off certain areas. We walk around looking at the tombstones we have access to for some time then scramble back down the hill to David’s car to drive back to the Christchurch rental car agency. There we say good-bye to our day’s host with much handshaking and stilted bonhomie.

After David leaves we load up the rental car and head south on highway 1 to Oamaru. Penguins Ho! Oamaru is famous for its Little Blue Penguin colony. A colony of larger Yellow Eyed Penguins is supposed to come into shore at a beach near the town as well. The guidebook describes the route between Christchurch and Oamaru as deplorably boring but after so much driving along twisty roads with alarmingly gorgeous scenery I find it refreshingly straight, fast, and non-descriptive.

It takes three hours to reach Oamaru. We drive past tons of junky looking hotels, stop at a few which we reject because of their high price, then backtrack to the first one we saw coming into town. The décor crosses the line from amusing to downright ugly but Kaitlin gets her own room, the location is convenient, and the price is right. We pay for two nights and move in. Dinner is sandwiches made from stuff bought at the grocery store with hot chocolate and Paul reading Bryson until bed.

I wake up early. The morning brings us to only two days until we leave New Zealand but I am not focused on that anymore. We still seem firmly rooted in this country and I am eager to see Oamaru. I make myself tea and Nutella biscuits then sit on the hotel suite’s kitchen floor to write in the trip journal without waking anyone up.

The others get up around 7:00. We dawdle until 8:00 then head out to find breakfast in town. We find the main drag and lots of interesting looking cafes but everything is stubbornly closed until 9:00 so we return to the hotel where we waste time for an hour growing hungrier and trying not to notice that it has started raining. At nine we return downtown settling on a small café which smells like fresh coffee and meat pies. They aren’t quite ready to take customers yet so we sit and wait as the woman behind the counter bustles about filling the display case. We ask her where the best place to see blue penguins is and she says that there is a pair nesting in the garage behind the bakery. She directs us to it and we eagerly go down to see but the birds, who do seem to have a nest right there behind some old wooden doors in the back of the garage, have already left for their day’s hunting at sea. Disappointed we return to the café. A good breakfast and the first appearance of blue sky restore our confidence in the day however. We pay our bill and head out to see something of Oamaru.

Downtown Oamaru is quite interesting. Many of the buildings are older and built of a pale easily carve-able stone called whitestone. On Tyne Street many of the columned and carved whitestone buildings house small shops or cafes whose owners appear to have a social bent toward the wacky. There are several antique shops, a used book store so old-fashioned that accounts are kept on index cards, artist’s studios, and an unexplained life-size locomotive/sculpture with the word “Steampunk” written in huge letters across the nearest building. There is also a sort of arcade space where we find a vintage car covered with decoration relating to a mandolin band. The area is wacky but not the purposeful, excited, self-conscious wacky of Austin’s South Congress Street. Tyne Street seems more like a sleep-befuddled flightless bird wearing a fancy beaded necklace. The shop owners seem just a touch surprised to be awake as they look around their stores gaudy, undusted interiors. We poke our nose into different shops for over an hour during which time I almost despair of finding anything for A. and C. but finally do at the Oamaru tourist center.

It is almost noon before we leave Oamaru to see the Moeraki Boulders. The day is by now beautiful and the drive along the coast is spectacular. The Moeraki Boulders are on a beach about 35 minutes south of Oamaru. We stop in a small town called Kakanui for a public restroom then cross the street to have lunch at a fish and chips stand. We order the fish of the day, blue cod, and are treated to by far the best fish and chips we have had in New Zealand. We eat until we are quite full and regret that we must stop. From Kakanui we drive on to the boulders.

The Moeraki Boulders are strewn across a short stretch of sandy beach. The large spherical boulders are made up of mineral deposits that formed around shells inside uplifted land. Earth pearls I guess. As the land eroded the harder boulders stayed where they fell on the beach. They are of various sizes but many are about Kaitlin’s height in diameter and very round. Some are smooth and some have surfaces made up of plates like tortoise shells, or are broken to reveal a honey-comb pattern on the inside. Several boulders can be seen emerging from the retreating cliff-side. The place is picture-taking heaven and there are many serious amateur photographers busy with their large fancy cameras on tripods. I took as many pictures of the golden flower-covered cliff bank as of the boulders. The yellow was engagingly bright against the deep blue sky. Paul took off his shoes and walked up and down the beach and Kaitlin went around happily patting the boulders saying “They just seem so happy!”.

After seeing the Moreuki boulders we drive back toward Oamaru to find a beach called Brushypoint Beach where the yellow-eyed penguins are supposed to come to shore in the evening after their day fishing out at sea. We wait for what seems like forever on a wooden viewing platform high on a cliff above the penguin’s beach. Evening is falling and it is chilly. And then! There they were!! Penguins!!! So. Very. Cool. We only see the first three birds to return from fishing but it was enough. The first guy seems disappointed that no other penguins are on the beach yet. He goes to the bushes along the base of the cliff then backtracks to the sea and looks out haplessly flapping his flippers and shuffling about. We can almost hear him saying, “Where IS everybody?” When the others come they say “hi” to each other and retreat to a sheltered sleeping place under the bushes.

From Brushypoint Beach we drive to the ocean front near Oamaru where the blue-eyed penguins are supposed to come to shore but our luck runs out – no little blue penguins. When it becomes too dark for us to see any birds even if they do come to shore get back in the car and drive back to the hotel after a brief stop at a grocery store to pick up some hot chocolate mix and milk. After the amazing fish and chips for lunch, it’s hot chocolate for dinner.

Last full day in New Zealand. The travel-bug angel is starting to visit me with tempting visions of Austin: high sun, hot weather, Tex-Mex food, Juno the gray cat…the comfort of having my possessions and work schedule to care for again. Still, the first glimmers of “let’s go home-ness” are faint and I am solidly present in New Zealand yet, ready for the day ahead on this island while America is a land very far away. I look forward to my day as I drink my tea out of a hotel cup and wait for Paul and Kaitlin to get up.

When everyone is awake we pack up our stuff and leave the hotel headed north back to Christchurch on highway 1 to the town of Timaru where we stop briefly for breakfast in a funky 1970s disco style café before taking the turnoff to the inland scenic route of highways 73 and 77. The landscape along routes 73 and 77 is different from what I imagined it to be. I thought it would be hilly and forested, but instead we drive past flat, open cropland with the mountains rising sharply on our left. The Canterbury Plain is pretty enough but not nearly as romantic as it sounds.

We’re not sure we have time to stop explore Peel National Forest but take a spur road for a few kilometers then park the car at the first sign for a walking trail anyway. Dense forest envelopes us as soon as we step on the path. It is like an enormous Riccarton Bush! Kaitlin and I are very excited. Paul gets a treat too – a bellbird concert just a few meters into our walk. We stop spellbound as the great waves of musical noise fill the woods. The bellbird call is Paul’s favorite Besides encountering bellbirds and just general ambient forest wonderfulness we pass the biggest tree in Peel Forest – a Kowry tree wider than the width of Paul and Kaitlin’s combined outstretched arms. Then, at the trail’s end a small brown bird came over to see what we were up to. It hopped about our feet quite unafraid for several minutes its black eyes looking us over intently. Peel Forest was definitely worth the detour.

There is supposed to be a second wildlife reserve close to Peel Forest which we are interested in exploring too but we never do find it. Awa Awa Taka eludes us and we keep driving towards Christchurch. Our route passes through lonely country, mostly empty winter fields lying in the shadow of the mountains. We pass a single café and stop for pasties. Inside it is warm and full of customers who have the conviviality of people who are choosing to spend a great part of a cold day inside sitting on soft armchairs with cups of coffee in front of a fire pleasantly burning in an open fireplace. We want to linger too but don’t, knowing we have a deadline on returning the rental car.

We press on until we get to the small town of Darfield where Paul asks a shop keeper where we can see the road that a colleague of his has told him has been greatly displaced by a recent earthquake. The guy behind the counter is very happy to talk about it and draws us a map with great flourish. His assistant comes out and ‘helps’ also very happy to tell the story of the crooked road. We say thank you many times and they say don’t mention it just as many until, somewhat in a whirl, we leave the store and follow the map to the earthquake made jog in the road. Which we drive past. Did we miss it? Yes. Turn around and drive back…there..it..is. An otherwise straight road does have a 10 or 12 foot offset in it, but since you can’t see where the pavement was broken (it was of course re-paved) you could easily miss it. Paul takes quite a few pictures of the phenomenon that don’t turn out and Karina thinks Peel Forest was a much more satisfying detour but it doesn’t matter because soon we are back on the road and driving into Christchurch, then pulling up to the car rental agency for the last time.

We take the bus home and Kaitlin and I start packing while Paul double-checks our flights. We have plenty of time to make a nice dinner then pop a bottle of champagne to toast New Zealand before settling down to read the last few pages of the Bill Bryson book.
The End.
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