Ponies, Lord of the Rings, and Fiords

Wednesday morning we awoke to superb weather despite questionable forecasts and were greeted by the resident adorable kitty at the Queenstown Holiday Park (every holiday park seems to have an obligatory friendly kitty). We packed up and drove 44km (about 27 miles for the fervently non-metric folk) along glacial lake Wakatipu, a huge, deep finger lake, north to the village of Glenorchy where we went for a horse trek! The drive itself was well worth it as the road followed the lakeshore with glacial hanging valleys visibly carved in the mountains just across. Glacier-covered peaks formed the northern skyline. A warning for those not wishing to read about Lord of the Rings: you should probably just skip the following section. My horse’s name was Elvis and he was actually IN THE TRILOGY. Yes it’s true, I actually rode a horse that was filmed in Lord of the Rings. I was elated when I found out that wonderful little tidbit of information. The ride took us along and across the Dart River, a very braided channel that flows out of the Humboldt Range, which was filmed as the Misty Mountains in the movies. The river itself is the same one that floods in front of Isengard and the distinctive mountain that serves as the backdrop to that same fortress was clearly visible throughout our ride. We rode directly in the shadow of the hill/mountain that was Amon Hen, you know, where Boromir betrays everyone and gets shot full of Orc arrows, blah blah blah. The beech forests just on the other side of it were Lothlorien. I found out some cool trivia about the actual filming as well: the area that Peter Jackson filmed on up here is a land trust called “Paradise.” It is a pristine little valley of huge native beech forests surrounded by imposing Southern Alps. The man who owned it died a few years ago and donated it as a land trust with the stipulated that it not be altered, developed, or otherwise touched for 99 years. So when Peter Jackson wanted to film there, they struck a deal. He donated a bunch of money for the upkeep of the place and promised to leave everything just as it was. So he traveled there before filmed started to mark and take pictures of every bit of vegetation, etc. that he didn’t want in the film. All of the marked items were removed and put in a green house, to be replanted exactly as before in meticulous detail after the filming was complete. Nice fun fact, eh? Also, the latest installment of the X-Men series about Wolverine was filmed right there as well. I have more awesome bits of information that I acquired about the place but I’m afraid I’ve dragged on for too long. Anyway, the ride was about 3.5 hours of walking and cantering through stunning glacial country with few to no signs of human habitation in perfect weather. Not too shabby.
The horse trek took us to within about fifteen minutes, as the crow flies, from Milford Sound, a well known fiord in the south western coast’s Fiordland National Park. Unfortunately, those fifteen minutes can only be crossed by air or by backpacking (not actually 15 minutes walking, more like two days). The only access road for vehicles to the fiord is a five hour journey around the mountains. We could practically smell the ocean and yet we had to drive five hours around…I was not pleased. However, it turned out that the latter portion of the drive to Milford Sound was well worth the extensive detour. We drove through perfectly sculpted, rainforested glacial valleys with hanging valleys and waterfalls lining them. And despite the Milford Sound area being one of the rainiest in the world, we had a clear, if windy, day. We took a 2.5 hour “Nature Cruise” through Milford Sound, out to the Tasman Sea and back. If anything can be described as “unfairly gorgeous” because it makes anywhere else you go look just ugly in comparison, Milford Sound is it. Though, the same could probably be said for the less tourist-ridden Doubtful Sound and the rest of Fiordlands National Park. We saw New Zealand fur seals and hoped to see dolphins and Fiordland Crested Penguins, though to no avail. At the end of the cruise, we were granted the opportunity to descend a spiral staircase down into “Milford Deep” at their marine observatory. The vast amount of rainfall and runoff into the fiord creates a dark layer of not-so-dense fresh water that sits on top of dense, blue salt water several meters below. The tea-colored fresh layer reflects enough light to create dark, deep water conditions at just a few meters. So, we descended about 10 meters into the observatory and looked out through thick windows to what can only be described as “window beds” for corals, tube worms, sea stars, giant mussels, sea cucumbers and other marine invertebrates (and fish) that normally live deeper, further out on the continental shelf. They even had a few brachiopods. Only a few of you probably know the significance of that, but I can now saw that I’ve seen living brachiopods. Dolphins, sharks, penguins, and seals are purported to occasionally swim by, though we were not fortunate enough to see any.
On the way to the fiord, one must travel through a long, narrow, unlit tunnel underneath a mountain in earthquake country. The tunnel is one-way, so there is a stop light on either side with a fifteen minute wait between green lights. As we approached, we parked the car in line and got out to take pictures of the scenery in the obligatory tourist fashion. However, on the roadside was a large Kea, the world’s only alpine parrot. So I took pictures of him instead. They are very curious, even destructive birds (they’ve been known to tear at car tires until they’re ruined) and people were feeding this one despite the ample signage pleading with them not to. Still, I got a sweet picture. We are currently spending our second consecutive night in Te Anau, though we were gone all day at Milford Sound. Tomorrow we drive to Dunedin, our first foray onto the east coast. I am excited to see my flat and visit the city in which I will be spending the next five months. From there, we drive up to Christchurch, further north on the east coast to turn in the rental and fly to Auckland where I will meet my orientation group and Mom and Dad will continue onto the Bay of Islands and other north island locations without me.
Pictures next! They are a smattering of all the places we’ve seen so far, and are all in very different locations so don’t get confused when you see glacier and kayaking pictures next to each other.

week one in Aotearoa

Here I am, over a week into New Zealand and just beginning to record the journey. I arrived in Auckland last Monday morning (Feb. 2), having left Saturday afternoon from Sacramento, then LA. February 1^st, 2009 never existed in my life and I still don’t know who won the Super Bowl. I waited around for eight hours in the Auckland airport for my parents to arrive in the afternoon. I finished a lot of crosswords. I exchanged money while in the airport, and the exchange rate is great! It about fifty three US cents for every NZ dollar so things cost about half as much in US dollars as the NZ listed price. After the parents arrived, we picked up our little camper, a mini motorhome which is a very popular way to tour the country. Driving has been nerve wracking to say the least. The steering wheel is on the right and you drive on the left side of the rad, and it’s a huge beast to maneuver. We backed into a rental car belonging to a couple on their honeymoon from New York City on the second day.

The first few days were spend on the north island, which is gorgeous and can best be described simply as pastoral. Sheep, cows, and horses are everywhere with the backdrop being lushly vegetated hills and mountains with crystal clear streams cutting through them. The towns are split between having unpronounceable Maori names and ones with clearly English origin, like Christchurch or Wellington. We went caving at Waitomo, which involved scrambling over cave formations, tubing down the stream in the cave, and watching the glow worms that dot the ceiling, which looked like a starry night sky when we shut off our head lamps. During all the adventuresome cave trekking, Mom managed to “sprain her foot,” which has been swollen and discolored ever since.

From there, we drove the Tongariro National Park in the central part of the North Island. The park encompasses three volcanoes, at least one of which is still very active, last spewing ash, rubble, and volcanic gas in the early nineties. We had planned to embark on a ten mile hike (the Tongariro Alpine Crossing) across all three mountains, but questionable weather and Mom’s ailing foot put the axe on that one. Instead, we drove up to one of the ski fields, where there is still snow despite it being late summer, and took the chair lift up the volcano. The area is completely devoid of vegetation, being a lava field strewn with jagged volcanic rocks. Riding the lift was a sorry excuse for doing the hike, but we wanted to see the mountain anyway. I found out afterwards that this was exactly where they filmed the Mordor scenes in Lord of the Rings, which I found extremely awesome. The volcano that was Mt. Doom was well within sight as well.

We left the mountain with a long drive ahead of us and returned to the lush hinterland. The countryside was usually dominated by impossibly steep hills covered with a confusing mixture of tropical tree ferns and pine trees. We drove south, headed towards Wellington, a port city on the southern tip of the north island. There, we hopped on the interisland ferry, which delivered us three hours later to Picton, a town on the south island nestled in considerably steeper terrain than the north island (we didn’t know that was possible). The ensuing drive was one of the most beautiful and terrifying in my memory, hugging sheer cliff faces overlooking bright blue inlets and estuaries of the Cook Straight, the body of water between the north and south islands. We finally arrived safely (I had my doubts) in the seaside town of Motueka, on the south island’s north coast. The next day we took a guided sea kayaking trip on the Tasman Sea, just off Abel Tasman National Park, New Zealand’s smallest but best known national park. The waters were reasonably warm, nothing like the frigid California coastal waters, bright blue and astonishingly clear. We could see droves of sea urchins and other marine life from over the sides of the kayaks. We visited the seal colony at Tonga Island, ate lunch at Mosquito Bay, and rafted together to sail back into Anchorage. I got sunburned.

The summer here is mild and pleasant, and the best part is the long days—it’s not dark until 9:30 or 10:00. Driving around in the camper affords the ability to cook our own meals, which we have been doing almost every morning and night, replenishing our supplies at local grocery stores. We stay at so-called Holiday Parks, which are sort of campgrounds meet RV parks. They have plugs for our little motorhome, bathrooms, a common kitchen, laundry, and sometimes internet access and pools. Right now we are at a particularly nice one in the village of Franz Josef, right at the base of Franz Josef glacier, named, for the Austrian emperor. On Monday the 9^th (one week anniversary of our arrival) Dad and I took a guided, full day hike up the glacier while Mom stayed back and nursed her foot. The hike was absolutely spectacular. Having never hiked on a glacier before, I can say with confidence that this is the best one ever. Our guided group consisted of eleven people, one of whom was a French guy named Ludovic whom we had also kayaked with up in the Tasman Sea. It was a very international group, with Dad and me as the only two Americans, and others being from the UK, the Netherlands, Germany, France, and Australia (No Kiwis?!?). Even our guide was British. His name was Hadleigh. The approach to the glacier itself was fantastic because we were walking through a rainforest! We were fifteen kilometers from the ocean, about to climb a glacier nestled within mountains covered with rainforest. What???

We adorned ourselves with ample Goretex and crampons and began to ascend good old Franz Josef. We left around 9am and finished by 4pm. I’ve learned a bit about glaciers through various Geology classes, but I must say, it’s quite another thing to really see them in action, instead of just their 14,000+ year-old evidence on rocks. Watching the cloudy river explode out of the terminus gave new meaning to the term “outwash.” Viewing a moraine in the process of deposition, actually climbing through holes and tunnels that will later fill with eskers or kame deposits, and looking down at a roche moutonee from the glacier that actually sculpted it was quite the addition to my theoretical geologic knowledge and really changed the way I think about the glacial process. Climbing up was quite fun—we started at the terminus, which was pretty dirty, then made our way up across “the flats,” took a break on a medial moraine, and eventually weaved our way cautiously up through an ice fall that would be the extent to which we climbed. An ice fall occurs where a steepening of the valley floor causes acceleration in ice flow. Ice down in the innards of the glacier is quite plastic and will bend with the contour, but the top several meters are brittle and form huge pillars and crevasses as the glacier curves over the slope. By this time the weather had declined significantly and we were trudging through steady light rain. Nevertheless, the view from the “top” (really only a quarter of the way up the whole glacier but the top of our hike) down to the valley below was quite spectacular as we took in the sheer height that we’d ascended. Our descent was not as enjoyable as the way up because my knee was bothering me and my toes were complaining. Not to mention I’d left my wool gloves and hat back at the Glacier Center and I was pretty chilly. We eventually made it down, took a couple more pictures, freed ourselves from the crampons, bade farewell to Franz Josef, and hiked back to the parking lot where we were driven back to the village also called Franz Josef.

Today (Tuesday 2/10) we drove all day, first south along the coast among more rainforest where it was...well, rainy. Then we traversed inland across the Southern Alps, some of the most spectacular scenery on the planet, I’m convinced. We crossed the Haast pass and dropped down into the Otago region where the weather improved precipitously, driving about seven hours in total. In Wanaka, at the end of a long, deep finger lake, we bought the best cherries I think I’ve ever eaten, then continued on another 60 kilometers through the Crown Range into Queenstown, the self-dubbed “adventure sports capital of the world.” Surrounded by 360 degrees of rugged mountainous terrain, Queenstown sits adjacent to another long alpine lake and is a very cosmopolitan little ski town. This is definitely Tolkein country—many of the key scenes of Lord of the Rings were filmed in the vicinity. In fact, tomorrow we are driving and hour north to the hamlet of Glenorchy where we will embark on a 3.5 hour horse trek in even more isolated backcountry that tours some of the exact set locations. I am full of glee at this prospect. J

The following day we are off to take a boat tour of Milford Sound, an unbearably scenic fiord on the west coast’s Fiordland National Park. More on that to come…

If you’ve actually read through the entirety of this inaugural entry, I applaud you. Thanks!!