We celebrated our 35th wedding anniversary with a flight from Wanaka to Milford Sound via Mount Aspiring and it was probably appropriate that this should be aboard a 1975 Cessna 207, a plane manufactured in the year that we married and before the days of recycled materials and plastic bolts.
The Southern Alps of NZ are much more extensive than we imagined them to be and although the flight there and back was 90 minutes it must have saved over 10 hours of driving. It was a clear and perfect day, and as we flew between the snow capped peaks we lost count of the glaciers, lakes and valleys before landing at Milford Sound for a boat cruise to the mouth of the Fjord and back. The small plane viewing experience was better than that obtained from the bumpy and noisy helicopter flights in the Canadian Rockies.
Although only about 1000km, we found it takes a full two days to drive from Napier to Wanaka with 5 hours being needed for the 94km crossing on the Inter-Islander ferry. Then as the trucks are first off, it can be many hours in a slow moving queue through the mountains before you are free of the ferried traffic.
Central Otago is like the Karoo and is referred to as Mackenzie country - named after a character where legend is that he was found in the company of a thousand stolen sheep.
Lake Wanaka is surrounded by snow capped mountains and fed with glacier melt blue waters that filter along gravel-bed rivers. The water is an ice cold blue but crystal clear. It’s somewhat of a mystery then as to how Wanaka’s micro brewery produces beer that is so cloudy. This clearly required further investigative study and may have something to do with considerable time being lost in trying to find a way out of the maze at Puzzling World.
We then tried to observe Lake Wakatipu’s seiche but concluded that instrumentation finer than a stick planted at Bob’s cove outside Queenstown was needed to detect changes in the lake’s water level. However it was the best spot to get views of the middle lake and its surrounding cardboard cut-out mountains and across to the Remarkables Range.
Crossing a few fords along a road from Hell to the one house “town” of Paradise we came across more theatre scenes. As is common with long stories I had drifted off, but this quest was about crossing mountain ranges - no doubt to find a ring. There’s a lot to do in Queenstown and we sampled the TSS Earnslaw, the farm teas, the sheep shearing, the gondola, the luge and the memorable steaks of the Botswana Butchery.
However there’s a limit as to how long you can afford to stay in Queenstown, living as we do on a SA pension which pales in comparison to a student’s budget. I was itching to flee the sand flies, and with the theory that they collect around dead wood such as myself, and that they would not like cement, we headed off to the southern university town of Dunedin.
Here the stone buildings are a mix of blue volcanic rock and cream coloured Oamuru limestone. We wandered around the town centre Octogon, fought off the temptations of Cadbury World, emerged at the historic station and found a way up to the botanical gardens. This serendipity led to the conclusion that anything higher than 100 metres in Dunedin is perpetually shrouded in cloud. Although we found the gates of Larnack Castle we couldn’t actually see anything other than fog. We are also sticking to the story that it must have been fog that clouded our vision of the mainland albatross colony.
Next stop was to see the rare yellow eyed penguins at the “whitestone city” of Oamuru. Well they are certainly rare as we didn’t see any. However we did stop to admire Oamuru’s colourful municipal gardens rumoured to be the best in NZ. Being free of charge they seemed even better value than the Butchart Gardens in Vancouver.
Although we intended to stay over at Timaru, all the accommodation had been booked out by numerous sporting disciplines deciding to test both Archimedes and Sod’s Laws and hold their major events all on the same weekend. We must have had a biblical glow about us as we were turned away from numerous inns, and so we headed inland to the town of Geraldine. World famous for its entry in the Guinness Book of Records as the home of the “Giant Jersey” we were more impressed to find a great bed and breakfast.
The road between Christchurch and Timaru across the Canterbury plains is straight, uninteresting and a single lane. It is hopelessly inadequate to cope with the amount of traffic and so being desperate we followed a Timaru pub owner’s advice – well partly. Ignoring the recommendation to take a taxi we took instead the “Inland Scenic Route” via Rotherham and then the “Alpine Pacific Triangle” via Waiau for the road between Christchurch and Kaikoura and onto Blenheim.
Thoroughly dizzy from South Island’s winding roads, we boarded the ferry at Picton for the return trip and were prepared for a sickening crossing across the Cook Strait. However the gale had abated since we crossed over the previous week and this time it was a relatively calm 30 knot breeze and 3 metre wave.
It was a typical fine summer’s day as we arrived in Wellington being cold, wet and windy and so with the GPS again set onto altitude we soared back up into the clouds. Emerging at Mount Bruce we were just in time to miss the feeding of the Kaka bird. But my camera captured its full tummy and there on its leg my lord was the elusive ring.
The Southern Alps of NZ are much more extensive than we imagined them to be and although the flight there and back was 90 minutes it must have saved over 10 hours of driving. It was a clear and perfect day, and as we flew between the snow capped peaks we lost count of the glaciers, lakes and valleys before landing at Milford Sound for a boat cruise to the mouth of the Fjord and back. The small plane viewing experience was better than that obtained from the bumpy and noisy helicopter flights in the Canadian Rockies.
Although only about 1000km, we found it takes a full two days to drive from Napier to Wanaka with 5 hours being needed for the 94km crossing on the Inter-Islander ferry. Then as the trucks are first off, it can be many hours in a slow moving queue through the mountains before you are free of the ferried traffic.
Central Otago is like the Karoo and is referred to as Mackenzie country - named after a character where legend is that he was found in the company of a thousand stolen sheep.
Lake Wanaka is surrounded by snow capped mountains and fed with glacier melt blue waters that filter along gravel-bed rivers. The water is an ice cold blue but crystal clear. It’s somewhat of a mystery then as to how Wanaka’s micro brewery produces beer that is so cloudy. This clearly required further investigative study and may have something to do with considerable time being lost in trying to find a way out of the maze at Puzzling World.
We then tried to observe Lake Wakatipu’s seiche but concluded that instrumentation finer than a stick planted at Bob’s cove outside Queenstown was needed to detect changes in the lake’s water level. However it was the best spot to get views of the middle lake and its surrounding cardboard cut-out mountains and across to the Remarkables Range.
Crossing a few fords along a road from Hell to the one house “town” of Paradise we came across more theatre scenes. As is common with long stories I had drifted off, but this quest was about crossing mountain ranges - no doubt to find a ring. There’s a lot to do in Queenstown and we sampled the TSS Earnslaw, the farm teas, the sheep shearing, the gondola, the luge and the memorable steaks of the Botswana Butchery.
However there’s a limit as to how long you can afford to stay in Queenstown, living as we do on a SA pension which pales in comparison to a student’s budget. I was itching to flee the sand flies, and with the theory that they collect around dead wood such as myself, and that they would not like cement, we headed off to the southern university town of Dunedin.
Here the stone buildings are a mix of blue volcanic rock and cream coloured Oamuru limestone. We wandered around the town centre Octogon, fought off the temptations of Cadbury World, emerged at the historic station and found a way up to the botanical gardens. This serendipity led to the conclusion that anything higher than 100 metres in Dunedin is perpetually shrouded in cloud. Although we found the gates of Larnack Castle we couldn’t actually see anything other than fog. We are also sticking to the story that it must have been fog that clouded our vision of the mainland albatross colony.
Next stop was to see the rare yellow eyed penguins at the “whitestone city” of Oamuru. Well they are certainly rare as we didn’t see any. However we did stop to admire Oamuru’s colourful municipal gardens rumoured to be the best in NZ. Being free of charge they seemed even better value than the Butchart Gardens in Vancouver.
Although we intended to stay over at Timaru, all the accommodation had been booked out by numerous sporting disciplines deciding to test both Archimedes and Sod’s Laws and hold their major events all on the same weekend. We must have had a biblical glow about us as we were turned away from numerous inns, and so we headed inland to the town of Geraldine. World famous for its entry in the Guinness Book of Records as the home of the “Giant Jersey” we were more impressed to find a great bed and breakfast.
The road between Christchurch and Timaru across the Canterbury plains is straight, uninteresting and a single lane. It is hopelessly inadequate to cope with the amount of traffic and so being desperate we followed a Timaru pub owner’s advice – well partly. Ignoring the recommendation to take a taxi we took instead the “Inland Scenic Route” via Rotherham and then the “Alpine Pacific Triangle” via Waiau for the road between Christchurch and Kaikoura and onto Blenheim.
Thoroughly dizzy from South Island’s winding roads, we boarded the ferry at Picton for the return trip and were prepared for a sickening crossing across the Cook Strait. However the gale had abated since we crossed over the previous week and this time it was a relatively calm 30 knot breeze and 3 metre wave.
It was a typical fine summer’s day as we arrived in Wellington being cold, wet and windy and so with the GPS again set onto altitude we soared back up into the clouds. Emerging at Mount Bruce we were just in time to miss the feeding of the Kaka bird. But my camera captured its full tummy and there on its leg my lord was the elusive ring.
No comments:
Post a Comment