South Island Part 1

Milford other pics
Glacier and other pics
Sky swing and sky dive pics

The next day I was to fly to Queenstown and then take a bus to Te Anau to meet with my group. So far while Rotorua had been fun, I didn’t think anything was particularly beautiful. As I sat in the bus which took a winding road towards Te Anau alongside rivers and mountains, it came to me “This is why I came to NZ, to see this beauty. This is it!” It just went on and on, unbroken chain of mountains with clear water, just stunning!

I met with the group (Armando, Eugene, Hans, Rachel, Gagan, Elena) and the first thing on the agenda that evening was glowworm caves. We had rented three campervans with mattresses and kitchen stuff in the back, the vans were practically be our home the for next several days (we occasionally slept in backpacker lodges)

It was a chilly on the alpine lake and the caves were damp and dark. A canoe ride took us to the large colony, there were thousands maybe tens of! I could have just reached out and grabbed a few and slipped into my pocket, which is precisely what the guide warned us not to do! The cave has tiny stalagmite since its only 12k years old. The water was crisp and cool to drink.

The next day was Milford Sound. I am (slightly) embarrassed to admit that until then I didn’t know what a sound was nor for that matter a fjord. I knew there is a Long Island sound in NY and that it’s a water body but didn’t know anything else. So I asked the guide to explain. Turns out Milford sound is technically not a sound but a fjord, but it got labeled and nobody changed. Though that whole area is called Fjordland National Park. The guide also told us the story of Tasman, an explorer that the sea and national park are named after. Though he got credit for “discovering” NZ at Milford sound, he apparently never set foot on land when he got here. The Maori ate 3 of his people and he turned right around and went to Indonesia.

There is a waterfall on the sound the boat went right upto it so everybody on the deck got a nice shower. It was quite exciting (I wore a poncho so I wouldn’t be completely wet). Cruising through the sound made me realize, once again, how insignificant we, the humans, are compared to these majestic mountains and waters. And for such tiny creatures, we make so much trouble!!

On the boat I tried teaching Armando (Cuban origin) to pronounce “Fjordland”. The best he could come up with was “freeland”. Try as I might, I could not get his “r” in the right place and the “d” was just not happening. At some point we would make some progress (I think we got to “freedland”) and then within a few minutes all would be lost and I had to start over again. Armando was to become funniest in the group and loved imitating others. He had marked me as too “fu-fu” since I had expressed some surprise that we weren’t showering everyday, he was also amused by what he thought was my british accent (he particularly picked on my usage of ‘delicious’, ‘rubbish’ and other such words). Gagan (traveling from India) was the “please take my picture in an action shot” guy, he had already taken 1300 pics less than halfway into the trip.

After the boat ride we went to an underwater observatory to see coral and sealife that we would apparently never see anywhere. We got to what looked like an introductory area with windows that you could look out of. Turned out this was it! It was small and while there were some beautiful creatures outside, I was expecting something large and impressive. Something like the underwater museum walks in US (Georgia aquarium). Rachel (Korean origin) was disappointed too, we had seen better coral in the US!

Queenstown

This was the adrenaline D day, the day of bungy jumping and sky diving and all that crazy stuff people do in NZ. I had previously booked sky diving and now felt another adventure was in order. Gagan and I decided to go sky swinging in tandem and in retrospect, I am glad I had someone to go with. I would have definitely chickened out otherwise. Armando was booked for bungy jumping and he couldn’t stop talking about it. I think he was a nervous wreck thinking of what he had to do. After all that talking, turned out Elena had booked him for the wrong day and he couldn’t do it after all!

As we drove up the step slope of the canyon for sky swing, the driver turned up the music, he was playing Chemical Brothers “Hey Boy, Hey Girl” and that song will always remain associated with the anticipation and excitement I felt in what I was about to do. As I walked the ramp to the pod out over the canyon I tried not to look down into the canyon. I was in a bit of a daze when he was giving instructions, because I couldn’t help look down and get more and more nervous. Finally, when he let us go, I closed my eyes. The whoosh, the air and the feeling was adrenaline pumping enough, I opened my eyes when the wild ride had slowed down (it was a 120m drop). I looked down and around me. Hmm… not bad, not that scary! Later when I saw another two guys swing, I freaked out! I am so glad we were the first ones to go so I didn’t know how it would actually be. When we came back, I was shaking, muscles I didn’t know I had were moving somewhere. Inspite of all this, for a crazy moment I wanted to do it again. But Gagan didn’t, and there was no way I was going alone. The whole thing lasts less than 5 minutes, but the drive and back was a total of 2-3 hours.

After lunch, I rushed into an Icebreaker store and bought some woolens at a discount. Icebreakers are made in NZ and hence a bit cheaper (also due to currency rate). And then it was off to sky diving. The staff took great pains to make us feel good about hurling ourselves out of a place. It was 15000feet drop and we would be falling at 200kph at one point. The nice lady assured us its not as scary as bungy jumping or canyon swinging and here’s why: for bungy and sky swing, you are jumping relatively close to earth and you see the other land mass rushing towards you. You know what you wont hit it, but the visual is scary. Sky diving is very high up and you don’t even know what’s happening. And then you are gliding safely in a parachute before long. I believed her and resolved to not close my eyes this time.

As we waited for my turn, I wrote “I AM MAD” on my hands upon a suggestion from another woman in my group. I decided to forgo the gloves so I could take a picture with my hands open in the air. They warned us many times to look at the camera and make funny gestures since it looks good in pics and all that. Inspite of all this I didn’t even open my hand wide! I kept my eyes open but I think is a great improvement. It was indeed surreal, it felt very safe. And the fact that this time I did not look down too much made it a much better experience. I asked my tandem master to spin a few times as we were gliding. It was all over too fast. After this and quad biking in Peru and this I think I can safely say I have retired from adventure activities (oh wait, I haven’t done rafting and I have not driven 4WD in the desert. Okay, maybe semi-retired)

That evening, Rachel, Gagan and I were driving together and were supposed to meet up with the group a little after Wanaka to camp at boulder creek (beautiful site). We made an unscheduled stop at an orchard and I bought some honey and we helped ourselves to candy and other free munchies. I had heard Wanaka Cinema was a must see so we made another unscheduled stop to see what it was all about. It’s a big living room with couches and small tables, you can get food and drink at the café next door and sit comfortably while watching a flick. It was rather cute. They had a pattern made of international coins on their door. Rachel and I grabbed some dinner at the café and then we made our way to the campsite. It was isolated and abandoned countryside, not many people choose to drive at night and the road signs are ok, not great. We went the wrong way for a few minutes, but by then getting lost, making u-turns was “du jour” for us all (it was particularly funny the number of times all three vans made a u-turn in the middle of the road when the leading van realized it had made a mistake). Besides our vans stood out, since every inch was painted in a theme (good thing so you cant see scratches and dents people make).

Somewhere along the way we picked up a hitchhiker called Nadav from Israel. He is 23 and has been traveling Australia and NZ for 7 months with no plans to stop (more precisely plans to stop when the money runs out). The next day, we stopped at Fantail café for brunch. I charged my camera since it was nearly dead. We stopped for pics at several places and kept driving along highway 6 along the Tasman sea (did I mention it looks green and not blue?)

Glacier!

We had a glacier hike that day on the agenda. I once again became aware of my lack of general knowledge, I never quire knew what a glacier was. And if I did, I had completely forgotten. Now I think of it as a giant river flowing between mountains, except its frozen and can reach the height of the mountains itself. It grows and recedes. Most glaciers have been receding (global warming?) but Fox and Franz glaciers have been growing the last few years. The guide explained how they were formed (as fresh snow falls on top, it push down and then its way into valleys, pushing the gravel up against the mountain wall and subsequently the mountain a bit higher), as they recede the valley cant hold on its own (without support from the ice) so there are routine rock slides and that whole area is generally unstable. On the way to the glacier, we had crossed the Indo Australian and Pacific earth plates. They have about 15 earthquakes a day. Unstable for sure! We had to hike up 800 steps through rainforest to get to the glacier. It was sunny and the hike in this section was quite humid.

When we got close, we put on crampons we were given and started the hike on the glacier. It was about 11deg C on the glacier. It was amazing to think I was walking on this giant chunk of ice, and to think I was seeing only a fraction of the whole thing. We were very close to the mouth of the glacier and our guide told us of two visitors who had gone upto the cave at the mouth unescorted and got caught when the ice shifted. Took them days to find the bodies (one just washed up somewhere miles away). We could hear what must have been giant blobs of ice moving under us. Since it was sunny, it was slippery in parts and the guides constantly made new steps on the ice so people could climb up and down. Indeed, the glacier is never the same from one moment to the next. Just like a river. The ice is packed so dense it was bluish in color, though dirty in parts due to gravel and dust of the valley.

The guide offered us the chance to climb down a crevasse, it was very slippery and a hard climb and Armando turned around after he fell (though he wasn’t hurt). My hands were frozen by now (I didn’t bring gloves, someone told me it was summer in NZ) but I did get down and took some pictures and then wondered how on earth I was going to get back up. Anyway, the whole thing was a fabulous adventure. I now want to goto an iceberg. I wonder if I can climb one?

One our way onwards we stopped at Franz Joseph and by it held no particular charm since it looked the same as Fox. So we moved on.

That night, most folks dined out and Rachel, Eugene and I decided we would cook and eat in. We are staying at a place with a real kitchen! We had a multi course meal with salad, mushroom soup, beef barley soup, fabulous biryani rice (rice packet with masala paste), beans, sausage and then orange for desert. Did I mention that I didn’t like the sausage in NZ at all? I tried it in a couple of places, no good. Their banana nut bread on the other hand is delish.