Trying to Cook in NZ

Sorry about the long delay in updates. We have been traveling and have not had that much access to electricity. I will add more things soon now that we are in Wanaka and will have to stay in a hostel every couple of days for showeres. Now we are planning on camp in Albert Town, just five minutes from Wanaka while we look for jobs and an actual place to stay. We are also going to buy season passes to the Cardrona ski field today. Very exciting. I just hope we can find jobs so we won’t have to move to Queenstown or Dunedin and not be able to use our passes. Keep your fingers crossed.

We are back in Wanaka after our trip all around the south island. We started in Nelson almost one month ago when Nina’s wallet got stolen, and now we are in the beautiful little town of Wanaka where we hope to spend the winter. On our trip we drove the entire length of the West Coast where we were attacked by sand flies and saw the best weather of the entire jaunt. It rains about 200 days a year and about 20 feet on the West Coast. The two weeks we spent there were almost all sunny and warm. It rained once on us. From there we had to head inland at the north end of Fiordland National Park and spent a day at the Franz Joseph glacier and a day at Fox glacier. They were amazing. Both of them are not receding like most others in the world, but advancing back down their valleys. They are huge. From there we came to Wanaka for the first time, cruised through Arrowtown, a small former gold mining village, now an up and coming culinary destination, and on to Queenstown. Queenstown is the opposite of Wanaka, it isn’t much bigger, but it is much more hectic. The buildings are all full of shops and the streets are full of people and cars. It is only the shoulder season, but the place is a madhouse. Our next stop was a quick run up to Glenorchy to check out the end of the Roterburn track and the mountains around there. As most of the mountains we had seen so far, they were magnificent. The mountain landscape is nothing like in America. The mountains are so tall and huge and impossibly close, you can’t really tell how huge they really are. The rivers and lakes are also so incredibly clear they look fake. The river next to our campsite in Wanaka is a big river, but it is crystal clear. You can see the bottom fifteen feet down.

Our next portion of the trip was up to Fiordland National Park and the Milford Sound (actually a fiord). We spent two nights on Lake Te Anou and then drove up, over and trough a mountain range to get to Milford Sound for our morning boat cruise. The scenery there was breathtaking. Again the scale of the place was too much to handle. The day started by cruising by Mitre Peak, a mountain that rises a mile straight out of the sound. It is the highest peak rising straight out of the ocean anywhere. After that we gave a pod of bottlenose dolphins a ride through the sound as they jumped and played in the bow wake right below where we were standing. Next was a trip along a 2000 foot overhang. That sounds tall, and it is, if you jumped off the top, you wouldn’t hit the water for 30 seconds. But it just looked like another rock wall because there was nothing to compare it to. The same sensation was felt at Stirling falls. It is falls 500 feet down into the sound, but it looks like any other waterfall. The place was mind-blowing. From there we headed south again, hitting the coast again and driving around the bottom corner of the country to Invercargill. There wasn’t much to see there except for the aviary at the botanic gardens. That place was very cool. Nina and I finally saw a Kea and a Kaka, two of the large parrots of New Zealand. They also had a great collection of parrots and other cool birds from Australia, Africa and South America. They also had a golden pheasant. I had never seen one of those before. Crazy.

From there we headed into the Catlins. These are some of the nicest forest areas on southern New Zealand. There are waterfalls and nice walks and great scenery all around. We spent two nights camping there where but the weather didn’t cooperate. For one and a half days the weather went in this cycle. It would be sunny for 15 minutes, then cloud over and hail for 10 minutes. After the cold hail, it would rain for 30 minutes and then start all over again. It was also below 40 degrees the whole time. We didn’t see much of the Catlins.

Dunedin, home of the oldest university in New Zealand was a nice change of pace from the outdoors of the past two weeks. We stayed three nights and visited the Otago museum, botanic gardens, Firestone Tire Store and hung out. It was nice and relaxing. It was in Dunedin when Nina found out that the thief who stole her wallet was caught in Haast after a chase on foot through a sheep paddock. We are looking forward to going back in July for an All Blacks / South Africa rugby match. Further north along the coast, we stopped at the Moeraki boulders and had a great dinner at Fleur’s Place in Moeraki. More on that in my upcoming food blog. We then drove inland to the Mt. Cook / Aoraki national park for a few days.

If we thought it was cold in the Catlins, we hadn’t seen anything yet. When we set up our tent at two in the afternoon, Nina noticed that there was frost on the ground. It never melted. The ground was frigid. We weren’t too cold while sleeping as long as no part of us actually touched the uninsinuated ground. The mountains were great though. When we lived in Jackson, WY, we were right up against mountains that rose 7000 feet straight out of the valley floor. Here we were next camping at the base of Mt. Cook at 2000 feet, the top soared above us at 12,000. It was an amazing sight. One third of the park is literally covered in glaciers. The next day we headed back to Wanaka.

Now that we are here, the tough work begins. Nina and I both have to get hair cuts and I have to manage to shave my beard off. Then we have to find jobs and a place to live. We did find a nice ski shop that rents skis for the entire season, so we have that covered. Now we just need the season pass. Wish us luck.

Check out our new pictures on Picasa and my updated beer list.

After dropping Dad and Deena off at the Nelson airport (the story of our trip with them will be posted shortly (sorry for the lack of updates recently)), Nina and I headed out of town to the Marlborough sounds and for some wine tasting around Blenheim. We had been looking forward to going back to the sounds after seeing it for a short day a few weeks before. This time we decided to go to Kenepuru sound and camp for a day or two depending on the weather and views. It turned out to be a beautiful area and we stayed for two days. The water there is an amazing dark blue and the hills are covered with tree ferns, nikau palms and other tropical looking plants. It was very relaxing. We just say by the sound and read books and did sudoku puzzles. I didn’t have a care in the world until I drank a very angry and possibly drunk bee that found its way into my can of beer. It stung be twice on my gums and then once on my lip its way out. I guess I am not allergic to bees, that’s good news. After two days on the sound, we headed to Blenheim to taste some wine. We had been looking forward to that since we got to New Zealand and tasting wine with Dad and Deena in the Nelson region got us interested again. First, we drove to Blemheim to look for some more breweries for my collection. It turns out that the big one in my books is now a little one that I have already tasted completely. The second one doesn’t have an address. Nina did manage to find one 330mL bottle of the mysterious Pink Elephant brewery’s Imperious Russin’ Stout. The label told me that it was 11%, should be cellared for three to five years and was bottle 1112 (hand written) and that it cost $8NZ. It is by far the most expensive beer I have had, but it may have been the best. Back to the wine story. We drove to Renwick, where the majority of the good wineries are and started down the back roads. We visited Cloudy Bay, Allan Scott, Hunter’s, Clos Henri, Georges Michelle, Huia and Seresin. By the end of the day, we had had a lot of very acidic Sauvignon Blanc, Riesling and Chardonnay and some very poor Pinot Gris. Overall though, I was very impressed with their style. The chardonnays generally are very lightly wooded and the Rieslings are off dry to dry. That way you can really taste the grape and not so much of the barrel or sugars. I really liked the way they did that. The pinot noir, however, was pretty bad. The wine was usually quite watery and you could tell that the grapes had been picked very while very immature. I am looking forward to tasting the pinots in the Otago, we got some recommendations for some wineries there from a woman at Georges Michelle. We had a very nice time and plan on stopping there again on our way back to Auckland at the end of our trip.  Stay tuned for an update of our trip down the West Coast…