On-the-Road Tales

Pulled out of the trailer park went on down the road to the Bushman center. This is run by a wacky couple trying to recreate the hardships of life living in the wild country. Possums and stokes (ferret like creatures) were introduced to NZ and are a menace to the environment. NZers are very protective of their land and have an ultimate respect for it, its preservation and its future. Not sure if this stems form the Maori relationship or their genuine dependence on it for survival but they have succeeded in protecting much of it as national parks. Ordinary citizens are rigid about recycling, abhor littering and take offence to anyone – including pesky animals, mucking it up. Hence at the center’s cafe cafe, various forms of possum pies were served. They kill them off and celebrate their demise by featuring them on the menu. Our rafting instructor told us a funny story about fellow guides rafting 2 boatloads of people down the river valley we did. As they came around one corner, they spotted a whole family of stokes sunning on the rocks. Without so much as a word or moments hesitation, they both steered the boats towards the shoreline hopped out and beat the stokes to death with their paddles in front of a group of stunned rafters. These people are vehement in their dislike of the creatures and do not screw around.

Which bring me to the next enviromental menace…Red Deer were introduced early last century from Scotland as a sport animal for the brits. With no natural enemies and apparently the english not having very good hunting skills, they spread over the islands and eating all the vegetation. In the 1940s, the govt employed some hunters to try and minimize the population. Some years later, a market for the meat was found in Germany. There was big money to be made but the deer had to be captured alive. So the kiwis came up with their brilliant deer recovery plan. They would find deer running in the mountains, a guy would climb out onto the skid (they became known as skidbiters) and would leap onto the back of the deer and tackle it to the ground. I watched a film on this and it was bloody amazing. FOr as many successes, there was a lot of people not quite making the deer or rolling precipitiously down a ravine with a buck. It was wild and incredibly stupid looking but it apparently worked. They used to wire into the helicopters electrical system to shock the deer (yes, true too they had it on video) and then tie and carry it under the chopper to a deer farm. Finally they invented a type of net gun that could catch the deer and the skidbiter would not actually have to leap from a moving vehicle. They actually had newclip where some NZers were asked to come to the US and use the technique to relocate some bison which they did. Amazing ingenuity.

Rolled into Franz Josph Glacier. This glacier, retreating like the rest, is one of the only places where it goes to sea level and is considered a warm glacier. You have to walk through a rainforest to get to the bottom. I got a good nights sleep to energize for the adventure planned the next day.

We cruised down along the westcoasrt and stopped at Cape Foulwind. Took a dander along the sea and came to a seal colony. Adorable little creatures, very playful. The seascape was fabulous. Continued on to Punakaiki Pancake Rocks and Blowholes. Hiked around to check out some stacked rocks formed funkily with the wind erosion. Stopped in Greymouth for ‘supplies’. Apparently we were going to have fancy dress that evening and the theme was ‘p’. A ‘p’ party. So we had to figure out a costume to be something beginning with P. Dress up? Everyknows I love that but with only a garbage bag given and no more room in my pack for playthings, was not sure what to do. Fortunetly, I had a brainstorm and stopped by the stationary store to sort my costume out.

We pulled in to Lake Mahinapua and I immediately realized the fancy dress was an effort to have us forget about the trailer park we were staying in! The ‘hotel’ was it – no town just a hotel run by an 80 yr old man. The Poo pub, as it was affectionately called was decorated with 10 years worth of photos of Kiwi busloads dressing up. 10 yrs times 1 bus per day of 50 people. That is a lot of polaroids. I took a walk down to the beach. Wow. It could have been 1000 yrs ago, it was so untouched. Thousands of rounded multicoloured stones littered the sand and driftwood – the size of forest trees – lay strewn up and down the beach. I wish I would have gotten there earlier to walk the length of the shoreline.

After dinner we got dollied up. My room had 2 Pirates, Prozac and me, ‘a postcard’. I pinned a bunch of, yes you guessed it, postcards to the garbage bag I wore and addressed the back. Fun night. My roomates and I walked down into the forest to see some more glowworms, on, land this time. We left just as the youngsters were headed towards the lake to skinny dip. Some of them, in their drunken stupor home did not quite find the dirt road and apparently got stung by not one, but two, electric fences. Serves them right!

Stopped off at Nelson Lakes to do a walk. Lovely place. Mountainous and rugged. We moved onto Buller Gorge which is split into an upper and lower gorge. The terrain is a bit rough and the roads are basic. Most of the bridges are single lane since there is not alot of traffic in this unpopulated stretch. The gorge narrows in some places and the driver showed us how high it floods during particularly bad storms, completely submerging roads. The people are really at the mercy of weather in this part of the world. We stopped off at Buller Adventure and I signed up to go jetboating. Again – a crazy invention only a kiwi would think of. A farmer wanted to get up to check out his cattle in an area of a shallow river. So he designed a boat sans props that worked off a pump thrust system – these were up out of the water so it could run on as little as 3 cm of depth. The concept took hold and soon it was being produced in NZ. Tourism people recognized the potential to spin tourists around with the directional thrust and thus I was forking over money to go skim over the water.

We loaded into the boat on a farm and Doc, the skipper, got into the tractor and pulled us the 15 minutes down to the river bank. We cruised 22 km up the river while Doc pointed out fish and relayed various historical facts. Then we raced back down doing 360 degree skids and turns, narrowly avoiding rock walls, and submerging under waterfalls – successfully drenching most of us.

We continued on that day and pulled into Bazils in Westport for the evening.

We boarded the ferry that would take us three hours across the Queen Charlotte Sound to the south island. It was full was full of little ports nestled in and out of groves of trees and mountains. We disembarked in Picton and went through to Nelson, Fern Lodge. An English girl and I hiked up to the “Centre of New Zealand”. Someone, somewhere decided this is the center of the islands so we needed to visit it and take an obligatory photo.

Since it was the Saturday before Easter ,I set out to find an Easter Vigil Mass. I asked around for the Catholic Church and was directed, more than once, to what turned out to be Anglican Cathedral. Not the same thing. I had not really thought about it before but I am guessing NZers are not so into religion.

This town is the gateway for Abel Tasman National Park. Supposed to be a great walking and kayaking park but I did not have time to explore this trip.

Lovely little city. Checked out the Parliament building in the shape of a beehive. In recent years, the Prime Minister, several key government members (Supreme court justice, atty general, governor general) and the most elder Maori representative were all…women – a country run by females. Yeah finally. haha. I was reading some possible reasoning for such a trend. NZ was settled by a lottery type system and people were on their own to make it or break it in the early days, independence and self preservation were required traits of succeeding in the wild and everyone was on equal turf. Kind of like the pioneers out in the western US but without a history. The new govt was small and mallable, NZ women were the first in the world given the right to vote! 27 yrs before the US. So hopefully this is a precursor of what comes – we are just a quarter decade behind in running the rest of the world’s industrialized countries too! The neighboring land to the East, Australia, had a slightly different historical progression. Since all the English and Irish prisioners were shipped there, the NZers often refer to them as the “convicts” next door. Funny and with a hint of truth!

Visited Te Papa, a recently opened musuem about New Zealands history, nature and geographically volatile position. I never realized how many tectonic fault plates this country sits on. It is chock full of earthquakes, volcanos, floods, and wind blasts that are capable of knocking down forests. Wellington experiences 40 earthquakes a day! Mostly unnoticeable but enough to register.

River Valley is renowned for its Grade 5 river rafting. White water rafting has always been on my ‘list of things to do before I die’ but I was never quite able to cross it off for one reason or another. We got suited up once again and the instructor I sat next to on the way to the launch was an absolute header. He had guided all over the world and some interesting tales to tell. My guide was fantastic and made me feel a bit more confident about rafting Level 5 my first time out.

The beginning of the river was fairly calm, couple of humble practice rapids. The scenery was great cruising though this stretch of nature. Once we would complete a small drop – our guide would make us turn around and climb back up it to get a good photo. The other boat – with a newer less experienced instructor was having a bit of trouble so our guide would hop out and help them out. He was all over the place. On our first major drop, he had us reneter and gave us an overleft command in the whirlpool. This promptly flipped the entire boat unmercifully and dumped us into the “fresh” water. Yowser, that was cold. Catching my breath I got pulled back in by a huge Dane. Reassuring to have a 6 footer on our boat for rescue.

Most of us managed to stay in the boat during the rapids. I did learn no matter how well you pay attention or follow directions, if the other poeple in the boat are not withit – you suffer the consequences. I kept slapping the hungover chick in front of me when she would fail to start paddling in time and slam us into a rock. I also got wacked in the head with the body of a flying Danish girl who failed to secure herself inside the boat during a 5 foot waterfall drop. Crazy little sport, never know what the river is going to do but certainly exciting. We made it though relatively inscathed and stupidly listened to our guide when he wanted to stand the boat vertical. On the third attempt we were successful for about .6 seconds before we dumped ourselves in the river once again.

We showered and warmed up at the lodge before continuing onto the capital city on the far south of the north island, Wellington.

Since the walk was cancelled, I did not wait for my bus and went away in the morning. There are busses every day so you are constantly switching drivers and people – not necessarily a bad thing. We did a walk through the National Park and then stopped by some Waterfalls where various people, including the driver, scaled a fence and jumped off a high cliff in a waterfall below and swimming against the forceful current at the bottom of the nearby waterfall. I was glad I got that experience over me soon after college cliff jumping near Willow Lake in Nevada. No need to experience the thought of possible paralyzation again.

We got to a most amazing area full of bumpy hills and rolling valleys. Lots of sheep pastures. There are 68 million sheep in NZ. That is a 17:1 sheep to people ratio. We pulled into River Valley Adventure Lodge for the night. A swiss friend and I went to find the “walktrack”. A succinct 30 minute stroll we were told. Within minutes we were scaling down the side of mountain using a rope. Walk track my arse – it was like bloody Jurassic Park. Not sure anyway has been on that path in years to be honest. I was more worried about getting back up the vertical landslide I had just descended than finding the destination but we battered on. We wakled along the riverbank and came into an great canyon. The water was so incredibly clear – you could not tell if the depth was 1 foot or 10 feet because the pebbles and stones on the bottom looked like they were right in front of you.

We made it back in one piece and found a river tram. One of these metal cart pulley deals where you climb on board and cross the river by pulling the rope above you. It was so neat – felt like the wild west, pulling yourself across this river suspended midair on a piece of plywood. Sweet as. (NZ slang for cool – getting hooked on my new vocab)

Got picked up by the shuttle and went to the Blackwater Rafting Company. Sounds like whitewater rafting except there are no rapids and no boats. This activity involved going underground and sidling through caves by crawling, jumping and floating in an inner tube in order to see a bunch of glowworms that like to hang out and glow in the dark.

We got set up in a wetsuit, booties, helmet and head lamp and we went out to the river. We got our inner tube and had to stand on a deck while the two guides informed us ‘we had to practice’. We had to jump backwards off the deck into the water with our tube so they could check ‘our form’. I thought it was a joke but no – they decided to tell us now, past the point of no return, that there were several waterfalls inside the cave where we had to jump out and off backwards in order to clear some rocks below. Fantastic. I did a successful practice run and got indoctrinated into the frigid waters but that was in the daylight, in the dark – underground – would be a different altogether.

We entered the ground opening and made our way through the underground tunnel system. At the point where backwards jumping was required – it was total blind faith. I did not want to hesitiate and get left behind by the only person who knew where we were going so I did not have time to think about it. The guides would tell us where to walk and demonstrate the dangers of not listening by jumping into holes deep enough to swallow them with a single wrong step. Yikes – we all followed their advice. Eventually we came to an open part of the cave where, recling on our tubes, you look up and see hundreds of glowworms – they looked star constellations. The guide – in his briefing informed us that glowworms is just an appealing name for maggot. These were actually maggots whose hind ends glowed to attract flies which would become ensnared in their trap and become dinner. But as the guides rightfully predicted “glowworm” tours was much more effective than “maggot tours” to the general public.

We learned that chocolate marshmallow fish float. The guides, again NZers with their wacky sense of humour – threw one at us for energy I presume before they made us turn our head lamps out and sift our way through the dark to the exit. Like I said – screw loose.

We checked out some waterfalls and landed in Taupo that evening to stay at Urban Retreat. The next we had planned to do an 8 hour trek across the Tongariro

On through to Waitomo. Decided to take advantage of the sunny afternoon and go for a hike. I ran into a friend form the bus a NYer standing steadfastily on the path. I knew he had set out quite a while before me so I asked him why he was there. Apparently, the cow in his path had looked rather menacing and the cityboy was unable to brave going past it. After I finished doubling over with laughter, I forged ahead to encounter the cow and we continued on the trek. NZs are not huge on signage. They will give you a general direction but you kind of lose your way with the lack of marked paths. We had to double back several times to retrace and pick up the scent. We climbed fences, jumped stiles, hopped rivers – all in a days work. We ended up in some lava tubes and cavern bridges. 3 hours later in the dark, under moonlight, we were finally arriving back at the lodge.

We stayed at the Waitomo YHA and had a barbq for the evening.

Motored along the coast and got to see some islands that through geological testing they have recently figured out were blasted from a volcano hundreds of miles south in the middle of the country. Apparently when Taupo erupted, in 186 AD the Romans and Chinese recorded the red skies – one of the largest eruptions ever as evidenced by these massive islands spit out into the sea. Stopped at the Karangahake Scenic Gorge and did a cool little hike into some old mining tunnels. Passed through the town where Hobbiton is located. There are all sorts of Lord of the Rings tours around NZ since they filmed in various location. Amazing what an effect it had on tourism increasing it multiple percent although that is wearing off now.

Got into Rotorua. Took a gondola up to the top of a hill and then got these little luges and pummeled 3 different concrete tracks and courses down the side of a mountain. Pretty insane but fun. On the ski lift back up to the top you would see all sorts of luges off the tracks in the grass, down ravines – did not want to know how they got there!

Rotorua is the thermal capital of NZ, just like Yellowstone. The earth’s surface is normally 50-60 km thick, here it is a mere 16 km so there are bubbling mud pools and hot springs everywhere which was weird to see in the middle of a city. The real question is why they put a city in the middle of a hot spring field! It is just really amusing to see a playground right beside a boiling water geyser. I think the origins come from the Maori taking advantage of the natural hot water system whwen they arrived to NZ.
The Maori have a strong presence in New Zealand. Hailing from Polynesia as well, these explorers landed around 1000 AD in what they christened Aotearoa, Land of the Long White Cloud. It is hard to believe that NZ was only inhabited by humans just at the time when the vikings were running around invading Ireland- donkeys years into Irish history! Unlike Tahitians, or Rapa Nui, the Maori have a formal written Treaty with their settlers, the English. That did not necessarily prevent robbery or exploitation of their lands but did give them more rights.

That evening went to a Hangi dinner and concert. Another Polynesian village, much better set up than the other villages I visited overseas. The songs and dancing was more upbeat too. Really interesting to see the differences between three groups of people originating from the same place, yet settling in diverse environments and being taken over by three very different nations.