Llew Wanders the World

As regular readers will know, I make a point of trying to cook a dinner for anyone who has me stay in their home for more than a day or two. The two menus I’ve prepared so far are an Italian meal and a Thai(ish) one.

At the suggestion of Jeff, one of my hosts in Melbourne, Australia, and since so many other people who’ve tried them have asked for recipes, I’ve decided to inc>lude the recipes for the dishes I’ve made here.
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The Overland Track is probably the best known multi-day bushwalk (as the Australians refer to hiking/trekking/tramping) in the country. It winds its way over 78.5km across Tasmania’s central plateau, through Cradle Mountain-Lake St. Clair National Park. This park (and indeed the whole western part of Tasmania) encompasses some of the most rugged and unexplored wilderness on the entire continent.

Most people walk the track from north to south, however I’d decided to do it in the opposite direction, since this would have me finishing my walk near Devonport, the location of the ferry docks that I’d be using for my trip back to the mainland.

This being the case, the track started at Lake St. Clair and would finish near Cradle Mountain. (You can find a map of the park here though it doesn’t show the hut locations so it won’t be too too easy to follow along on.)

The Overland Track has a bit of a reputation… Its weather is known to change very quickly, especially in the unsheltered high altitude areas, and snowstorms can occur at any time of year, even in January or February, the heart of summer. The track is also reputed to be spectacularly muddy (though much of the worst mud had supposedly been boardwalked over) and the walking, while not heavily sloped, is often made difficult by tree roots and rocks on the track. On the positive side, there are huts at regular intervals along the way, very similar to those I’d already experienced in New Zealand.
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Leaving Sydney proved to be slightly more stressful than I’d planned. Despite a 10:00 flight (an entirely civilized time to be flying) and the fact that the Kostrevskis live a mere 10 minute drive (under normal traffic) from the airport, I still JUST arrived in time to check in. This was due to a combination of a late rise and bad rush-hour traffic.

But in the end all was well. I arrived 28 minutes before the flight was due to depart (not the mandated 30) and even if the flight hadn’t been delayed by a half hour or so, I still would have made it on board.

My (very inexpensive) flight was on Virgin Blue, my first experience with any of Richard Branson’s airlines, and I liked what I saw. While meals and drinks weren’t provided, just as on North American discount airlines, the attitude was entirely different. They made the odd joke over the PA system, chatted with the passengers, and just generally seemed to be having fun while flying.

Hobart’s airport was surprisingly small for a state capital, and I had no difficulty finding the shuttle bus into town (the driver actually took the destination of each passenger and dropped us off at the door.)
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My trip to Australia began with arrival in Sydney following the three hour flight from Auckland. First activities after disembarking were short wait to collect my bag and a less short trip through customs and quarantine inspections (Australia is one of only three stops in my itenerary that required a visa in advance, and the country takes serious measures to avoid importation of foreign pests.)

After completing entry formalities, I went to have a seat in the arrivals lounge (my flight had got in a bit early) and had barely sat down when I was met by George, one of my hosts in Sydney, along with his wife Faye, their daughter Kirsten and mother and father Peter and Vlasa. A few years ago while I was dating Faye’s sister, Kate, George, Faye and the yet-to-be-born Kirsten had stayed at my house in Toronto for a few weeks, and they were overjoyed to have a chance to return the favour.

After the merely warm weather in Christchurch, the 33 degree blast of heat awaiting me in Sydney came as something of a shock, but no matter. In no time, we’d driven back to the air conditioned comfort of George’s parents’ in the Sydney suburb of Bexley.
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After my trip down southwards, I began to realize that I didn’t have all that much time in New Zealand. Indeed, as I woke up in Te Anau, I noticed that I actually had only four days left before I had to depart the country via Christchurch.

Fortunately I woke well rested, thanks to the wonderful place I was staying, Rosie’s Backpacker Homestay. Though they don’t have a website, I so enjoyed my stay there that I’m going to include their address and phone number: 23 Tom Plato Drive, Te Anau, New Zealand; +03 249 8341

Rosie and her family were super friendly and even put up with me sitting in the main bedroom typing my previous weblog entry until 23:00 (I actually hadn’t realized that anyone slept in the room where the computer was.) Furthermore, Rosie was quite happy to drive me out to a good hitching spot the following morning for my (300km) trip to Dunedin.
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Last you all heard, I was in Greymouth, near the north end of New Zealand’s west coast, preparing to head south.

Before departing Greymouth, I had some important business to take care of.

First, I had to re-write my ‘blog entry. This was due to the fact that after having spent over three hours on it the previous day, it somehow vanished. This had me in a rather irritable mood. Fortunately, my other business, a tour of the Monteith’s brewery cheered me up.

Monteith’s has a reputation for being “the beer of the West Coast,” though most of it is brewed in Timaru (south of Christchurch on the east coast and in Auckland, on the North Island.)

The Monteith’s brewery tour was pretty standard, but did have a couple of interesting features. The first of these was their open vat fermentation tanks. Most breweries keep their fermentation tanks sealed, but these had open tops so that you could see the process in action, and smell the powerful yeasty aroma throughout the building. The second interesting feature was the coal fired boilers. Coal mining has always been a major industry on the West Coast, and the plentiful supply made it a natural choice for warming up the brew kettles, heating the buildings and so forth.

Another part of the tour was the post tasting open bar. After trying a bit of each of their six regular-run beers, we were invited up to the taps for to serve ourselves our favourites for ten minutes. While ten minutes may not sound like a lot, I did manage to enjoy plenty of my favourite, Monteith’s Dark.

All of this left me ready to head south. My planned destination was the Fox Glacier, some 240km distant, but I feared that I wouldn’t be able to hitchhike my way there leaving at 15:00 as I was.
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Arriving in Takaka following my tramp on the Abel Tasman Coast Track, I figured I deserved a bit of rest before starting out on the Heaphy, a longer and (reputedly) slightly harder track.

My rest took the form of two and a half days exploring the town and resting, reading and writing at Annie’s Nirvana Lodge (the hostel I was staying at.) The first afternoon I fell asleep very early after a bit of reading (you may recall that I got up just after 05:00 for my last day on the Abel Tasman.)

The morning of the second day was spent wandering around the (small) town. Takaka is a nice little town, populated by an interesting mix of rich retired farmers, aging hippies, foreign chefs, masseuses, and all manner of other interesting characters. This being the case, it has things you wouldn’t necessarily expect of a town of 1300, such as an organic food store, yoga studio and so on. All in all, Takaka was a lovely place to spend a few days.

The afternoon and evening of day 2 were spent inside reading since it had begun to rain. In the evening, I sat outside enjoying a couple of well deserved beers and got chatting with Sabina and Caleb, a couple from Austin, Texas. Around midnight, they were getting tired of being inside (having spent the whole day there) and since they had a car we headed out to the nearest beach. Our trip to the seaside ended abruptly when the rain switched modes from heavy drizzle to torrential downpour and we headed back to the hostel and bed.

The next morning brought still more rain. Despite this, I was feeling well rested enough to want to start out on my next walk. Caleb and Sabina had a few days with no plans before heading back to Picton and the North Island, and had offered to drive me to the trailhead. Only one thing could stand in our way: more water.

There are three (uaually) small streams that must be forded on the road to the trailhead, and unfortunately after a day and a half of rain they weren’t in their usual small state. We approached the first ford, and things weren’t looking good. I got out and took off my boots so that I could wade into the stream and see exactly how deep it was. I got less than 1/3 of the way across before it had reached knee level. It MIGHT have been possible to cross this ford in a nice big four wheel drive vehicle with good ground clearance. In a rented Toyota Corolla? No.

Thus it was that we turned around and headed back to Takaka, where Caleb and Sabina dropped me back at our hostel before departing themselves for Nelson. I ended up spending the rest of the rain soaked day reading and hoping that the weather forecast, which called for fine weather the following day would be right for once.
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I arrived at the Wellington train station nice and early for the 09:05 shuttle bus to the Interislander ferry docks for my trip to Picton on the South Island. It was around 09:15 that I started to get a bit worried about being at the docks in time for the 09:30 sailing. Thankfully, a woman showed up a few minutes later and informed us that while the 09:30 Interislander had been cancelled, our tickets would be taken on the faster (a 2:15 trip rather than 3:30) Lynx ferry, leaving at the same time.

This, of course, meant that we had to hurry over to the nearby Lynx ferry terminal, but it all worked out okay in the end. The boat sailed away from the dock right on time, and out into the Cook Strait. It was supposedly a fairly calm day, but this didn’t help about 10% of the passengers who got seasick anyway. Fortunately I wasn’t among them.

The crossing of the strait wasn’t particularly exciting. The 120 vehicle, 760 passenger ferry was well equipped with the sorts of things you expect to find on such boats (video arcades, cafes, small shops) though it was a bit short on outdoor viewing decks. This was a shame really, as the crowds made it hard to enjoy and get photos of our passage through Queen Charlotte Sound as we approached our destination.

All the same, just over two hours later I was on dry land again, in the town of Picton and ready to start exploring the South Island.
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Waking up in Auckland once again, I was well rested for the two or three hour drive down to Rotorua (and further on to points east and south.)

Since New Zealand lies on border between the Australasian and Pacific tectonic plates, there’s plenty of geological activity here, ranging from mountainbuilding, to earthquakes, to volcanoes, to hot springs end geysers. Rotorua is the spot in New Zealand with the highest concentration of geothermal activity of this last type, and though I’d been there before many years ago, I was looking forward to returning.

I headed out from the Darragh’s place into ominous looking weather. It wasn’t raining yet, but despite the spectacular changability of New Zealand skies, it seemed certain that it would before too long.
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After taking my leave of the wonderful Darragh family (thanks to them yet again for their kind hospitality) I went to pick up my rental car, which turned out to be a 1995 Toyota Starlet.

It isn’t pretty, but it runs well and is an unlikely target for breakins 🙂

After picking up some maps and going through all of the rental formailities, I set out into the rush-hour traffic of Auckland to try driving on the left side of the road for the first time ever. Talk about a trial by fire!

I soon discovered that it comes very naturally, and after being on the road for ten minutes or less, I felt as though I’d been doing it all my life. Which is fortunate, because I had a lot of driving to do.

The first few days of my trip were to be sent in New Zealand’s Northland, the thin peninsula north of Auckland that forms the top end of the country. (If you want to follow along with my travels on a map, rather than just reading place names, there’s a nice map of the Northland here.)
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