The world must be liberated from the sand-fly

Did I tell you we landed on a glacier in a helicopter? Oh. Shame. I could tell you all about it again. Okay then, I’ll wait till we’re home.

Via Queenstown (which we are not telling Peter and Simon about because we think they would love it there) and Arrowtown which is almost as it was in the gold rush

and fascinating, we got to the Franz Joseph Glacier – the one we would have choppered to had we not done that at Milford. The day we were at Franz Joseph the weather was pretty good and we would have been able to fly but we are certain we made exactly the right decision to do it at Milford: the cloud was quite low and I’m not even sure the helicopters were actually landing on the glacier.

It is a remarkable sight even from the ground. A glacier: thick, thick, blue ice but at a level you simply walk up to. It’s a geological, ecological phenomenon which is (apparently) quite unusual and wonderful to look at.

After that we’ve travelled up the west coast passing through town after town, each consisting of huge estates of …well, just fields and forests and farms and coastline and a couple of houses. Beautiful scenery though.The beaches are universally grey shingle which is actually harvested from the rivers and used in copious quantities on the roads. Greymouth doesn’t exactly sell itself well, either,with a sign which says “Welcome to the Grey Area”! Greymouth was, in fact, the mining town which had that disaster around the time of the miraculous Chilean miners rescue, but it really is just a working town and not much for tourists. The beaches are not only grey but largely inaccessible because between the road and the coast is mainly farmland. It’s as though the sea is just ‘there’ and isn’t seen as having a tourist potential: it doesn’t really because of its greyness and because of NZ’s most evil bird of prey – the sand-fly. They land on you and, before you know it, they’ve unpacked their blankets and thermos flasks, used you as a raw barbeque and beggared off. Evil, evil, evil creatures leaving Heather and me to share one remaining functioning leg.

But we have found some wonderful places to picnic sans sand-fly:

seen the Pancake Rocks:

and some more fur seals.

(Si, I was at full zoom from about 20 metres away and I’ve cropped this – not bad, I think.)

The weather remains very kind to us and notably warmer as we have moved further north.

We have been out of internet range for a while and keeping tabs on news hasn’t been easy, with even radio stations hard to get at times. But the Tokyo quake has been met with some shock here. People on west coast beaches were warned not to swim for fear of a tsunami and Blenheim, where we head for in the next day or so, had a 2.1 wobble yesterday. When an air raid-type siren woke us at 3am this morning we thought it must be a warning of a quake near to us but we discovered in the morning (when it went off again at 7.30!) it was simply calling the volunteer firemen! We’ve still each got a change of trousers available thank goodness! 

We are having to plan the last few days of this part of the trip. We need to be within easy reach of Christchurch on Saturday with the van to take back ready for the flight to Hong Kong via Sydney.

Milford Sound

I have read the Stephen Fry Compendium of Hyperbole and Superlatives, even the chapter where he explains the art of stringing adjectives together that no one has ever heard of but all mean the same really, and still I cannot explain what we’ve experienced today.

We have come to Te Anau, effectively the gateway to New Zealand’s Fiordland. Our plan was to gauge the weather and see if we could get one of the 80 rain-free days in Milford Sound (which, by the way was neither found by Milford or, in fact, is a Sound but a true, full-blown Fiord of the Scandinavian variety). So we plumped for Monday and weren’t we the lucky ones: almost cloudless sky. Yesterday we watched an amazing film of the area taken from a helicopter and when it ended and the small audience broke into spontaneous applause, the person sitting nearest to me just said “Wow!” and in our conversation that followed they said that they had, that very day, taken a helicopter flight and they rated it the best $**** they had ever spent.

We had planned to do that onto the glacier at Franz Joseph or Fox, further up the coast but the growing consensus was that there may be no better chance than today. This same couple had waited three days in Franz Joseph and the weather had stopped them flying.

So, we decided we’d bring forward our heli-flight and do it today.

A coach picked us up from our site and we drove to Milford Sound, stopping on the way for photo-opportunities: the scenery was breath-taking (here I go, but I might have started too high!). There was a little disappointment that the much-hailed Mirror Lakes had cloud above them when we stopped and they didn’t work as well as lakes we know in Ireland. But after about three hours driving, stopping at stunning scenic points, driving some more, being entertained by Bruce our driver with amazing information and some jokes which will be right up Simon and Peter’s street, we arrived at Milford and boarded our boat. No sooner had we stepped foot than we were served a mighty lunch and off we went.

This, then, is a Fiord with steep forested mountain plunging from a mile up to a mile below the water on either side. No words or pictures can describe how beautiful it is. Usually Heath and I are chatting away and pointing things out to each other but we were strangely quiet because our chins were resting, for the most part, on the deck!

We gently cruised up one side and down the other, pausing to look at fur seal, water cascading from above with the bow of the boat just a couple of metres from where it crashed into the water, soaking those outside on the lower deck and spraying those of us on the top.

We took about 45 minutes off the boat to go 8 metres under water

in an observation chamber, dodging some leaping dolphins as we docked alongside, before completing the round trip.

We were collected at the dock, back on the bus for a short drive to where just four of us alighted to board the helicopter. We didn’t have time to think “What the …. are we doing?” Just time enough to hand over whatever was left in my wallet, climb in to a tiny five-seater chopper and take off. For the outward flight Heather sat between me and the pilot in the front and the ground fell away beneath us. We flew inches (well it felt like it) from the mountainsides, up and up and up, hovering while the pilot told us where we were: I already knew – a bloody long way up and a dead drop back down if things went wrong!.

Up some more until we were seemingly on top of the world, the mountains of Fiordland surrounding us. We landed on the glacier almost at the top of New Zealand’s second highest mountain, Tutoku. We climbed out and onto the ice, heeding the warnings to go neither near the back of the helicopter or the crevasses.

It really did defy words. We had had no time to think about it and here we were, a chopper flight to a glacier where the view was stunningly, wonderfully, beautifully – oh come on Fry, help me out – amazing.

Several people had told us we should do it, that it is an amazing experience, but I’m sorry, try as I might, I cannot explain just how brilliant it was.

Heather had a few instructions from the pilot

but didn’t take the controls on the way back!

When we rejoined the coach half an hour’s worth of drive up the road towards ‘home’ we were greeted with the nicest expressions of envy from some of our fellow day-trippers and a seemingly genuine pleasure on our driver’s part that we had enjoyed the flight.

Both of us feel it hasn’t quite sunk in yet. The day has left us tired and suffering a bit of sensory overload: how good a feeling is that?! If the holiday ended today I wouldn’t care: we’ve just been to a place we could only have dreamt of going to and, in fact, few people could ever get to until the invention of the helicopter. We did it on an exceptional and perfect day and we will never forget it.

Wildlife aplenty

I know this is two blogs in quick succession and there is only so much you can take but we have been out of WiFi access – where is a McDonalds when you need one? The campsite in Pounawea was lovely but they didn’t have broadband let alone WiFi. “Every other person asks about WiFi,” said the girl at reception. “I’ll have to get on to me Dad about that!”

The reason for posting this blog so soon after the other is because Pounawea turned out to be a wonderful place for seeing some amazing creatures,in the wild, in their normal habitat. We saw fur seals the other day:

Then one of the real highlights, i reckon, the rare yellow-eyed penguins walking up the beach at Nugget Point. There was a hide to go in but that was it: no other commercialisation and we saw ten of the little creatures waddle up the beach towards their nests. We’re a little way from them, up on the cliff so that we don’t scare them back into the sea, so the zoom lens is working overtime.

Before we set off for Invercargill we called in at Surat Bay and took way too many pictures of the sea lions sleeping on the beach. They took no notice of us what so ever and it was wonderful to see them in the wild. Once again we find ourselves pinching ourselves: these are sea lions on the beach, in New Zealand, and we are standing just a few metres from them.

Less of interest to me but no less extraordinary was visiting the best example (they say) of a petrified forest at Curio Bay. What I want to know is who scared it that much? In fact its tree stumps and fallen tress that have, over millions of years become like rocks, fossils. It was Jurassic in the true sense.

If you can see the lines in the water, they were trees and now, to touch them,you’d think they were rocks.

And despite all this Attenbrough stuff we still had time to get Heather’s portrait done in the Otaga Museum!

So this is what a tortoise feels like!

We seem to have got the bed-making and dismantling down to a … no, not a fine art,

more a graphic design and so our wheels have become our home, rattling around New Zealand behind us. In fact the cab bit feels not unlike a car but the cushions, pots, pans and drying washing flying around in the rear view mirror remind me a) to slow down, b) to take corners a little more gently than in the Holden V6 and c) that we are now in the land of ultra-chill where the Aussie “No worries” sounds quite panic-struck and paranoid.

We are beginning to resign ourselves to much more variable and cooler weather than in Aus and even in North Island. One minute it’s blue sky, the next black and stormy, one minute calm the next blowing a hurricane.We got away from Christchurch and headed south for Waikiki and then on to Oamaru. We had another look at some penguins which are the same as the ones on Philip Island but are called Blue here. It was much less commercialised than Philip Island and the view of them coming out of the sea was much better. Oamaru was a Victorian wool town and fascinating. Heather got yet more fabric for patchwork!

The next morning we headed for Dunedin, as Scottish as it sounds and dubbed the Edinburgh of NZ. On the way we turned off to a place called Moeraki and looked at some fur seals basking.

We got involved in a long chat with some people who have come away from Christchurch. One woman who had brought her grandson with her had pretty much lost her house. Their descriptions of what if was all like were spell-binding and the elderly man who was part of the group said how helpful it was to talk about it.

A lot of people have left the city and come to this area and clearly Christchurch is very twitchy. It has been noted that the temperature in the city has risen by two degrees and that has led to some speculation and ‘Moonman’, some local soothsayer, is now predicting a Richter 8 on March 20 and that really does seem to be getting too much coverage. Wellington got a wobble last night of 4.1 and with them long overdue a biggy they too are now going to be on edge.

After that we went to see the Moeraki Boulders, extraordinary, almost perfectly spherical boulders on the beach which no one can totally reliably explain.

 

 

 

 

 

Having got to Dunedin we stayed at a Butlins on wheels which was not very nice but meant we could see this kilted town, including what they boast is the steepest street in the world.

We decided to photograph it rather than test it: in fact you are not allowed to drive up it and I suspect this tortoise wouldn’t make it anyway.

The route from there to where we are now was beautiful. Sheep by the million, lovely rolling countryside and the weather I described before. Our site is nestled beside a beautiful estuary and we can see the sea in the mid-distance. Now this is what carrying your home round with you should be like.