Comfy sofa in a living room, good music, log fire, cup of liquorice tea before heading to bed with a hot water bottle. Nope, not home prematurely. This is the South Island winter backpacker standard. Excellent!
Dr Mizen and I have been on the road on the South Island in Charlie the car for just over a week and all is going well apart from the weather. Unfortunately, low clouds and driving rain have meant at times we've had to simply take everyone's word for it regards the gorgeous views. Other than making us feel more at home, the weather HAS, however, made the west coast beaches even wilder and more beautiful than they are normally. Luckily we've had clear days for crucial things like glacier hikes and hopefully it will be good tomorrow for the Milford Sound.
But I'm getting ahead of myself.
Christchurch provided me with my first couchsurfing experience, which was great. Fred looked after us brilliantly and we're looking forward to seeing her again when we pass back through. After buying my car and picking up Lindsay, we headed to Arthur's Pass via the Castle Hill giant boulders, which I'm reliably informed had a bit-part in the Narnia film. Literally washed out of Arthur's Pass, we abandoned a hillwalking attempt and took a cold shower in the streets of Hokitika. Which we're assured is lovely in nice weather. A grump and a half later and we trundled up to Barrytown to carve our own NZ-design necklaces from a cow's shin and took a tour of the incredible pancake rocks and blowholes. Finally we were starting to get an idea of the South Island we'd heard about!
South to Fox Glacier. I tell you, driving with fingers crossed for the weather is not that easy. But it paid off, and we had a glorious day up on the glacier. A helicopter dropped us off 7km up it. We then crampon-ed around for a couple of hours, enjoyed the ice caves, crevasses, mulans (not Disney characters but plug holes in the ice) and blue blue ice. The glacier's actually growing and is one of the fastest-moving in the world. We made the most of the clear day and also took in Lake Matheson, one of the most famous reflections in the world because it's so flat.
Haast Pass and more great west coast beaches brought us to Wanaka, where my old pal Philippa kindly put us up and put up with us for a couple of nights. Yesterday we hit Queenstown and depleted our bank accounts for a total of 33 minutes of madness. Half an hour on a jet boat careening through the Shotover canyon and doing 360 degree turns and then 2 canyon swings. For a canyon swing, you basically throw yourself into a gorge at the end of a wire, freefall 60m at 150km/hour then it goes into a huge swing when you hit the bottom (of the wire, not the gorge).
And now we're in Te Anau. We've tasted some of the fine Pinot Noirs of the Otago Valley along the way and tomorrow head along the road to Milford Sound.
While I'm still mixed on how I feel about NZ, the South Island is truly stunning to travel around and I can't wait to come back and see more after my stint working on the North Island.
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