Goodbye my headphones

The last few weeks have been pretty varied, I’ve gone from the golden beaches of Abel Tasman to the very heart of the Southern Alps. There have been moments of sublime beauty as well as terrible loss. I started off in Nelson (home of the CENTRE OF NEW ZEALAND. I like to write it in capitals to make it sound more exciting), where in a shocking incident of crime I had my headphones ripped out of my iPod by some jerks driving around the corner in their car. All because I wouldn’t give them 50c to buy an ice cream at McDonld’s. Jerks. I’ve since found replacements (they don’t sound as good though) but my iPod has become my closest travelling companion so it was most upsetting to see him emasculated in this way. In a similar incident I was wandering around town later with my American and Canadian room-mates and a girl asked us for a cigarette, however when we revealed that none of us smoked she just slapped the Canadian guy. Shocking. So after all this I swear the next time someone asked me for something I would have punched them in the face and run away screaming, I don’t care if they were just asking for the time or for help crossing the road. Jerks.

So that was Nelson. Thankfully Abel Tasman National Park was much nicer. Did some good day walks there, getting dropped off each morning by water taxi, and covering around half the 50km Coastal Track. It basically meanders along what is some of the nicest coastline in New Zealand, travelling through the beech and fern forest from one secluded bay to the next. It’s all very nice, the best spot I found was this nice little stream which feeds into the Torrent Bay estuary with water this beautiful shade of green, surrounded on all sides by ferns and plants which were also green and giving the general effect of being really green. And nice. Lots of people miss it too as they usually take the shortcut across the estuary so it was good to have it pretty much to myself.



Afterwards I took the train from Picton back down to Christchurch. It was really great to stop by Kaikoura again as I have very fond memories of there. After resting up briefly in Christchurch it was on to Tekapo once more. It was such a nice day when I arrived I decided to take a flightseeing trip around the Alps, crossing over to the West Coast and the glaciers there, circling around Aoraki and back. It was a brilliant trip, was really good to get right up close to the mountains and see them from a totally new perspective.



Aoraki especially is an impressive sight, and I’ve built up quite a collection of photos of him from various angles, both on the flight and then on the ground when I went and stayed in Mt Cook village for almost a week. Aoraki (meaning Cloud-Piercer) is the Maori name for Mt Cook, the tallest mountain in New Zealand at around 3700m. I love that name, and I like how the Maori regard all the major mountains as having distinct personalities so I don’t usually call him Mt Cook (I mean come on, that sounds so wussy compared to ‘Cloud-Piercer’) and tend to refer to the mountain as ‘him’. This has confused a couple of people though who wonder who this guy is I keep talking about that I went to see. Check it out though, it even looks like he’s got a giant face, it’s the coolest thing. On my last day there I was the first one out to the Hooker Lake at the base of the mountain, where I got to sit around for a while and watch him do his cloud-piercing thing, slowly revealing himself over the course of about an hour, it was great.



The Mt Cook village is set in a beautiful mountain valley, and you can see ol’ Aorkai sticking up around the corner from the far end of the village. You go there to either walk or climb (I stuck with walking for now), but I also went on one of the boat trips onto the Tasman Glacier Lake where you cruise amongst the icebergs, eating and landing on ice which was laid down as snow about 500 years ago. Well, you get to break off a little piece of ice to suck on, confirming that water tasted pretty much the same about 500 years ago. Would have brought some ice home to help with the whole drought thing but hey, it’s a national park, you’re not allowed to take anything with you. Sorry.



Back in Wanaka now to revisit all my favourite spots and see how they’ve changed in the spring, everything being all green now and lots of wildflowers all over the place. Will be heading up to Mt Aspiring National Park at some stage to check out some of the walks there and get amongst the mountains and glaciers again. Beaches are all very nice for a while, but here, this is my kind of country.

Return to Te Wahipounamu

Yep, I’ve come back to the south island, the place of greenstone, and it’s good to be back. I had a really good trip down the north island, I enjoyed it much more than the trip up even though I mainly visited places I’d already been. First stop was Waitomo, which exists pretty much to let people visit some of the hundreds of caves in the area. It’s set amongst some typical north island countryside, lots of green hills and sheep but gets really interesting underground. I only had the chance to visit one cave, Ruakuri; it’s only been outfitted for tours recently so it’s got all modern walkways and is entered via a huge shaft that’s got this cool spiral ramp leading down to some airlocks – if I ever get an underground fortress built it will be something like that.



Revisited Rotorua briefly, basically just to do one of the Maori cultural shows with the hangi (which had been recommended to me mainly on the basis that they served good lamb. It wasn’t half bad either, amazing what you can cook in a hole in the ground really). It was set out at this forest village and had a pretty good atmosphere, although it did have a bit of a Survivor feel to it and was a little bit rushed to fit everything in. Everyone had a fun night though, and a lot of us travelled on to Taupo together so it was one of those great times which only happen occasionally when you’re travelling, where you fall in with a great group of people for a little while before you all head your separate ways again.

After spending a few days waiting around in Taupo, the weather finally cleared and a few of us got to do the Tongariro Crossing, a one day walk which crosses the saddle between Tongariro and Ngauruhoe, two of the three volcanoes in the centre of NZ’s north island. It was an awesome day, there was still heaps of snow up on the mountains and while there were some serious looking clouds following us all day they didn’t catch up until we’d finished the hardest sections, but it did mean we had to keep moving pretty much constantly. At times we were walking across flat expanses of snow, with mountains rearing up on either side, no view of the world below and the only sound the thundering of avalanches on the slopes above, it might as well have been in Antarctica. It felt like it too when the wind was howling across the very top ridges, it was really, really cold (it would be hard to say exactly how cold, but taking into account the windchill factor if I had to guess, I would say bloody) and it was strong enough to make sure you kept well back from the crater rims.



Red Crater in particular was amazing, a gaping hole in the side of the mountain filled with steam and that familiar sulphur smell which will always remind me of Rotorua). The soil on the rim of this crater was warm enough to keep the snow off and the descent was so much fun (particularly after the attractively named Devil’s Staircase) and left me feeling so full of energy I wanted to sprint across the next flat stretch. That feeling disappeared pretty much completely the moment when we had to start the next uphill stretch, stepping literally in everyone else’s footprints as they were the only places on the icy snow you could actually get a foothold. The descent was quite long and a little bit on the ordinary side after everything we’d already seen, with stretches of tussock grassland and rainforest that seemed to go on forever. Once we got back to town and looked back across the lake at the mountains I was struck by a new sense of scale (they’re like, really, really big) and felt that usual sense of unreality you get coming back to civilization after that kind of experience, where you can hardly believe you’d ever been up there. Then I had pizza, which is easy to believe in.



Headed down to Wellington again after that, took tings pretty easy there (saw Little Miss Sunshine at the movies – it’s quite a good film) and caught the ferry back across to Picton. Did a day-walk on the Queen Charlotte Track, which was quite pleasant although I think as pleasant as the Marlborough Sounds are, it would all start to look the same after a few days so one’s probably enough for me. Heading across to Nelson next and up to Abel Tasman National Park from there, and that will be it for all these beaches and I can get back to my mountains again.