I’m not going to give a play-by-play account of the 3 glorious weeks I spent in NZ. I’m not bothered writing it, and you probably would not be bothered reading it either. Anyway, enjoy!
New Zealand is beautiful – this much I knew before going, both from seeing movies shot there, and from other people who had been. I still was not prepared for exactly how amazing it really is! Add to that our luck with weather – we had great sunny days, except for my trip to the North Island, where the weather did play havoc with my nerves due to its influence on whether I would be able to walk the Tongariro Crossing or not. People are genuinely friendly, and willing to chat to strangers and ask where you are from etc. I had to get used to the accent, and I didn’t get enough exposure to be able to understand everything or to tell the difference between an Aussie and a Kiwi accent. One of the best bits about it is that there are no big hairy nasty spiders (biggest reason I will never go to Australia) – there are only a couple of poisonous ones but they are rarely seen and they are not necessarily lethal. I didn’t go bush-walking more than I had to, because I didn’t really want to tempt fate and be one of the rare people to see one of the above.
The worst and best thing about NZ is the distance you have to cover to get there – bad because it’s an awful long and miserable journey, good because it means NZ has great potential for retaining a primeval quality and not be completely overrun by tourists. The trip there was alright, because I managed to catch a couple of good naps – I have great difficulty sleeping on planes, and had acquired some valerian root tablets in Frankfurt, but they didn’t really work. The best bit was when we were landing in Sydney and flew over city centre, including the Opera House, which of course has special significance for me as a Danish person (it’s designed by Danish architect Jørn Utzon). I had hoped to see it, but had also thought it would probably be too good to be true. But it wasn’t! What a way to start the holiday :)
Customs processes upon entry into NZ are very thorough – you have to declare if you are bringing a great variety of things, including hiking and camping gear. If you say you are bringing any of these, the items will be submitted to an inspection. In my case I had ticked the box for hiking gear, and so my boots had to be unpacked, and yer man took them away for cleaning. They had been really muddy from the visit to the soggy Lake District, and I had cleaned them before packing, but not the soles, so yer man did that and gave them back to me in a new plastic bag and sent me on my way.
It was surreal to walk around in summer clothes and sunglasses, and be looking at Christmas decorations on the lamp posts and in the supermarkets. Christchurch is a lovely city, and is not given the moniker Garden City as a joke, it really is full of beautiful gardens, and huge garden centres. You can tell that it’s a sparsely populated country – all the houses are big and sprawling, with gardens, all the streets are wide, and the general feel of the place is more similar to the US than the UK. Once you get out of the city, to the west you have the wide Canterbury Plains, bordered by the gorgeous Southern Alps, and to the east you have the hilly Banks Peninsula. There are lots of tall and dense hedges around the fields, to prevent soil erosion, and you should see the water systems they use, they can be as long as a soccer field.
The city centre of Christchurch does have a very British ambience about it, think Oxbridge. The Arts Centre is beautifully built and looks like a cross between Magdalen College and Hogwarts. We took a canoe trip up the Avon, along the edges of the Botanical Gardens – this is one of the old-fashioned punts that you can also take, if you don’t feel like flexing your own muscles.
I was booked on a trip to swim with dolphins in Akaroa on the Banks Peninsula, and we had a glorious day for it. Getting into a wetsuit was great fun, and so was the trip out on the bay to look for the dolphins, in a wee boat that could go fairly fast. The dolphins we were seeking are called Hector’s Dolphins, and are among the smallest and rarest. We did find a few, but they kept disappearing on us and didn’t seem very interested in playing, so we didn’t get to actually swim with them. I was not as disappointed as other people, I had a brilliant time anyway, and I am glad that we at least got to see some of the beautiful wee creatures up close.
More to come in Part II, and there are loads more pictures on Facebook......
The glittering icing on the cake would of course have been to actually climb Edoras, but you have to ford a couple of streams to get there, and we were not equipped for getting wet feet, and also, we had plenty of other places to go and see. I did see what I insisted were people on top of it the evening before, which did puzzle me, because they wouldn’t have been able to get down before full dark. Stefano said they were earthquake markers, and of course that’s exactly what they were. :)
