New Zealand Travel Diary Part VII

When we first started talking about me coming to New Zealand, I had three things on the Must Do list: Swimming with dolphins in Akaroa, seeing Edoras and walking the Tongariro Crossing in the Tongariro National Park, which provided most of the locations for Mordor. Mount Ngauruhoe was used for Mount Doom, although I think the actual mountain slope filming took place on Mount Ruapehu a bit further south.

The last week of my NZ stay saw me heading up to the North Island to fulfil that last dream. Originally I had planned to fly up one day, do the Crossing the next, and come back to Christchurch on the third day. Elisa warned me that I might be better off including an extra day, just in case the weather turned bad, and the Crossing thus off-limits. This proved to be excellent advice and I am very happy I took it. I had booked my domestic flights before leaving Denmark, and the whole itinerary looked like this:

Monday 24th November – Fly from Christchurch to Palmerston North. Get a bus from Palmerston North to Ohakune.
Tuesday 25th – Wednesday 26th November - Stay in Ohakune, hope to walk the Crossing either Tuesday or Wednesday.
Thursday 27th November – Get a bus from Ohakune to Wellington. Stay in Wellington
Friday 28th November – Fly from Wellington to Christchurch in the morning.

My flight from Christchurch left very very early, at 5.45am on Monday morning, so I arrived in city center Palmerston North just in time for some breakfast at McD. Lovely. I had a couple of hours to kill, so I walked around a pretty park for a while and went to the visitor’s center to ask for advice and weather reports for the Tongariro National Park. The weather there changes faster than it does in Dublin, so it was vital to keep tabs on it. They didn’t really know, but told me that they would have all the information I could want in Ohakune.

The journey from Palmerston North to Ohakune was very nice, but became downright spectacular once we left Wanganui. Almost the entire trip to Ohakune, lasting an hour and a half I think, passed through the most fantastic landscape of steep green hills crowded together like spikes on a hedgehog, the road winding in and out and up and down constantly. Ohakune itself was not madly fascinating, outside of ski season - a lot of the shops were closed for that reason. The first thing I did was go to the visitor’s center and get weather information and buy some postcards, then I headed down the road to the Matai Lodge where I would be staying for the next 3 days. The hostel was very quiet, which suited me just fine – I got a 4-bed room all to myself. There are a lot of hostels or guest houses operating shuttles to and from the major walks in the national park, including the Crossing, but the deciding factor for me with Matai Lodge was the fact that they ran an early bird shuttle, so you could start the Crossing by 8am. Knowing me and my sleeping habits, getting an early start sounded perfect.

I spent a lot of time walking around the village, looking at Mount Ruapehu, which forms the backdrop for Ohakune Village. It was hidden by clouds most of the time, but I got glimpses of it every so often. This is an active volcano which last erupted, quite spectacularly, in 1996. You can buy lots of postcards with images from the eruption. I had a pamphlet describing walks around the area, but I couldn’t really get my act together enough to do one, I was too psyched about the Crossing and worried that I wouldn’t get to go because of bad weather. I did wander a bit along the banks of the Mangawhero River, and walked up to Ohakune Junction, a village 2km up the road. It was like walking around a ghost town from an old Western movie. All the shops were closed and I didn’t see a single human being anywhere.

The weather forecast for Tuesday was not great – it mentioned gale force winds and rain, so no Crossing on Tuesday for sure. Boy, was I happy that I would have an extra shot at it on Wednesday! I bought credit for the hostel computer so I could keep track of the forecasts online. There is a consensus among the shuttle operators that if winds are over 60km per hour, they will not go, for safety reasons. Wednesday initially looked bad too, gale force winds still being forecast, but it slowly kept changing for the better, with Rob making the decision at 7am on Wednesday morning that the shuttle would go. I didn’t get to go on the early bird (I guess it didn’t even run at all that day anyway), but I didn’t care. I would get to walk the Crossing and that was the main thing.

I was VERY excited when we set off, I’d been dreaming about this for so long. Mordor, here I go! I had lots of water, little chocolate energy bars and stuff for sandwiches. Rob said we should be at the Ketetahi car park around 4 for our pickup, and that this would not leave us time for climbing Ngauruhoe or Tongariro, unless we planned on running the rest of the way, but that we would have enough time to do the Crossing itself and not have to hurry. I did harbour a small dream of actually climbing Ngauruhoe, but as it turned out, I was happy enough not to have the time for it – I wouldn’t have had the stamina!

The Crossing started out nice and even from the Mangatepopo car park across flat lands, full of black volcanic rock pieces in twisted shapes and little streams until reaching Soda Springs. There’s supposed to be a little wildflower oasis at the springs themselves, 10 minutes walk from the main track, and I did try to get close, but the ground was waterlogged, so I ended up turning back before reaching the springs. There were quite a few people on the trail, a couple of hundred is my guess. The weather was really good, in spite of the forecast having promised rain in the morning – it was sunny and warm, and I soon had to remove two of my many layers.

After Soda Springs, the track led up the devil’s staircase, aptly named, because it’s a hard climb when you’re not that fit *ahem*. The trail snaked back and forth across the hill face, and seemed like it would never end. I had loads of little breaks and little sips of water, and the chocolate bars helped a lot as well. Mount Ngauruhoe was getting closer and closer all the time on to our right. Once you get up the staircase there’s a nice flat walk across the Southern Crater, or you can turn right to climb Ngauruhoe, which of course I did not. The landscape was magnificent and it was great being on the flat - there was even a bit of snow stretching across our path, which I had not expected. You can take a wee detour towards the end of the path, over to the Southern Crater lake below Ngauruhoe, but I didn’t. I wanted to get the climbing over with, and there was a bit of that to be done at the far end of the Southern Crater path. This climb was in some ways worse than the devil’s staircase – the staircase had had a proper path, bordered and with steps, but here you were on your own, just having to follow the poles that marked the route throughout. Some spots were a bit scary, open ridges where the wind was felt quite keenly.

At the top I found myself looking down into the grandeur of the Red Crater, with Mount Tongariro to the left. This is the actual Crossing giving the name to the walk – the saddle between the mountains. Climbing up to the summit above the Red Crater, I looked down on the beautiful Emerald Lakes, breathtaking in their intensity. At this point, the sky had clouded over, and Mount Ngauruhoe was disappearing from sight behind clouds as well. The trail down to the Emerald Lakes is on loose scree, which was a bit scary at first – it’s a long and very steep slope – but once I got into a sort of skating rhythm, it became fun. The Emerald Lakes were bigger than I had first thought and very beautiful, each of them with a distinct colour all their own.

From there, the trail led over to the Blue Lake, another beautiful body of water. There was a lot of snow around which you can see, so at this point I had put all those layers back on that I’d taken off during the first leg of the walk. The clouds were still massing at this stage, and I thought the rain would not be far behind, but we didn’t get a drop at all. Or maybe it stayed on the mountain, I don’t know.

Once I reached the other side of the mountain and the trail started leading down every so slowly, the landscape changed, and became all tussock and rocks. We had a gorgeous view of the land to the north and west, including Lakes Rotoaira and Taupo, and Mount Pihanga. It is a nice but very winding road down to the Ketetahi Hut, and the smell from the Ketetahi Springs slowly becomes more pronounced, which is not great – it smells like rotten eggs. I had some sandwiches at the hut, along with 20 or so other people. I was making good time, and enjoyed myself thoroughly. From the hut, it was roughly 1 ½ - 2 hours to get to the car park. The last hour takes you through a forest that feels like it will never end, plus it has at least 500 steps that you have to go down, making my legs rather sore at the end of it. Okay, so maybe it wasn’t 500, but it sure felt like it! There were around 50-70 people spread around the car park area, resting, when I got there, and I found a spot for myself on a wooden platform and had myself a drink and a chocolate bar. I was a very happy and tired camper!

That night I went to a nearby bar in Ohakune to celebrate – had a pint and wrote my diary, and went home because I was kind of tired for some reason…. Got on a bus the next day to go to Wellington, which seems like a very nice place. I stayed in a hostel across from the bus station and had a lovely early morning walk through Wellington, along the waterfront, before I caught a bus for the airport. Once back in Christchurch, Elisa and Isabella and I went shopping and the next day I went home to Denmark.

And with that I will finish my tale of the Best Holiday Ever....*sigh*

New Zealand Travel Diary Part VI

The TranzAlpine Express goes from Christchurch to Greymouth on the west coast and back again. You can easily do the return journey in a day - perfect day trip. We just had time enough for lunch in Greymouth before getting back on the train. Of course, you could stay in Greymouth (although it doesn’t seem to have much of interest) and use it as a base for exploring the glaciers further down the coast, Fox and Franz Josef. If I had had more time, I probably would have done that, because I would’ve like to have seen the glaciers, but hey, I wouldn’t really have wanted to miss out on some of the things I did see, so no complaints.

The train has really great seats, very comfortable, and big panoramic windows. For the photographers, there is an open-sided observation car. The first hour or so from Christchurch is fairly uninteresting, as the route goes across the flat Canterbury Plains. From Springfield, you go up and soon after the fun begins. You cross glorious river gorges (the Waimakariri) over viaducts, you go through lots of little tunnels (19 in total), you cross wide plains where the river braids through, surrounded by mountains. I don’t think we saw many rivers that were not braided, and I found them fascinating. A braided river is a stream that cannot decide which way to flow, so it splits up into lots of little streams that meander in and out of each other, here illustrated by a picture from one of the gorges of the Waimakariri.

At Arthur’s Pass, high in the Southern Alps, you have to go back to your seat, because you’re not allowed to remain in the observation car for the journey through the 8.5km long Otira Tunnel due to the exposure to dangerous gases inside the tunnel. Then it’s on to more woodland plains and mountains and streams until you hit the rainforest area and the river Arnold, and then finally the river Grey shortly before arrival in Greymouth. It’s a really great trip, and if you don’t want to get your face and hands covered in soot by spending all the available time in the observation car, you can certainly enjoy it very much from your seat in the normal carriages.

Needless to say, I chose to get sooty, although I didn’t realize until we got off the train in Christchurch and I went to the bathroom to wash my curiously dirty hands. Then I looked in the mirror and this black face stared back at me. It was very funny. That’s what you get for standing in the observation car going through 30 or more little tunnels! But hey, small price to pay if you ask me…

New Zealand Travel Diary Part V

So, sleeping over at the Deer Flats on the Milford Road. The area in general had apparently been used to portray Fangorn Forest in the Lord Of The Rings, and the trees sure looked very Fangorn-ish to us. There was a little pond, which turned out to be a mirror pond, as you can see. Very very nice. I loved these trees, they reminded me of the Chinese cartoons we used to watch growing up on telly, there was that kind of intricacy to them.

From Te Anau we headed east towards Queenstown, on the shores of gorgeous Lake Wakatipu. There are a lot of Lord Of The Rings locations in this region, but most of them are not ‘whole’, in the sense that they would have been combined with landscape from elsewhere to make up the scene, making it difficult to recognize any given spot. So, I’ve seen what must have been either the White Mountains (Ered Nimrais) or the Mountains of Shadow (Ephel Duath), which combined with some fields near Twizel make up the location used for the battle on the Pelennor Fields. Anyway, no more LOTR talk…for now.

The drive around the lake was very nice, the road being windy and lovely. Queenstown itself is buzzing – we took a walk down through city centre and had lunch in a great café. There are lots of things to do in Queenstown, most of them related to some form of extreme (or not) sport. After a couple of hours, we drove off again and went to Arrowtown, a lovely village higher up in the mountains, founded during the gold rush in I-can’t-remember-when. The Arrow River formed part of the location for the Ford of Bruinen, and a little further down the river was the site of the Gladden Fields, where the orcs attacked Isildur (it’s in The Two Towers). We saw both sites, but for the Ford of Bruinen only the river itself was used in the movie, the banks you see are from Skipper’s Canyon, not far from Arrowtown, where we did not go.

For once, we went out for dinner and found a really great restaurant called The Stables, with very good wine and food. It had a great table under yet another Party Tree wanna-be. Okay, so that probably requires an explanation. At the beginning of The Fellowship Of The Ring, Bilbo has a huge birthday party for when he turns 111. The main table is situated under a big tree, henceforth known as the Party Tree. In Hagley Park in Christchurch there is a tree which would have made an awesome Party Tree. I have no idea where the real Party Tree is that was used in the movie.

All in all, Arrowtown was great, and the camp site we found has to be the most beautiful and up-to-date I have ever seen. Spacious and clean and with more facilities than you could shake a stick at.

From there, we headed east towards Wanaka. To get there we had to choose between two routes. One was very scenic, and the other passed by an LOTR location. We chose the scenic route, and it was indeed very beautiful. Wanaka, on the other hand, was very windy. We parked by the lake and chilled out for a few hours before heading off again. I didn’t ever get tired of seeing beautiful lakes surrounded by snowy peaks, but I think I did get a bit used to it. At any rate, Lake Wanaka is not a match for Tekapo or Pukaki for beauty – it’s just very nice.

Speaking of Pukaki, we spent the night at the Mount Cook Lookout at the southern end of the lake, in the parking lot by the small visitor’s centre. Yet another spectacular sunset and what a view in the morning. The same thing happened as the first time we visited Pukaki – Aoraki Mount Cook was partially covered by cloud when we arrived, proceeded to become completely clear after a few hours, and then stayed that way. This prompted a change to our plans – we had to be heading back to Christchurch, but it was just too good an opportunity to miss out on, going up to Mount Cook Village for a closer look at the mountain, on a day of clear blue skies. Elisa and Stefano have tried it before, coming to the lake in fine weather and ending up in the rain once they got to Mount Cook Village. Not this time. We stopped by the Edmund Hillary Alpine Center for an hour or two and then had to go back – there was still roughly 5 hours to drive before Christchurch and home. But oh, it was worth it!

It felt weird being back in Christchurch, the camper had so quickly become home. It was like we’d been gone for a lot longer than just 9 days. But then again, we did see an awful lot of places, and all of them awesomely gorgeous. And on that note, I’ll stop here, stay tuned for Part VI, in which we go on a scenic train journey across the South Island…

New Zealand Travel Diary Part IV

The next couple of days saw us heading south-east, ending up on the Otago Peninsula just east of the city of Dunedin. On the way we stopped to see the wondrous Moeraki Boulders. They lie on a beach at the tide line, and their creation process dates back sixty million years, when they were part of the sea bed. When the coast lines eroded they popped out and that’s how you get to see them now. They reminded me of the Giant’s Causeway in Northern Ireland in that both look completely manmade but are not.

Further south, the road from Dunedin onto the Otago Peninsula snakes along on the level ground, hugging the coast line very closely, which can be a bit dizzying, but quite breathtaking as well.
We had hoped to be able to visit an albatross colony, but unfortunately the birds were nesting that week, and all tours were off. Oh well. We ended up spending a lovely chilled-out shopping day in Dunedin town, which has the most beautiful train station I have ever seen. The name of Dunedin comes from the Gaelic name for Edinburgh, and the Scottish influence is unmistakable – even if we did end up having lunch in an Irish pub called Craic…

From Dunedin we headed west, towards the Fiordlands region. Given the weather in this area, we were trying to decide whether it would be worth our while going up to Milford Sound or not, or if we would be better off spending more time somewhere else. We ended up going for it. The Fiordlands is the 2nd rainiest area in the world – 6 m per year on average.

There are many fiords in the Fiordlands, but only two of them are currently accessible, and only one of them by proper road (Milford Sound – the other one is Doubtful Sound). The road goes from Te Anau for 2,5 hours along some of the most stunning scenery – which says a lot, this being New Zealand. This mountain looks to me like someone put flour on top and then blew on it.
In Te Anau, we had booked ourselves on a 1,5 hour cruise of Milford Sound, which was really great, although, once you got out further into the fiord, the wind picked up considerably. The landscape was majestic, sort of how I imagine the Norwegian fiords, just without all the lush vegetation. Waterfalls, waterfalls, waterfalls everywhere. We did see some blue sky in between the light showers, so our weather luck did not desert us. Yay!

We headed straight back towards Te Anau after we got off the boat, and ended up camping at Deer Flats halfway, at a gorgeous location in a little forest near the Eglinton River. But I think this is a story best continued in Part V……

New Zealand Travel Diary Part III

Okay, so this is not going to be a wordy post, because I want to give the pictures room to speak.

So, accompanied by the seemingly neverending line of the Southern Alps, we headed deeper into the heart of the South Island. Then we turned a corner and I had to pinch myself. This is approximately what we saw (this is obviously taken after we had left the camper and gone down to the shore). And no, I didn’t edit this in any way, the water is like that. The intense colour is due to light-reflecting micro-organisms or something along those lines in the water.

From Lake Tekapo we went along the turquoise canal that connects Lake Tekapo and Lake Pukaki. I think it’s part of some hydro-electric scheme or something, which is very cool. We were heading to a camping spot on the eastern shore of Lake Pukaki. As the journey progressed, we could see part of Aoraki Mount Cook appear to our right, across the canal. It was shrouded in cloud, but that cleared later on and remained completely clear. It’s quite a lovely mountain, and I took many many MANY pictures of it.

Aoraki is the Maori name, and the combination of the two names is increasingly used for the mountain. When we came upon the lake we turned right along the shore. Pukaki has the exact same very intense turquoise colour as Tekapo, but here there were more rocks and less flowers. Not that it wasn’t absolutely stunning! I think Lake Pukaki/Aoraki Mount Cook is probably my favourite place of all that we went to.

We found the camping spot after only one false turn, which turned out to actually just be a wee detour. It was breathtaking. We were sheltered by a few trees (mostly birch, and a couple eucalyptus), and had an open view of the lake and mountains. Below us was a very rocky (I guess I could call it bouldery) beach, behind us evergreen trees. We had dinner outside, as per usual, with lake-cooled lovely Mac’s Sassy Red brew.

The sunset needs no further words.....

And, I got up in the middle of the night and sat for a bit on the moonlit shore – and took a couple of pictures of the moon above. The big boulder I sat on, was a fast favorite because it had little steps and holds seemingly carved into it, so it made a great seat for more than one person.

Then of course, I got up early too, being WAY to excited by the beauty of it all to sleep properly, and sat on the big boulder to enjoy the sunrise (this picture is from before sunrise).

New Zealand Travel Diary Part II

We had a road trip planned for the South Island and to that end had rented a camper. This is a very common way to travel around NZ, and I can definitely recommend it. It gives you a lot of flexibility and the chance to experience nature first-hand. There is something quite magical about waking up in the middle of the night – and looking out the window at a sky full of bright stars over some incredibly beautiful landscape, no city lights, no lone cars going past, no other humans in sight. And then, once you start missing showers too much, you find a camp site and enjoy the mod cons for a bit before heading back into the wild.

I was amazed how quickly the camper came to feel like home, and I missed it when we returned it back in Christchurch. It brought back a lot of good memories from camping trips in my childhood *sigh*

The first night we spent in the middle of nowhere, and it was glorious. Well, we spent it beside the location used for the city of Edoras in the Lord Of The Rings movies – a hill called Mount Sunday. I had brought my elf dress and elf ears, not wanting such a prime opportunity for playing dress-up to escape me, and we had a lot of fun with the Elf Photo Sessions (yes, we had more than one, because we arrived in late afternoon, so had to wait for the light to be right on the mountain the next morning to take more pictures). The landscape is exactly like you see it in the movies, except for all the fences around the fields. There are mountains all around, many of them with snowy peaks.

We saw the moon rise over the hills and bathe everything in a silver glow, giving the mountains long shadows. It was quite simply magical, as was the beautiful and very starry sky. If you watch the Two Towers, there’s a night scene where Aragorn is smoking outside Meduseld, and Legolas comes to join him – that’s what it was like for us as well. I woke up very very early and could not get back to sleep, so I took one of the chairs out and sat opposite Edoras, writing my travel diary (of which the present post is not a transcript), and watching the sunrise. Pure bliss….

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. :)

From Edoras we went back down the 48km gravel road to Mount Somers and a proper road, and headed a bit south and then west, towards the spectacular landscapes of Lakes Tekapo and Pukaki…..stay tuned for Part III.