Wellington - Picton - Kaikoura - Mount Cook - Fox Glacier - Milford Sound

Tuesday to Sunday - Wellington

Wellington is very, very windy and a bit cold although sometimes the sun shines. Its about the same size as Edinburgh, its quite pretty, it has some nice shops and cafes and theatres etc but my honest impression was that it was a bit lacking in the sort of atmosphere you get in Edinburgh or any other European city. That sounds a bit cruel because its a really nice place and maybe its just that its too new to have that feeling of individually or uniqueness that other older cities have.

So in Wellington I spent almost five hours in the Te Papa museum mostly on the four floor which is the Maori history section and is very well presented with an audio guide to accompany the exhibits. I also spent some time on the second floor where they describe volcanoes and earthquakes and have a model house which you stand inside to experience a simulated earthquake.

I was staying with Karen Aitken (ex JPM) for a few days and she picked me up from outside the YHA and drove me to her house in Martinborough (about an hour outside Wellington). There was an art festival in Wellington so I got tickets for Karen and me to see a Cornish theatre company perform a show which had sold out at the National Theatre (Tristan and Yseult). I also went to a lunchtime thing where they had two directors (one from T&Y and one from an American hi-tech play) in front of an audience talking about their vision for the show. Its funny but directors are never able to explain how they take an idea and make it into a production. They say vague things like "the whole team works together to contribute ideas". Now I know, I have seen directors work and this is bollocks.

In Wellington I also visited the Botanic Gardens, saw the fur seal colony at Red Rocks and saw some modern art (which I didn't like) in the National Gallery. Fur seals sleep on the rock during the day and look like blobs of fat. The guide was an extra in Lord of the Rings as were 14,000 other people in NZ and needless to say he knew more about filming than he did about fur seals....
Karen was lovely, she cooked and did my laundry, it was bliss being looked after so well. We went to the village fair on the Saturday but it was chucking it down so we got some DVDs and slobbed. We both liked Russell Crowe in Proof of Life, she told me he's really a Kiwi but when he gets an award, they say he's an Aussie and when he gets in trouble, he's back to being a Kiwi. On Sunday we went for a cycle around the vineyards which are literally on the doorstep of Martinborough village. We started with a larger winery, the woman behind the counter looked totally uninterested and couldn't even answer a simple question like how many bottles of wine do you sell each year? The second one was better and by the time we got to the fourth one, we were talking to the man and wife who run the whole thing by themselves and only produce Pinot Noir but very good Pinot Noir. The man gave us some freshly pressed grape juice to taste and showed us how he measures the bricks or sugar content in the grapes. We had a very merry cycle home.

Monday - ferry to Picton. Now the whole idea about getting the ferry is to see the view but the ferry was delayed and it was dark so no view and also I arrived in Picton at 11:30 - arrrggghhh. The hostel was packed and everyone seemed to be leaving the next morning to go on somewhere so I decided to hire a car and get out of there before the next batch of people arrived from the ferry. Got the car, looked a the map and drove to Kaikoura.

Kaikoura (famous for whales and dolphins)
Swimming with dolphins was booked till Saturday so I decided that it must be good and reserved a place.

Wed morning 6:15am - whale watching. Kaikoura is unique because the continental shelf drops off suddenly and dramatically to a depth of 2,000 metres just about three miles from the shore. This makes it really easy to see whales which only live in deep water. Whales breath on the surface for about 15 minutes and then dive for about 2 hours. When they are on the surface, you only see a small fraction of the 18 metre long whale and it looks like a brown log floating in the water. About every 18 seconds there is a spurt of water from the blow hole as it breathes but apart from that there's not much to see. The guides use a PC animation which is very educational about whales and their ocean habitat. The guides can also tell from the movement of the whale when its about to dive and this is the signal to get ready for the Kodak moment when the tail fin is in the air as the whale goes down under head first. The reason that photo is so common is that's it with whales, that basically is all you get to see.

Wed afternoon I decided to give the seals one more try to impress me in their natural environment - the water. I got out there with them in a kayak, I paddled against the waves, around the rocks, just to get close to the seals but they were as sleepy as usual. I did see one seal in the water and to be honest, they are totally different in the water, they are sleek and funny and they look slim and fit and agile.

Thursday and Friday I took a guided walk up into the mountains behind Kaikoura and stayed overnight at a luxury lodge which was a bit on the cold side and a bit bare but had a queen size bed. By chance I was the only person booked on the walk and I had the guide all to myself, he also turned out to be the owner of the land and the guiding company. The land had been a sheep farm but as the price of wool declined, he looked for another use for the land, he hired someone to research the tourist industry and identified a gap in the market for shorter guided walks. In NZ, there are a lot of what they call "freedom walks" which are 3 to 5 days long over mountains and you have to carry all your stuff including food and sleeping bag. The walk I was doing was two days just carrying a day pack with warm clothes and waterproofs. Since then he has been trying to encourage regeneration of the land back to natural bush. He was very knowledgable about the different types of forest and the alpine meadows, he explained how the Manuka acts as nursery cover for the Totra forest to emerge. He has introduced deer to the area (which we ate for dinner), cleared most of the sheep except about nine Spanish sheep which we saw high up in the mountain scree evading capture. He also pointed out a chamois goat, bush robins, bell birds and lots of plants. The second day, we went for a wee walk up the valley (everyone here says wee instead of small) which turned out to be two and a half hours to the top of a 5,500 foot mountain. It was a clear day and we were able to see all the way up the west coast to the outline of the North Island and down the coast to the Bank Peninsula.

Saturday 5:45am - swimming with dolphins
Dolphins feed at night and come into swallow water to rest during the day. You don't actually swim with dolphin, they swim rings around humans, we just float in the water with them, if we are lucky. The guide stressed that the dolphins are wild, they are not encouraged in any way to come to the boat and they will only do so if they choose to. There are said to be things that encourage them to be interested like for example, keeping your hands and arms by your side, diving under water, making dolphin like noises and circling in the same direction as the dolphin as it swims around you. It should be noted that you have no hope of diving in a wetsuit as its far too bouyant and dolphins swim a lot faster than you can circle. The boat took us out to where a pod (collective term for dolphins) off approx 600 dolphins were swimming along and dropped us off in the middle of them. This was being like dropped off on the M1 There are masses of them just wizzing past you at what looks like fairly high speed, they swim in a kind of synchronized way in little groups of three, four or five as if they are having a chat as they go along. They water is not too clear so you cannot see them till they are right next to you and whizzing past. After a little while, they main body of them passed us by and four or five (I am not sure exactly because they move so fast and look kind of similar) stayed behind to investigate us. They were like sheepdogs herding us together, they got really close but not close enough to touch and we were told not to touch them anyway. They were really inquisitive, I think they were wondering why we couldn't swim very well, if we had fallen in by accident and got injured. We just floated in the water totally amazed by them, one of them had a bit of scaring on the back maybe as a result of a too inquisitive nature. Our time in the water was limited to avoid disruption to their environment and we were reluctant to leave them, they also seemed reluctant to see us go as they swam around the boat for a little while. On the boat we followed the pod for a little while to try to take photos but its almost impossible, they are so fast, I had lots of photos of water with no dolphin As they swim along, sometimes they leap out of the water head first, turn 180 degrees in mid air and re-enter the water head first. No one knows why they do this.

After the dolphins, I drove to Lake Tekapo and then the next day on to Mount Cook

Sunday - Mt Cook
I took the ski plane up around Mt Cook and landed on the Fox Glacier. This is really strange, its warm because the sun is so strong and its sheltered from the wind by the mountains. It looks like a small area of snow but its huge, but because its all white and the mountains on either side are so huge its difficult to appreciate how big the glacier is.

Monday - boat trip to terminal end of Tasman Glacier
The Tasman Glacier ends in a lake and as bits of ice break off they float along the lake as giant icebergs slowly melting. We get into a small boat and go on the lake around the icebergs, water drips off them as they are melting right in front of us. They start off a green colour because the ice is so densely packed it doesn't reflect the blue/green end of the spectrum, as the air gets into the ice, it turns white and then as the ice melts you can see more of the moraine (crushed rock) inside the ice and it looks more grey. The water in the lake is a milky grey colour from the crushed rock powder. As it travels down the mountain, the glacier picks up a lot of rock, crushes it and deposits it along the sides as moraine. We got off the boat and climbed onto one of the icebergs for a closer look, there are bands of scree that have come down the mountain, been embedded in the snow and them been carried along with the glacier and now they are like layers of rock in the iceberg. The guides say it takes 300 years for snow that lands at the top of the glacier (neve) to reach the terminal end. All that time it is being pressed down and compacted.

Tuesday - drive around Mt Cook to the other end of Fox Glacier to go for a walk on the terminal end of Fox Glacier. I was a bit worried that I might be overdoing it a bit with the glacier sightseeing thing but walking on the glacier was really great fun. We had to work for about an hour up the hill alongside the glacier first till we could get to a point were we could step onto hard ice. We had on crampons, we climbed up a crevice and slide down inside a tunnel in the ice a bit like a tube at the swimming pool. The guides cut out steps in the ice with ice axes. We saw people learning to ice climb up a horizontal part of the glacier. We walked on the ice for 1.5 hours and then back down along the slide of the glacier.

Wednesday - drove to Glenorchy to see if it looked like Scotland as it said in the guide book - no, it doesn't. There is a big difference. There is only one mountain in Scotland - Ben Nevis, there rest are below mountain height. There are old and they have been eroded and smoothed by the ice ages, they are mostly covered in earth and can be quite mossy and boggy at times. In NZ, the mountains are very young, they are formed by movement of plates, they are still growing, they are very unstable, bits fall off and they crumble, they are mostly rock, there is some growth in places but even there, there is a lot of drainage and not many mossy boggy bits. Mostly they are very straight up, they've not been smoothed or rounded by the action of ice ages. When the streams run off the mountains in NZ, they tend to be very clear and create green or blue lakes. The lakes in Scotland are never green or blue they are always a dark colour.

Thursday - Milford Sound - kayaking
Milford Sound is actually a fiord, the difference is: a sound is a V shaped valley created by a river and a fiord is a U shaped valley created by a glacier. The drive to Milford Sound is described in the guide book as stunning and it really is stunning. Kayaking around the sound on Thursday was really beautiful, we started at 8:15am and had the early morning on flat calm water with the sun coming over the hills. There is nothing, not even a petrol station, between Te Anua and Milford Sound (120 kms) and even at Milford Sound there is very little but the place is descended on by 80 to 90 coach loads of tourists every day. The South Island is a bit like that, nothing for miles and miles and then a crowded tourist hot spot. In the North Island, there are more people there, its seems more normal.

I had arranged to stay in Milford for two night, to go kayaking on Thursday and diving on Friday. On the dive website they quoted a price 35 dollars cheaper to be collected in Milford. When I phoned the dive place they wanted me to go to a briefing on the Thursday night and try on the wetsuit etc. I suggested that I could drive there from Milford but the guy on the phone was telling me 'oh no, its a two hour drive, you won't be able to do it'. So I changed my plans and stayed in Te Anua on Thursday night so that I could go to this briefing. Things started to go wrong from there, I thought the guy said the briefing was at 7:30pm but when I turned up, he said 'oh, you are half and hour late, we started at 7pm'. Then he couldn't come to my hostel to collect me and I had to go to the end of the round, ok, not far away, a few minutes walk. So all the gear was fitted an put in the bag and I arranged to meet him at 5:55am.

Unfortunately I slept right through the alarm and woke at 6:37am. I thought if I drive to Milford, I saw where they put the boat in the water when I was kayaking, I could maybe catch them in time and still go diving. I made the two hour drive in an hour and a half and arrived there just as he was backing the boat trailer down the ramp towards the water. I was so pleased with myself and then he said 'oh, I've sold your dive place to Craig, he was going to snorkel because diving was full but we waited for you till 6:15. You can dive tomorrow or you could come snorkeling today.' That was enough for me, I had plans to be in Doubtful Sound the next day and I wasn't going to change my plans again, I said goodbye to the dive man and I felt relieved that Craig had bought my place and I wasn't out of pocket. I agreed to pay 60 dollars for the day hire of the gear I didn't use.