Dunedin and Christchurch

It's been a wet week but we've managed to see a bit of Dunedin and Christchurch, two cities on the east or Pacific Ocean side of the South Island.
It was a four-hour drive from Manapouri in Fiordland to Dunedin through steady rain. It was pretty in a pastoral way, and the rain did little to detract from its quiet beauty. Alas, the rain continued for the next two and a half days, and the backpackers we had booked in Dunedin quickly earned the bottom slot on our ranking of places in this otherwise outstanding network, so our feeling for Dunedin is somewhat skewed to the negative.


Nonetheless the rain forced us indoors for a change, where we visited out the excellent cycle collection in the Otago Settlers Museum. Louise checked out one grouping of old bikes,
Jeff tried out their "penny-farthing", and we saw two exhibits that amused the historians in us. The first was this print of Dunedin's first bike shop,
which was in fact a sewing machine and bicycle shop! The other was this Peugeot bike that was ridden from one end of NZ to the other -- about 1200 miles -- in 1979. It was similar to the bike Jeff rode from Oregon to the East Coast of the US in 1971 -- about 3,700 miles --
and those two saddle bags and the sleeping bag on the top of the rack are almost identical to what Jeff used on that trip. Aaaargh, if only Jeff has saved all that stuff, it could be in a museum now!

Well, that indoor venture was so rewarding, we did another one that evening and went to the movies, only the second or third time we've done that in the past two years! Given our recent adventures, of course we chose Australia, and look forward more than ever to seeing the city of Darwin Australia next month after viewing its' Hollywood treatment in the movie.


Next day it was off to the Taieri Gorge Railway, a tourist train that takes a 4-hour r/t excursion up the valley of that name. We started at the stunning Dunedin Railway Station, one of the most impressive buildings in NZ,
and caught this shot of one of the stained glass windows in the station. In fifteen minutes the train was out in sheep country, and soon started passing through tunnels and over trestles into the gorge.


The drama of the scenery built slowly but surely, enhanced by the ability of passengers to go out on the open platforms at the end of each car to view and photograph the train and its surroundings.



The interior surroundings were pretty interesting too, as you can see!



Our third and final day started with rain, but by noon it had cleared and we headed up to the north end of town for Baldwin Street, where these three photos were taken.
No, the house isn't built on a slant. Look at it on an angle, with the roof flat to your eyes, and you'll get a sense of how steep this street is.
As signs at the bottom and top of the hill proclaim, Guinness has proclaimed this "the steepest street in the world."


As soon as the weatherman had predicted the break in the rain, we had booked with Elm Wildlife Tours, and our luck held. They picked us up at the backpackers and drove out the Otago Peninsula to this sheep farm. Looks pretty ordinary so far. Once we descended that hill and entered a small shed built like a duck blind, this turned extraordinary. First, there was this little fur seal pup right below us, and some of his buddies playing "tag" in a tide pool close by.


Then there were the Bullers Albatrosses gliding by over the ocean on wingspans that beat Jeff's two meters by 25%.

Next it was back up the hill and down another side of it to Papanui Beach, where we encountered this Yellow-Eyed Penguin. Thanks to the telephoto on our new Canon camera, it looks like we're on top of this fellow but in fact the folks from Elm kept us at a respectful distance.


As we walked along the beach we passed by three sleepy sea lions,

then entered this second blind at the far end of the beach to watch another dozen Yellow-Eyes for a while.
Nearby was one Yellow-Eye and two little Blue Penguins that were molting, but molting penguins are fairly unpretty and hard to see in the hiding places they inhabit for 3-4 weeks of doing nothing but waiting for last year's feathers to fall out and this year's to come in.

So for one final display of wildlife, we headed to a nearby point where Royal Albatrosses nest, the only mainland albatross nesting colony in the world (all others are on small islands).
These are true monarchs with incredible wings that stretch 3 to 3.5 meters across. While we stood there a dozen teen aged albatrosses showed off to each other with aerial acrobatics, hard to capture on film but hopefully archived in our store of memories from this trip.

It's a long drive from Dunedin to Christchurch, so we divided the drive into two days and spent did some puzzling over the Moeraki Boulders, a cluster of a few dozen almost perfectly round stones with odd innards, as you can see.

As an additional reward we got to stay at the Old Bones Backpackers, so-called because bones of a large flightless bird hunted to extinction by the Maori, the moa, were found nearby.
Old Bones quickly made it to "Top Two" status on our Backpacker rankings, along with Global Village in Greymouth, and these two photos will hopefully give you a sense of why we have enjoyed using backpackers so much. Our bedroom was small and spartan but with comfortable twin beds, we had this excellent common room to relax in,
and a clean well-equipped kitchen to work in. We've actually eaten very well and very healthily in NZ, as the supermarkets are usually as good as the better chains in the US for quality and choice.


On our way north we stopped in nearby Oamaru, somewhere between being a town and a city but with NZ's most impressive collection of limestone buildings,
including this atmospheric bakery. On the edge of town was a pier full of cormorants -- thousands of them --
and a nearby Blue Penguin nesting area.
Blues are the smallest penguins in the world and very social. They go out to fish as a group, and come back home as a group. The return is near sundown however, and we were too tired
to come down the night before so we and you will have to rely on this photo of two stuffed Blues in a penguin wildlife exhibit.


Christchurch recently passed Wellington as the second most-populous city in NZ, allegedly overtaking its rival shortly after students arrived for the new school year at Canterbury University. We poked around downtown to see cathedral square and the punters gliding on the Avon River,
then arranged with the friend of a mutual friend to get a tour of the University. Alas, it outgrew its English gothic campus in downtown four decades ago and the new campus looks like a collection of the least memorable buildings from the last few campuses you've seen.
Our friend did take us to a small park of virgin NZ forest and an historic home nearby, however, and it more than made up for the campus's architectural shortcomings.

Day two saw the rain return, but we had booked a train trip across South Island to Greymouth and back, touted as exceptionally scenic, and the touts were right.
The so-called TranzAlpine followed glacial rivers to Arthurs Pass high in the Southern Alps, and the open-air car was crowded for most of the ride there, when a lot of the tourists hopped off, their memory cards filled with the wonderful scenery.

Although a highway follows a similar route, we rarely saw it, and it was a pretty quiet road when we did.

We stayed on to Greymouth and met our British tandem friends Bernard and Lin for lunch, the fourth time we've now met them as we circle the South Island in one direction and they the other.
We'll see them a fifth time on our way further north, tying the record we set with Jim and Anita, the folks we kept running into as we bicycled up the East Coast last year while they boated north on the Intracoastal Waterway.

Our last day in Christchurch saw beautiful weather that sent us to the hills -- the Port Hills to be precise. This is an ancient volcanic crater, open at one end to the ocean. It sits just south of Christchurch, spread out below Louise in the first photo, and looks westward in the second photo over the Canterbury Plains.

The road down to Lyttleton Harbor in the third looks like something out of a Tour de France mountain stage, while the view eastward to the ocean gives you some idea of the size of volcano that must have existed at one time to create this massive landform.


Best of all, it is criss-crossed with hiking trails and heavily used by cyclists as well. Something to look forward to seeing on our next trip to New Zealand, whenever that might be!

We're almost out of special experiences in NZ, but we've saved one of the best for last, a two-day trek in Abel Tasman National Park with the night in between on a floating backpackers. We'll tell you all about it in our next blog entry.

Fiordland

Greetings from Fiordland, an enormous national park that takes up the entire SW corner of the South Island of New Zealand. It's roughly 50 miles wide and 150 miles long, and the coast is deeply indented by deep, deep fiords. You can link to a detailed map here at http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.fiordland.org.nz/images/Fiordland-Map.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.fiordland.org.nz/Travel-Guide/Maps/Fiordland-Region.asp&usg=__f3HNf_7pdLReYTqSn6uFEpMLlXw=&h=591&w=500&sz=32&hl=en&start=1&tbnid=F3URdPAxf42IvM:&tbnh=135&tbnw=114&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dfiordland%2Bmap%26gbv%3D2%26hl%3Den%26sa%3DG.

For all its size, it's not an easy place to access. You can enter from the sea, of course, but there are no ports within 50 miles of the first fiord, so only a handful of cruise ships come in en route from NZ to Australia, and few other sightseeing boats by that route. By land your options are quite limited unless you're into 3- to 5-day backpacking over 3,000' climbs. Louise did that 15 years ago and it was quite a challenge in her 40's, both from the climbing and from the sandflies who wait along the trail to welcome you in numbers equal to bike fans along the Tour de France route.

Needless to say, we chose the easier way of accessing two of the fiords, Milford Sound and Doubtful Sound. They're called "sounds" because the sealers and whalers got here first and were not sophisticated geographers. There are fourteen fiords in all, but only those two can be accessed easily.
We kept disassembling the bike until it was in small enough parts to fit into the trunk of our rental car, then drove 180 km from Queenstown to the small town of Te Anau on
Lake Te Anau. Hard to imagine from this photo, but the lake is itself a freshwater fiord carved so deep by the glaciers that you could hide the Empire State Building on the bottom, standing straight up, and no one would know. We picked up some groceries and drove part-way to Milford Sound, stopping for photos of the peaceful Eglington Valley.

We spent the night at some cabins in a scenic spot called Knob's Flat and got some early-morning pictures the next day of the valley and a few of the tall mountains thereabout.

As we continued, the road climbed up to 3,000' and the tree line, and the scenery became quite alpine indeed. The road reached this enormous rock ampitheater and headed right for the wall, pierced by one small hole, the Homer Tunnel. It was started in the Depression as a work project, interrupted by WWII, and finished in 1953. To keep costs down, it was built single lane, with a traffic light to control the 1.2 km ride through in alternating 15-minute waves. That's our rental car first up, waiting for the green light.

Once through you descend those 3,000' to sea level very quickly, following the Cleddau River. At the bottom was the Milford Wanderer waiting for us,
and this view of the head of Milford Sound and the Cleddau Valley running off to the right. Ahead lay a second view westward to cloud-tipped Mitre Peak, rising 1682m (over 5,000') from sea level itself.

The map shows Milford Sound, which we explored by boat from the end of the road out to the mouth of the Sound, about 14 miles each way.
There were numerous waterfalls of staggering height -- two of these are about 500' each, hard to capture a sense of without a 50-story building nearby to give scale.

The boat had a lot of decks and the weather stayed dry for most though not all of the 2 1/2 hour voyage. Nonetheless, that's considered very good luck for Fiordland, since it rains about 70% of the time, with an annual rainfall of 4 to 7 meters, depending on where you are.

Besides many seabirds, we also saw fur seals basking in two places on opposite sides of the Sound.
We also saw constant examples of a phenomenon we had never heard of before, "tree avalanches." The ground is very rocky with a thin covering of soil.
When trees get large and the ground gets wet enough -- which it obviously does a lot in these parts -- a tree high up may start to topple over. The roots are so shallow and intertwined, however, that the one tree will pull up its neighbors, and soon the whole hillside is tumbling down into the Sound. The close-up scar on one of these pictures was the site of a tree avalanche maybe two or three decades ago, while the distant one with bare rock occurred four weeks before our visit.
It will be covered in mosses and lichens in the coming few years, then with small plants, larger plants, and finally trees by the time our grandchildren are old folks.

The land shoots almost vertically out of the water here, and one crazy lady some years ago actually sky-dived off this cliff and managed to pull the parachute cord in time to tell the tale. We'll close out on Milford Sound with one more photo of this spectacular place.

We drove from Milford Sound back out to civilization in the form of Te Anau, 120 km away, and on to the nearby town of Manapouri, on Manapouri Lake. Yes, another freshwater fiord, even deeper than Lake Te Anau, and fairly moody the next morning when we took the boat across. It rained all day, but fairly lightly for the most part and with occasional pauses, so it was far from unpleasant, though it was fairly cool, high 50's F.
After a 45-minute cruise across the lake, we hopped off the boat and onto a bus for a 22 km drive over 2,100' high Wilmot Pass and the descent to Doubtful Sound. The first glimpse of Doubtful foretold another interesting day.

This is a much bigger fiord than Milford, about 25 miles from the sea to the head of the fiord. As the map shows, it also has numerous arms extending a few miles each from the main channel.
In our three-hour cruise on a faster boat than the day before we reached the mouth of the Sound and explored about half of narrow Crooked Arm, seen here, with many tree avalanche sites visible there as well.

We also passed an island with a "hotel" for fishermen. You're seeing the entire establishment, right there!
They pull in for a break from the weather on the Tasman but this is a National Park, so on the way in and out they can only admire the scenery like the rest of us tourists. And what scenery it is! We also saw another seal hangout,
and had a brief encounter with some bottlenose dolphins. They were not into showing off this particular day, so all we saw were a few fins breaking the surface a hundred meters away.

One of the great things about a visit to Doubtful Sound is the peace and solitude. In Crooked Arm the captain turned off the motor and generator for about 2 minutes, and we enjoyed hearing the waterfalls all around and the birds. Unlike Milford Sound, we also saw virtually no other boats,
until we encountered this school group getting a wet start to some sort of adventure from the hostel that sits at the head of the Sound just for such trips, mainly by middle schoolers.

We explained that only two of the fiords are easily accessible. Milford of course is by the road built mostly in the 1930's. Access to Doubtful Sound would still be by a three-day hike over the Southern Alps but for a hydro scheme that came to fruition in the 1960s. The original plan was to raise Lake Manapouri to enhance the power-generating, but that generated its own force field of environmentalist objection, and the episode is widely seen as the beginning of the environmental movement in New Zealand. An aroused electorate threw out the party in power and the incoming government ordered Lake Manapouri kept at its natural height.

What was done, however, was still monumental. A power station was built 750' underground, and water from Lake Manapouri that used to flow out to the southeast via a river is now channeled down to the generators and out a 10-km tunnel to Doubtful Sound, which sits 600' lower than Lake Manapouri. When you consider that most dams consider a 50' drop rather worthwhile, you can just imagine how much more power they get from this one!

But to build it, they needed material, and the easiest way to get it was over Wilmot Pass. They spent two years just constructing the road up and over the 2,100' pass, and when the hydro project was completed six years later the road was just sitting there, not really needed anymore. The government took it over, and now a handful of tour operators and private individuals willing to barge their cars and boat trailers over Lake Manapouri can access it as well. On the ride back we lucked out to get a seat behind the driver, and it's an exciting drive to be sure.
Back on the shores of Lake Manapouri, the bus drove over to a tunnel entrance, stepped out to get clearance from the hydro authorities, and the gates opened. We next drove down the 2 km-long tunnel, the curving yellow tube in the diagram,
descending those 750' to visit the "machine hall" where the generators crank out their megawatts. Now, this is a very thinly populated part of NZ. Where does this enormous amount of power go?
About 85% is earmarked for an aluminum smelter, largest in the southern hemisphere, that is located at the port of Bluff some 175 km away.

So, thanks to the hydro people for building that road, and to the environmentalists for keeping them in line so that Lake Manapouri is the jewel it is today. We're now headed to the east coast of the South Island to visit Dunedin and Christchurch, among other places. Write to you next from there!