South Island Recap…

I'm finally on my way out of New Zealand! Why, "finally?" Well because I feel like the way we organized our tour was a bit over zealous and I'm ready to move onto the next adventure. I guess that's one of the luxuries of a trip like this. As soon as you feel like you've been in one place too long or spent enough time in one place you're able to just move on. We bumped into a fellow backpacker along the way and she mentioned the only luxury you have from backpacking is the luxury of time. I thought that was pretty truthful.

Recap of what we did in the south island:

Marlborough Region - we were able to squeeze in a quick stop to the Cloudy Bay vineyard while we were at the top of the north island. We had to make our way down to the west coast to do a glacier hike but thankfully I was able to do a little wine tasting. This is definitely something foreign to Paul but something that feels more at "home" for me since I moved to Northern California. It was really strange to return to the northern vineyards of the south island after seven years of life between visits. When I was last here my idea of a good bottle of wine came from the discount racks at the local grocery store where the soon to be expired box wines had been taken out of the box and written in sharpie on the bladder what measly payment you had to shell out to get the worst hang over of your life. This is how I began my luxurious encounters with the fruit of the vine down under. I have vivid memories of our NZ Crew walking down to Pack n'Save to scour the discount racks. As a hilarious side note, today Paul and I had to walk to a Countdown grocery store to fill up on a few needed toiletries and while there I stumbled upon this discount rack. HILARIOUS to see that they're doing the same thing still… .50 individual cans of VB, Canterbury Draught and whatever else was soon to be expired. Joe, Paul and I used to fill up a shopping cart with these and completely thought we had the best deal going in town! AH to be 19 again.

Forgive me if I reminisce about being nineteen a bit here b/c I just revisited a country where I spent some of the best months of my college career. Once we hit the south island our van was full of, "remember when Joe did this… remember when you wore that trash-bag and tried to slip n'slide on the grass or remember PuPu springs!!!" Yup, after our disaster of a north island trip our spirits were lifted by simply knowing our way around the south island (that was a huge relief as it gets tiring constantly trying to figure out where you are and where you should be going).

I digress. So we headed down to the pancake rocks, this was a bit uneventful and we treated this stop like Japanese tourists. I.e. we parked, got out of the car, walked the marked trail out to the rocks, took some photos and then hopped back in the car to get down to the glaciers. I was glad to see them as Andrew (other Uni friend) and Paul raved about then from their trans-alpine train ride while I was procrastinating at the library back at Uni on my history of "music from the renaissance to today" project. Yeah, let me tell you how much fun that was when you were getting texts from your best friend about how COOL the west coast is!

So the pancake rocks are pretty sweet! They literally look like rocks shaped like pancakes from large all the way up to silver-dollar size (pita! he he). They are constantly being eroded by the sea and have these sick blow-holes that make loud booms when the waves come through.

After the stop in Greymouth to see our favorite Brewery! MONTEITHS (I know my old NZ crew will be jealous). The brewery tour was a bust as the guy leading it has the same amount of personality as the pancake rocks. Never-the-less the final stop was in the pub and we at least go tour moneys worth with beer. My new favorite is Monteiths Black which is a stout but tastes like Guinness mixed with a chocolate chip cookie! We were also able to pour own own schooner (yup not a pint but a MINI-pint). I was pretty horrible at it and ended up with tons of foam but they let me practice! SWEET! By the end of nearly a dozen pours I was an expert!

We trudged south down to the Franz-Joseph Glacier area immediately as we thought the weather was good. Little did we know it was going to start raining JUST as we got there. The glacier walk was really impressive. It was one of the "splurges" of our NZ adventure. Lets just say I had never been on a glacier before and didn't quite know what to expect. I had seen pictures of friends on glaciers from our last NZ trip and had heard from Paul about his glacier experience up in Alaska. Once I stepped foot on the ice I finally figured out what all the fuss was about. It was this surreal experience where you're having this cool adventure but you find yourself looking around and realizing how massive this planet is. I'd be hiking with my crampons on and look up to see where the glacier used to be back in the early 1900's and think to myself, "if that was in the early 1900's, what did this thing look like 500 or 1000 years ago!?" The answer is MASSIVE!!! The thing was massive as it stands today but seeing how it carved the mountains straight out of the ground was seriously impressive. I guess New Zealand is known for those types of moments. Or maybe I should say I recall having those moments in the past in New Zealand. I call them "Jurassic park" moments. Its as if a pterodactyl could swoop down at any moment and you'd have to run for your life.

So needless to say I enjoyed myself on the Fox Glacier. That afternoon we piled ourselves back into the Jucy Cruza and headed east to Lake Wanaka.

This post is WAY overdue so most of you have probably already seen my pictures on Facebook from my hike up Mt. Roy. Pretty impressive, eh?! Well let me tell you the story of that hike. Paul and I rolled into Wanaka that night and swung by the "iSite."

Side note: how awesome is it that in every major city in NZ/AUS there are iSites that are FREE with TONS of information about what to do in the local area. Where are these in the US!? Maybe I don't look for them b/c I'm a tourist but it would be really helpful and set a better tone for people visiting our cities!

After figuring out where we'd be crashing that night we decided to do what we do best in our Jucy Cruza, crash a YHA hostel and use there facilities for free. I came up with this idea back on the north island. The YHAs are such big hostels that you can walk into any of them and just use whatever you want without anyone having any idea if you're staying there or not? Genius, right? So we go in an use there massive kitchens, refrigerators, Internet, showers, laundry and anything else we could get our hands on. After just shy of two weeks in a mini-van anything in a YHA feels like a luxury!

We camped that night in this awesome site next to a river (pic on FB). The river had a rope swing AND a trampoline that jumped right into the river. Too bad the river was glacier run off water and it was rainy and cold or I'd have stayed a lifetime! The one thing I wanted to do in Wanaka was go for an epic hike to see the lakes from a higher view. We heard from some of the YHA staff (he he) about Mt. Roy. Everyone seemed to say it was a "good hike" and to expect between 3-4 hours to get to the top and about 2-3 to get back down. We agreed this would be a good opportunity to stretch our legs and set out early the next morning. Of course the hike starts with walking over private land through sheep grazing territory so we had the opportunity to hang with some "wild-life." What the YHA folks didn't exactly spell out for us is that the hike is straight up hill. Paul compared the hike to hiking a 14'er in Colorado and I honestly don't have anything to compare it to… it was seriously over a forty-five degree angle the entire time. At about the two hour point of the hike my quads had burnt out and I had to massage them into keeping a forward momentum. It was a good test for my rehabilitated knee and thankfully I made it up and down without any issues. I was completely sore at the end of the hike and had developed some major blisters. We met this awesome girl Becca on our way up who's going to be starting a masters program in San Francisco next year and ended up hiking with her the whole way up and back. She's been tramping all around New Zealand and really put both of us to shame on this hike. So Wanaka was a great success and we packed up to move onward to Mt. Cook.

Mt. Cook is the tallest mountain peak in all of Australiasia. That's all of Australia + Asia. Driving up toward our camp site at the base of it was completely stunning. Its covered in snow in the middle of their summer and has huge winds and clouds pouring over it. Paul had been really looking forward to seeing Mt. Cook since we studied at uni. Unfortunately the next morning when we were going to do a little walk to get a better view it started raining and turned REALLY cold. So we headed on to Lake Tekapo and back up to Christchurch.

This is when the trip got a bit shaky for me. I am not 100% sure where I ran afoul but I drank/ate something bad. I ate something so bad that it gave me Bali-Belly or Indian-Belly. Any traveler who has had this can attest to how completely awful it feels but then add in that you're stuck in a mini-van and have to search for public restrooms! It was a bit uncomfortable but Paul was a trooper. He parked me in the middle of the botanical gardens in Christchurch and let me sleep it off for an entire day while he went back to explore our old city.

The following day after returning the Jucy to the airport we caught a shuttle back to central Christchurch and checked into the YHA down near the arts center. This was a great launching point for us to get around the entire city. We set out to see all of our old stomping grounds from uni at University of Canterbury. One thing that really struck me from this trip back to Christchurch was how small the city was. At the time I studied abroad I had very little large city experience. I had grown up in a suburb of Chicago but my experience with the city was limited to field trips as a kid downtown. I went to college in Indianapolis, which to my college friends chagrin, doesn't count as a big city. Yup, not matter where you're from in Indiana folks! So when I got to Christchurch in college it seemed a bit bigger, in fact everything seemed a lot bigger. It must have been that I was in a strange place really far away from home and didn't have any perspective. Now, after living in Boston and San Francisco it seems ity-bity.

So we hit up Dimitri's greek slouvaki's (epic!), Mickey Finns Irish Pub, back to the University of Canterbury, Ilam Flats, The Holy Grail Sports Bar and just about everything else I wanted to see. We didn't get back out to New Brighton beach where we learned to surf but it was chilly so we didn't want to get in the water anyway. I am really thankful for that time in my life. Not only did it give me my first taste of the "travel bug" but it introduced me to a chain of events that has formed the basis for many of my closest connections as a young adult. I met my friend Joe in New Zealand. Joe introduced me to Ariana and Betsy in Boston after I graduated from Butler. After I moved from Boston to San Francisco I moved in with Ariana. Joe, Betsy and Ariana are some of my closest friends and I'm so thankful to have them in my life. This wouldn't have happened if I didn't take that one step toward a study abroad experience.

So the New Zealand chapter came to an end. If I were to do it all over again I'd just fly into Christchurch and do a circle of the south island again but I'm glad to have seen the north island. I'd like to come back and spend more time in the south island. I didn't get to do enough hiking (seriously this island is crisscrossed with hiking tracks) and I"d like to do more wine tasting.