The Spacetravel then took us south onto Christchurch, the most English of all the New Zealand towns, and it certainly was. Oxford and Cambridge terrace with a lovely river running through the middle of them reminded us of home and especially Oxford. We decided against the touristy punting though and opted for a kayak instead, Nige doing most of the work against a very strong current which thankfully pushed us home to a beer very easily!
The Gorgeous lake Tekapo
Tekapo is known for being the sunniest place in NZ (oddly lots of places seem to have this claim)….. well it wasn’t, after a 300m ascent hike to the observatory look out the clouds were rolling in to make sure our lovely view was in fact a complete white out of clouds – nice. So leaving crappy views behind we began our decent when finally the sun began to shine and the views were worth the wait. We then began the most amazing drive alongside lake Pukaki back to the coast. A short detour later to Twizel gave Nige his Lord of the Rings fix to see the location of the largest battle scene in the film – well if like me you haven’t seen it, its pretty hard to imagine on the large expanse of nothingness.
The views we climbed the hill for...
The end of the drive lead us to Oamaru, a place that I had unashamedly been soooooo excited to visit, not for the town (or lack of good fish and chips that we had desperately been searching), but for my favourite animal, the Penguin.
Yellow Eyed Penguins are one of the rarest Penguins only found in a few places in NZ, and in a blink and you will miss them moment, we managed to spot 6 (although one may have just been a rock) Amazing! Not fulfilled though, we went on the search for the blue eyed penguins. They only come out at night time so settled in our man made shelter with a load of Japanese tourists (not quite the wild this time) we waited for the Penguins to come home. An hour later and 63, foot high Penguins, battling against stormy seas and slippery steep rocks were back safe and sound and we had the biggest smiles on our faces.
PENGUINS!!!!
Brilliant sign.....
Oamaru’s other gem has to be the Whitestone cheese factory, never to early to eat cheese, we set off at 10am on our cheese tasting and factory tour – some bloody fantastic cheeses, I think we even have a contender for next years cheese competition!
After leaving what so far has been the last of our ‘Top 10 Butlins style campsites’ we drove through the tiny village of Hampden to be faced with all East Anglian street names, Norwich st, Ipswich St (bizarrely Ipswich was nicer!), Colchester, Cambridge and so on….. clearly an East Anglian settled here first.
Naaaaaaaaaarwich
After agreeing that Norwich was indeed better than Ipswich (the football pitch being the exception of course…) we hit the coast to see the Moerake Boulders – which star in many cool photographs of NZ. No-one really knows how they were formed – but probably some volcanic wizardry combined with some Maori elaboration.
Arty Boulders
Next stop was Dunedin and the Otago Peninsula for a couple of days, to visit NZ’s one and only castle which though impressive, didn’t have a patch on any English Castle. What was impressive here was the wildlife. Visiting Sandfly Bay on the search of more Penguins found us faced with numerous Sealions all lazing on the beach. These things are massive and when they start fighting with eachother and you are a matter of metres away its truly amazing, damn them though they definitely scared the Penguins away!
Nige and his Castle.....
Big beasts
Heading further West we made our way towards Te Anau, a pretty non-descript place however it was the gateway to Milford Sound. Now… not sure if it has been mentioned before, however Nige has bought a fishing rod and is desperate to catch a fish, stopping at most lakes and praying for the bite to bring home dinner…….Well it finally happened, one trout later and it was on our dinner plates as our first free meal – yum! (still waiting for another one though).
Fishy... sorry on the wonk as i cant turn it round....
Raining in milford sound
Oh the wonderful view of doom.....
After being drenched at Milford Sound we headed north to Queenstown (the party skiing capital of NZ). I had visited Queenstown 7 years ago and the change was amazing, the number of hotels and tourists had pretty much doubled, and I think its safe to say that Nige and I were probably about 10 years older than the rest of the population. However somethings had remained the same, Winnie’s, the famous pizza restaurant and bar still had the same pizza’s on the menu, which of course we had to sample!
There was a downer in Queenstown though, it rained and rained like i have never known….seriously torrential for 4 days, we were wet, the van was wet and smelt of wet dogs, it was miserable. Good job were were in a town of plenty of pubs to drown our sorrows and eat a lot of food!
Brilliant....
Due to the rubbish weather we decided against doing any skiing at all as it would have been really bad, however the Winter Games were being held at the time so a quick trip up the mountain for the finals of the Big Air and the closing ceremony, resulted in seeing one jump, the rain starting (yes even up the mountain) and everything being cancelled…. it was time to leave Queenstown!
