Hello from Queenstown! Today is Friday, April 17 and Sarah and I are chillin out at our current hostel of residence, the Resort Lodge. Because we never know exactly when we’ll have internet, I have started writing my blog entries in Word as events happen and then post them when I get the chance. As such, the post below this one was put up only a few hours before I’m writing now, which is a couple days after I wrote it. And this post will probably be put up on Saturday. Which is tomorrow. Which is today, in respects to when it’s online and being read. Which is actually yesterday, considering that most people reading this are in the States and many hours behind me. Confusing, I know.
But why should you care about all this nonsense? Well, you shouldn’t really. All I really want you to know is that, at the time of the actual posting to the World Wide Web, the information may be a couple days old and I could be halfway across the country by then.
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Like I said, we’re in Queenstown. We got in around noon today and we’ll be staying here for two nights. It’ll be nice to be in one place for a bit before taking off on the road again for the second week. Not much has happened here yet (except we ate incredibly succulent burgers at Fergburger…mmm…), so let’s take a step back and talk about what has transpired since I left you aching for more in Invercargill.
We woke up at the Kackling Kea at 7:15 and made the half hour drive to Bluff where, as I mentioned before, the ferry departs from. It was an hour crossing the Fovouex Straight to Stewart Island and the tiny town of Oban (colloquially known as Halfmoon Bay [half the places in NZ sound like they’re from Zelda or Lord of the Rings]). We checked into a very nice backpackers hostel called Stewart Island Backpackers and then went to the general store (yep) to get some lunch.
Being the smallest and most southern of the three main islands, there really is not much on Stewart Island; a handful of people, a few intersecting streets, and more kilometers of tramping tracks than you can comfortably cover in a month. All three of those things may be slight exaggerations but, considering the only restaurant open at 8:30 that night was the one attached to the only motel, it isn’t far from the truth. But I’m getting ahead of myself. We came to Stewart Island, as everyone does, for the nature walks and crazy scenery, so we struck off a little after midday for Fern Gully and Ryan’s Track.
Yes, there is a real place called Fern Gully and, yes, it is as gorgeous as it is in the movie. And much less cartoon inspired. It was awesome. It had just rained a bit so everything was green and damp and beautified. Also, this was my first try of unicycling in New Zealand, but it proved to be a bit too muddy most of the time, plus I just kind of wanted to look at the scenery. I did get some great stretches of riding in though and managed to make myself and my unicycle (Christened “Tahi” after the one-legged kiwi bird I visited at the zoo) wonderfully muddy. Like they always say, “a dirty unicycle is a happy unicycle.” And Tahi was ecstatic.
But the mud was mainly from the second walk, Ryan’s Track, which clocked in at around three hours, a good three times as long a the Fern Gully tramp. It ran along the cliffs hugging the coastline and kept me off of my unicycle most of the time with its massive mud traps and slippery wooden steps winding up and down the hills.
Favorite moment of the afternoon goes to Sarah Warner and The Slip-n’-Slide Mountain Mud Splash. We had come across our gamillionth mud pit and I went left around into some bushes while Sarah went right, on top of some logs. I was inching along, trying to avoid taking a spill, when Sarah decided she had just had enough of standing up. She attempted to step onto the next log, ran out of braches to hold on to, stumbled, slipped, and fell amongst a pile of felled trees and mud. After assessing that she wasn’t hurt (and was in fact laughing hysterically) I did what any good documenter of travels would do and whipped out my camera. I’ll post the video some time.
But I did of course help her up and the rest of the trek was rather uneventful, except for a few spectacular views of Golden Bay and the outer islands. We got back to the hostel around 5, showered and took care of laundry. For dinner, as I jumped to before, we went to the Sea Side Motel. I ordered rice and blackened salmon but received couscous and _____ salmon, a difference I actually didn’t fully realize until I had almost eaten everything on my plate. It was still good and ended up being cheaper anyway, so not a bad mistake, as far as mistakes go.
We were pooped that night so we watched two episodes of Seinfeld on my laptop (I feel it is my duty to spread the Gospel of Seinfeld wherever the four winds take me) and went to sleep.
The next morning was another early riser with a 7 am wake up call and an 8 am ferry ride back to the South Island and our car.
Hold up everyone- I just realized that I never mentioned our noble steed’s glorious name. He is…eh hrmm… the one, the only…
Master Thor!
Inspired my our friend the black belt in Taekwondo and Master Thor’s rugged, experienced personality (read: dents, scrapes, and plaster). Ok. I can proceed now.
We got back into Master Thor and drove the three-ish hours to Queenstown, where we now lay typing and napping. I’ll let you decide who is doing what. I’ll try to be better about posting with relevance and also putting up more pictures to compliment the stories. Until then, just keep doing what you’ve always done- reading and reading and rereading the blog posts I already have up. Thought you guys might like to know I just looked up five seconds ago and noticed a skydiver gliding past my window a couple of hundred meters away. You don’t see that everyday. They don’t call Queenstown the adventure capital of the world for nothing, I guess.
This was another extremely long post, and my apologies for that. I’ll try to keep up thus keeping them shorter. Almost dinner time now, on this inspiring (?) Friday night. Good evening to you all, and Godspeed.
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