One ring to rule them all...

Today is the day we continue on our way up the west coast.  We've been in Queenstown now for three nights and it's finally time to move on.  I love it here and would love to come back and spend some time here, but I probably won't.  Plus it's kinda expensive around here, so it would probably bankrupt me pretty quickly anyhow.

It'll be good to be on the road again, though.  Master Thor has been anxious to get rollin again.  But, before I move on, let me fill you in on what we've been up to in the Q-town (nobody calls it that).

* * *

Last time on "...and the world keeps turning":

Our heroic duo, tired from the long previous day of hiking and driving the next, rolled up to the Resort Lodge in Queenstown, New Zealand.  They ate an exciting scrumptious burger meal at Fergburger and spent the rest of the afternoon napping and writing.  Not knowing what the future held for them in the ever-moving adventure culture of Queenstown, the pair arose to explore the local nightlife...

So we went out with a few friends that also happened to be in Queenstown at the time.  Not much exceptional to say of the nightlife here, except that one place did have a Queenstown Pirate Rock band playing, the Scurvy Dogs, complete with pirate accent.  So that was interesting.

The next day we met up with my friend Gray from Tech who is also studying in Wellington with me.  Actually we didn't know each other before, so that was kinda funny.  We packed a picnic and Sarah, Gray, and our friend Andy and I all went to the park to eat and play with Andy's roommate's dog Dozer.  It was such a nice day, like from a movie where people are just walking, chilling, playing frisbee in the grass, taking their daughter's out for a casual canoe ride.  

After all that relaxing we decided to take the gondola up to the top of Bob's Peak for some excellent views of the surrounding mountains and lake.  From the top we did some luging down part of the hill, which was way cooler than I thought it would be.  Basically you sit in these very simple go-cart type deals with no motors or anything, just brakes, and you cruise on down the hill.  Fast.

That night was a chill night.  We cooked some pasta and the four of us sat around on the deck of the hostel and chatted.  After that we watched Batman Begins to top it all off.

Day three in Queenstown was quite different.  I really wanted to see some Lord of the Rings filming locations, because there are a ton around Queenstown, and Sarah wanted to go to Wanaka, a nearby lake town with a quaint little dinner cinema place.  We were supposed to drive to Milford Sound that day but opted against it because of driving time and financial practicalities, so Gray was happy when he had someone to hang out with.

So yea we did all of those things:  visited a park where a bunch of the Rohan scenes were filmed in the movie, saw the River Anduin and Pillars of the Kings on the river from the first movie, and drove to Wanaka to for Puzzling World and Cinema Paradiso.  Puzzling World was way cooler than it sounds, with a HUGE maze that took us an hour to do (30 minutes short of the average) and an exhibit of illusions with crazy stuff.  

At the cinema I has Hawaiian pizza and a homemade cookie during the intermission of Welcome to the Sticks, an absolutely hilarious new French movie that none of us had ever heard of before.  And on top of all of this it was a gorgeous day next to the beautiful Lake Wanaka.  To finish it all off we stopped on the side of the highway back to Queenstown to see more stars than I've ever thought of before.  It was insane.  The Milky Way was just BAM right there.

Well my hour of internet is almost up here at the Global Gossip, so I'll leave it there.  And I'm finally up to date!  In real time!  Woo!  So now we're leaving for the glaciers about four hours north of here, so next time I post hopefully I'll have hiked and climbed and slid all over them.  Keep checking back and having fun and doing all those things you guys always do best!

A true stew of art

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.

* * * 

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.

The ancient old man on the wall

Cheers everyone.  I forgot to mention in my previous post… well, many things actually.  I was very rushed because of the confines of the internet café.  Some things of interest that I shain’t elaborate on:

- learning to read road maps

- almost running out of gas coming in to Dunedin

- the difference between actually almost running out of gas and just thinking you’re almost running out of gas

- Tuesday night Dunedin nightlife (or lack thereof) OR weird bartenders

- A very excellent hostel entitled The Manor House

So, getting back to my original point, I forgot to mention that we have a new member of the road trip: Flat Stanley!  Stanley must have stowed away in my road atlas back in Wellington, being that he’s so thin and flat.  We didn’t discover him until pulling out the atlas to begin the road trip in Christchurch, so now he’s a regular part of are adventures.  If yo

u read Sarah’s blog, you already know these things.  If not, you should:

http://sarahabroad09.blogspot.com/

After the internet café we had the BEST PANCAKES EVER.  I mean, they were really quite good.  Blueberry pancake topped with yogurt and fruit topped with another blueberry pancake with the center cut out allowing easy access to the fruitgurt.  Delicious.

Then we got horribly lost.

People with confidence make everything sound so easy, and the lady who gave us directions to the Tunnel Beach Walk was Confidence Man #1, if you know what I mean.  So we cheerily and naively skipped back to the car only to find ourselves amongst roads that change name and directions every 20 meters and aren’t labeled on any maps we had.  Frustrating, to say the least.  Also: hilarious. 

Eventually we pulled through and it was entirely worth it because the Tunnel Beach Walk turned out to be the Tunnel Beach Gorgeousness and Elegant Ferocity of Nature Walk.  It was striking.  A lonely little beach with HUGE cliff walls on all sides and raging waves coming in.  We even found a penguin nursing its young in a little cave.  A choice out of the way cove.  Oh and then, after getting back on top of the cliffs (you had to descend through a tunnel to get to the beach) we went out a this peninsula type deal that was actually the top of a arc of rock jutting over the water.  It was all very exciting.

Getting out of town was amazingly easy, since we were already out of town and the walk started about 100 meters from the scenic highway, which we road for about 40 minutes until it connected with the real highway in Waihola.  We stopped at a tiny gas station for relieving and refreshing, noticed the ancient old man on the wall of the station, then got back on Highway 1 South for Invercargill. 

The road actually splits into another scenic route through the Catlins, which we didn’t have time to take… so we followed the normal highway inland to the town of Gore and the largest trout in New Zealand.  After getting Subway we drove the last 45 minutes south again to our hostel in Invercargill.  The only town more southern than this is the dilapidated tiny Bluff, old whaler’s colony and departing point for the Stewart Island Ferry, which we’ll be getting on tomorrow.

I’m writing this post in Word not knowing when I’ll actually be able to post it, so hopefully it isn’t too outdated.  But it’s bedtime here at the Kackling Kea. 

Wrong turns mean well

Things to consider while on a road trip in New Zealand:


- it's better to veer left into the grass than right into oncoming traffic
- the driver's door is on the other side
- cold food/drinks are in short supply
- $70 a day is normal... unfortunately
- $70 Kiwi is about $38 US
- when all your money is in Kiwi, the previous comment means nothing
- internet is a rare commodity
- the ratio of town driving to farm driving is about 1:1,000,000. About.
- unexpected places are fun

* * *

Sarah and I are in Dunedin now, towards the south end of the South Island. We got into Christchurch two nights ago, ate a delicious meal with Gail (Emily's host mum), stayed the night at her place, and were off again in the morning. We took a very pleasant scenic drive through the hills of the Banks Peninsula to visit Ashley in the little cove town of Akaroa. A quaint seaside community with little shops and cafes, it was a nice place to chill for lunch.





After leaving the bakery and Ashley, we then headed south towards Dunedin. We tried to stop at the Moeraki boulders, but took a wrong turn and ended up here:

All in all not a bad wrong turn. We chilled here for a sec, ate some dark chocolate covered apricot granola bars, and then continued on to the real location of the Moeraki boulders.

Well, anyway, I need to hurry along as I'm in an internet cafe right now and my hour's almost up. I wanted to do a longer post with more pictures, but this will have to do until next time. We made it to Dunedin yesterday evening and are going to explore a bit today before continuing down south the Bluff, the most southern town on the South Island. Hopefully I can post from there!

A kumara is a sweet potato

Back in those times before you or I were alive, there were people who explored.  These people didn't explore like we would explore our backyard.  No.  They were way cooler than us.  First they walked from Africa around the edge of Arabia and India and then eventually made it into the Indonesian islands via a convenient land bridge, on account of there being great amounts of would-be ocean water held up in ice.

Anyhow, when they realized there was no more land to cross, they didn't give up.  Instead, they dug canoes out of trees and began crossing the vast oceans to find more islands.  Over the years they developed a religious connection with the East and continued to island hop towards their promised land.  Well, needless to say, it was these people who discovered the vast majority, if not all, of the Pacific Islands, including New Zealand.  There is even evidence that they made it to Easter Island, and from there the South American mainland.  It was probably at this point that they realized that there were not gods and divine reclamation in the East, but only llamas and corn.

But Chris, how can you be so sure that they made it that far?  Well, I wanted kumara fries from Burger Fuel and guess what?  I could have them because those crazy ol' Polynesian pioneers of the sea brought them back from South America for me to enjoy.  Not only were these guys the smartest, most progressive, and furthest-reaching explorers in all of H.H. (Human History), but they allowed for all of us here in New Zealand to enjoy the delicacies of the sweet potato fry.  Or chip, depending on your country of origin.

chips

Do you want chips with your burger?

But fate has a sense of irony, as Morpheus once shared with the world, and it was not my destiny to eat kumara fries that day.  They were sold out.

* * *

I've settled in to Kaikoura at the Lyell Creek Lodge for the next couple days.  I'll talk about it all later after I've had a proper chance to experience the local colour (too much?).  I've started a map to log our progress.

Cheers.

Day -1 (or 52, depending)

So!  I've decided to start a blog to document my adventures over here in NZ.  Up until this point I've mainly been working on school with a few side trips here or there, so there hasn't been anything too terribly engrossing to write about.  But TOMORROW I leave for a two week road trip across the South Island, so it's a great excuse to start.  If things get dull I'll reach into the past and throw in anecdotes from the two months I've already been here.

Anyways, I'm waking up at 5 45 ish tomorrow to walk to a bus station by 7 10 to catch a 7 15 bus to get on a 8 25 ferry across to the South Island.  And the fun doesn't stop there!  After a 11 25 arrival I'll have about an hour to get on a 12 30 bus from Picton, the ferry disembarking point, to Kaikoura, the Sarah Warner point.  I'll hang out in that pleasant beach side community for a few days before Sarah and I continue along the Path of Golden Dreams (aka hop on another bus) to Christchurch, at which point we rent a car and start the REAL journey of road trip freedom!  Woo!  Just like Calvin and Hobbes would've done!

It really is going to be great and I want you guys to be a part of it. *soft cry*  So don't be afraid to become hopelessly addicted to this blog!  I don't want to give everything away too quickly, so I'll stop there for now and leave you to contemplate a few Kiwi words and phrases I've learned.  

Until next time.

keen 

Would you be keen to play frisbee tomorrow?

heaps

I've got heaps of those.

You can cut off heaps and it does nothing. ( actual sentence from the barber I went to)

lollies

Mmm these lollies are so sugary and sweet!

sweet as...!

Hipster #1: I got some new jeans today.  They're soooo skinny and awesome!

Hipster #2: Sweet as!  I should get some tomorrow!