New Zealand Part 3!

Clarification: We did get the bag back that we lost when we flew in the Christchurch NZ. I forgot to mention that. We picked it up the in the airport the next day so that's why the $63 NZ was "bonus!"

We've been so bad at staying on top of this blog that I don't even have an idea what dates we were where at this point.... We'll try to be better in the future. We were staying at a campground for almost one and a half months so we had no internet. Anyways, back to NZ!

We jumped in the car to head to the West Coast and see the glaciers. The views are supposed to be spectacular on the entire stretch of road up the west coast, however as we realized in New Zealand the views are spectacular everywhere, you just need to weather. Since the west coast gets truly obscene amounts of rainfall (5-15m) we didn't really get to see much since it was completely clouded over and raining our whole way into Fox Glacier. We spent a day in the Fox Glacier area, had a nice dinner at a restaurant, and wandered up to see the glacier. It was strange to see a glacier in a temperate rain forest! We, of course, ignored all warning signs and wandered out in front of the glacier. We were smarter than most of the tourists though and stayed away from the face where it could collapse. There are a lot of stupid people that really feel the need to touch the unstable constantly crumbling bottom face of the glacier.

I wanted to touch the glacier, but went about it in a much smarter fashion... I found the trail that the tour guides take customers up to walk on the glacier! We headed up that past many signs about how it was illegal for us to proceed, and passed a few tour groups with guides who really didn't care about the fact we were on the trail except to stay out of the way as their large groups passed, which we did. They claimed the trail was private property, although we were in a national park. Weird... Once we reached the where the trail descended to the glacier, I ran straight out on it up the stairs that were conveniently chopped into it. Good thing those guides made it accessible to me in my running shoes! We snapped a few pictures of me on the glacier (Nath was too scared to go out on it for some reason) and then headed back down to town. It was my first time on an real glacier (as far as I know)!

The next day saw us heading back south to the trailhead of the Copeland Track. 18km of uphill hiking leads to a beautiful alpine meadow in the mountains, and some hot springs! However, the entire trail, until the last few hundred meters, is completely enclosed in trees and ferns and you don't get more than one or two nice views during the entire hike. As a result, we didn't pull out the camera much at all and we blitzed the trail passing many people despite having left very late, and had plenty of time to hop in the hot springs. Unfortunately, the hot springs aren't nearly as cool as they sounded. They are barely past knee deep, full of silty mud that is easily stirred up, and sand flies like to chow down on any exposed skin. We enjoyed it for about 30 or so minutes, but as soon as the sand flies really figured out where we were as the sun headed down, we were out and back in the hut. Bad weather was predicted, and sure enough came in and pounded us the entire way out. I learned that if you're hiking in NZ, you WILL get wet! There were warnings about how if it rains too hard there are two impassible rivers. We made it past the first before it swelled, but the 2nd river was going pretty good. Since our shoes were already soaked, and the car was only 200m past the river, there was no way I was going to hike the extra 1 hour or more to the flood bridge. I just looked at Nath and said, "grab my elbows" and did the same to her. We quickly barged through the icy river in about 2 minutes, and it was actually pretty fun! Once back at the car, we cranked the heater on and tried to dry out a little.

The next day was Franz Josef Glacier. We didn't spend too much time there, but it was enough for me to lose my camera which had almost all the NZ pictures ranging from Castle Hill, to the Routeburn Track, to the glaciers and hot springs. True bummer. Having walked on Fox Glacier, we didn't even do the slog all the way up to the glacier. We did some short hikes from which you could get great views, and then headed out for warmer dryer climate up on the northern part of the south island. Our next destination was Westport.

Westport was a rather nice climbing area. It was a sea cliff with huge swells rolling in constantly. Luckily we were there at low tide or I'm sure we would have been soaked on at least one of the climbs. It traversed out to a where a massive boulder is resting against the cliff, and as the swells rolled in they would explode in a massive spray. The routes there were interesting feature granite trad climbing. It was really enjoyable climbing, mostly due to the setting. I played on a few easy routes, then did one harder route in the 22-23 range. Nath just followed that day since she hadn't been leading gear routes for a while. It was fun because you could see pods of dolphins off in the ocean, and seals playing in the water from the top of the cliff. There were supposed to be penguins there, but unfortunately we didn't see any, despite it being one of Nathalie's goals while on our trip. Luckily there would be more opportunities...

When we were done with Westport, we headed to Takaka where the weather, camping, and climbing is all great! The sun was definitely appreciated, although since fall was getting on it still wasn't hot enough to swim for long in the beautiful swimming hole. The camping is at Hang Dogger Camp. Some guy created a camp ground less than a kilometer from the climbing area at Takaka. The camping area is hippie central, with people from all over the world there to just hang out and climb. There is a huge fire pit, refridgerators, a shower, it's only $5/night, and everyone was friendly (although we decided they were a little too hippie for us). The climbing area, Paynes Ford, is on shist, like in Wanaka, but the climbs were a little more varied and interesting. It consists of a cliff down near the river that stretched for a couple kilometers and had predominantly bolted sport climbing. Both of us had fun watching our strength return as we climbed there for 4 days with one rest day in the middle. We had both lost strength in NZ from where we were at when we left Thailand. As I got stronger, I started onsighting up to 24 again (5.12a) and managed many grade 25 climbs on the 2nd try. One of them "require" a stick clip, which I didn't have, but I managed to climb it anyways. Quite scary doing 5.12a moves about 15' off the deck with nothing clipped! I took a few nice whips, since some of the routes were a little runout, but it was all good fun! Nath worked on her leading a little more and was redpointing 22 by the time we left.

On the last day of the climbing I managed to send a spectacular route called Mea Culpa graded 27 (5.12d) on my third try at the end of the day. It was a great route with the tiniest of holds up a slightly overhung face. Many of the hardest moves were using microscopic sidepulls, perfect footwork, and dynamic moves. I was destroyed by the time I got to the top, but I did it! It was a perfect last climb in NZ!

Between the 4 days of climbing, we took a rest day up at Abel Tasman National Park and hiked about 16km of the Abel Tasman Great Walk. Its a beautiful hike following the coast line and wandering up through hills linking beautiful sandy beaches and picturesque bays. We had to time the hike properly since part of the hike is only passable at low tide. The water recedes for kilometers out of a bay leaving a muddy sandy shell filled crossing. The tide at Abel Tasman rises and falls 6m (20ft)!!! We hiked to our pickup point (we had arranged a "water taxi" since it was cheap and we could see more without backtracking) and then went for a quick swim in the ocean before boating back to the car.

The day after we finished climbing we moved on to more touristy things. We headed north and saw the world's clearest water and a massive spring that rises out of the earth creating a beautiful river, saw Farewell Spit, the northern most peninsula of the south island of NZ where there was an amazing number of birds. Just west of where we saw Farewell Spit is Whareriki (I probably misspelled that) Beach. It's a beautiful beach with sand dunes, beautiful rocks, and seals! I was most interested in the sand dunes where I played around jumping off the top and eventually doing back flips!

Once we were done playing in the sand, we jumped in the car and headed to Mussel Inn. It's an amazingly quaint little restaurant with reasonable priced really good food, and amazing beer! The seating was really nice, and they even had an enormous tire swing if you felt so inclined. Apparently they didn't like cell phones, since there was a beam there will many different cell phones nailed to it! I was amused. They have local bands (we missed this) and it was just a nice place to be. Meg had recommended it to me with the line "You haven't been to New Zealand if you haven't been to Mussel Inn."

After seeing the far northern tip of the island, we headed off east to Nelson and the Marlboro area where there is more excellent wine tasting and beaches! We picked up our favorite Pinot Gris we could find, and the next day found us day hiking out the Queen Charlotte Track for an hour or two til we found a nice beach we could picnic on. We cooled the wine in a creek, ate, and played chess. It was a great day...

Next up was Nelson. We headed into the city with a huge list of things to do, like sell books, tent, etc, some of which we got done and some of which we didn't. A lot of stuff was closed, since it was Easter! We had no idea... We ended up having to take a bunch of stuff all the way to Melbourne to sell. If we had more time, I definitely would have done a bone carving class, but we didn't so we moved on.

The rest of our time in NZ (a day or two?) was pretty uneventful. There was some more bad weather, some camping, some driving around finding out that stuff was closed, and eventually we found ourselves back in Christchurch. In Christchurch, the funniest thing that happened was while we were packing our bags to go to Australia. I was tossing stuff out of the car onto a lawn in a park so we could pack, and turned around and SMACK! The hatchback won against my forehead. I was bleeding like mad and had to get "steri strips" to hold the wound closed. They're great for first aid, by the way. I didn't need any stitches since I had those things! We finished packing, and stayed our last night in NZ in the airport since our flight to Melbourne was so early in the morning.

In the end, we put 4000km on the car, and learned a lot about ourselves and travelling from New Zealand. If you want to do NZ, do it on a bigger budget or stay in one spot and don't expect to see it all. It's really hard to travel from a car when you don't have the $70-$90/night for hostels. New Zealand is REALLY good at sucking money out of touists to the point of taking away from the experience. Hiking for the sake of hiking isn't fun anymore after rock climbing. But, most importantly we learned there are free showers in the Christchurch airport. :)

Next stop, Down Under!