Greetings from Twizel, on the road between Christchurch and Queentown! As I’ve had to pay for internet lately and haven’t had much time, I’ve realized the necessity to start pre-writing blogs on the buses between places so as to keep everyone updated.
Since my last post on my last night in Taupo, I spent the remainder of January in Wellington (okay, so just two full days, an evening, and an early morning). On the way to Wellington sheep finally began to appear in about equal numbers to cows, while my pig and goat count finally began (at three each, plus the addition of one goat yesterday between Picton and Christchurch). While in Wellington I spent my first full day wandering around Te Papa Museum, which was absolutely amazing (and free!). I had my first meat pie and L&P there, and I might just be an L&P convert at the expense of Sprite. However, as I spent much of my day at Te Papa on that Sunday, I was unable to hunt down a camera store and try to fix my still partially broken camera, which turned out to be a bit of a costly error as I found out the next day on my Lord of the Rings guided tour. Yes, I went on a LOTR tour, and was the only person on it (no, not because nobody else is nerdy…just nobody apparently went that day after days of at least ten at a time, according to my guide Sam…I’m also just now aware of the irony of being led around on a LOTR tour by a guy named Sam, and I hope that doesn’t make me Frodo or Bill the Pony). The tour itself was amazing: I got to see/visit the quarry where they filmed Helm’s Deep and parts of Gondor, the park that stood in for the grounds of Isengard, the bit of river where Aragon gets saved by his horse, the bit of river where Faramir imagines seeing Boromir’s funeral boat, the forest where they built Rivendell (and dressed up like Legolas in front of the tree they used for a promotional poster…feel free to mock me for it, but I willingly did it), the forest of the Shire (where my camera decided to die, because overexposing pictures wasn’t annoying enough) that had these awesome wind-knotted pine trees (will Google these and put them up on Facebook to compensate for the lack of actual photos), ran into a drugstore and got a disposable camera after learning that the grocery store near Peter Jackson’s studio doesn’t actually sell disposable cameras, visited the Weta Cave (the only public area of the Weta Studios Workshop) that sadly didn’t have props from Black Sheep (sorry Lauren!), then on through the neighborhood where the cast lived and along the beach where the cast learned to surf. All in all, amazing day, even if I wanted to chuck my camera off a cliff by the end of it.
I also met Jane, from the Lake Country area of England, who was in my room for the three nights I was at the YHA, and is now on her way to Christchurch hopefully, as she currently has a bum foot thanks to a nasty bite she got in Fiji. Thanks to Facebook, I’m going to try and meet up with her for coffee when I’m England.
Yesterday morning I took the ferry across Cook Straight between Wellington and Picton, and joyfully found out that so long as the boat is rocking I don’t get seasick; however, if old Japanese tourist women decide to stand directly between my view of the water and my seat, not so much. The three hour trip allowed me to work out many of the possible issues with my camera though, so there should be lots of photos up on Facebook soon hopefully. I’m still amazed at just how blue the water here can get, whether it be the pure blue in the straight or the turquoise rivers and lakes.
After a brief stop in Picton, I got on the bus headed to Christchurch and met my first large group of North Americans since my cruise on The Fearless. One of them was a guy from “upstate New York,” who then claimed to be from near Buffalo, but as any Buffalo relative knows, he’d be claiming to be from Western New York if he was truly from Buffalo and not somewhere else. However, he got off before I could chide him on his geographical errors, leaving behind Carolyn from Vancouver, who sat behind me yesterday and is in front of me on the bus today. We spent last night at the YHA in Christchurch City Central and are currently en route to the BASE X Queenstown (simply because it’s cheapest). Just before our first scheduled break on the way to Christchurch, the bus drove past a long stretch of shore that is home to a colony of fur seals, the first of which I’ve seen in the wild and not in captivity. Last night I had dinner with Carolyn, who it turns out got a BA in music (piano) and can also play the flute. We quickly began swapping music group stories and I told her about my favorite oboe player ever, Lauren Pollock.
So that sums of everything pretty much until today, which has found me sitting on a bus driving through the South Island and nearly blasting Lord of the Rings music on my headphones. This has resulted in me continually expecting to see a mass of men on horseback to come riding over the hills at any moment, since so much of the South Island looks like Edoras. We also stopped for lunch just next to the famous Church of the Good Shepard, which looks much smaller in person and isn’t at all as isolated as it appears in pictures once you realize there’s a strip mall behind it. There’s still snow on some of the mountains in the Southern Alps, and I really wish that some of the cooler air from up there could appear here in the bus, as it’s quite warm both inside and out and fairly windy.
That’s about all that’s happened today, so I may as well provide details of my plans for the two weeks I have left in NZ before heading over to Australia:
Today (Feb 2)-Feb 5: Queenstown; staying at the BASE hostel, hopefully going up on the gondola, possibly taking a trip out to Milford Sound?
Feb 5-Feb 7: Mt. Cook Village; staying at the YHA Mt. Cook, very likely visiting Mt. Cook National Park (Mt. Cook, by the way, is the highest point in NZ)
Feb 7-Feb 10: Back to Christchurch; not sure where I’ll stay yet, but there’s two YHA hostels and one hostel that used to be a jail, and Stu and Maggie will hopefully be meeting up with me there before I fly back to Auckland on the night of Feb 10
Feb 10 (night)-Feb 15 (early morning): Auckland to stay with Lauren and Arron, finding out if there’s any way to do a quick trip out to the Coromandel Peninsula, if only so I can get a picture with a sign and the “Just One” shirt (which is now falling apart and I have no clue how to get the edges of the letters to stick back on!)
Well, that’s the news from the South Island, and I’ll try and get in at least one more post before Sydney!
Love to you all,
Kayla
No comments:
Post a Comment