Danni travels on

I travel on and now I really do write about it

Last post: Omarama - Tekapo - Christchurch - Kaikura - Akaroa

After leaving Dunedin we had a stop at the coast at Shag Point for more penguins and sea lions. We just can’t get enough!
After having lunch of a self-made couscous salad next to some really cute sea lions hanging out at a small natural harbor we continued to the actual shag point (a shag is a cormorant), a rock outside in the sea with a lot of shags hanging around there when we practically stumbled over 2 seals who hid in the grass and under a small cliff. So cute! But of course we respected them, holding our distance but taking a few pictures. Then further on to the penguins, but there was just one tiny one and we could only see it through our camera tele-lenses. On we went, another two hours something towards the mountains again towards Omarama. We had to reach our hostel until 8pm and we hardly made it, stopping only at a bit useless Maori drawing rock (hundreds of stupid youths had already drawn over it).
Finally we reached the backpackers/motel at Omarama and after the sun shining here up in the mountains all day the temperature now dropped pretty quickly. All rooms here were in separate small buildings which meant that if we wanted to visit the bathroom in the middle of the night we had to go across the entire complex and it was very chilly, so no thank you. In the morning I even discovered a thick ice layer on our car. Has it gone from summer to winter in one single night?
Luckily, when the sun rose it melted the ice away and it was quite hot again. After talking to two hitch hikers who had been working in exactly the same hostel that Tina is going to work after I have left, we drove onwards taking a detour to the Clay Cliffs near town. The gravel road leading towards it was a mess and it took a long while to reach the washed out clay rocks, which had formed interesting peaks over time. We walked along them, me taking a break at some point while Tina headed on up the hill for a bit when there was a 4x4 coming near and exactly next to me noticing that it could not go further. The driver was obviously not experienced, the road was very tiny and full of enormous holes, but he had to go through it anyway…before getting stuck right next to me. So he drove backwards the whole way to the car park, which meant we were not able to walk by until then. Aaaah, men at the wheel, a nuisance… ;-)
We had a snack in the sun at Twizel’s Musterer’s Hut, with very good French fries (honestly, you cannot rely on getting good fries everywhere!) and I had a meat roll, which always tastes like a mixture of meat. There is a definite whiff of lamb in it and all is rolled in a sort of pie dough. Very tasty! After some time we came across a stunningly blue lake with a mountain range in the far back of the it. It was Lake Pukaka and we had never seen anything like it. No waves, crystal clear water and sooo blue. We drove down the Eastern shore on a gravel road until we got a good view of Mount Cook and its surrounding mountains in the far back of the lake. It would have been great to jump into the lake and take a swim but we found it still a little bit too cold even when the sun had returned. After enjoying some time on the lake shore we returned on the road and continued towards Lake Tekapo. The only free backpackers was in a motel called “Lakeview”. No rooms in its backpacker part had any windows (except on some ceilings) but for the rest it was alright.
The next morning after check-out we took a look at the Mt. John observatory that was situated on a nearby round-shaped mountain that looked more like a hill from afar. But when we were on top we had a stunning view all around onto Lake Tekapo, small Lake Alexandrina and the mountains all around us, snow covered mountains and rolling grassy hills. All trees and the tiny cars riding around the mountain resembled model train figures. Wow! Being back in town we visited an old church which had been recommended to us. We were not allowed in because there was an Asian wedding going on, so of course we stayed to get a glimpse of the bride. After this we drove on to Geraldine to Rawhiti Hostel. It was fantastic, almost no people there, a lot of space and a cozy atmosphere. There were a lot of weirdos though, especially an idiotic Canadian who added a stupid comment to everything that was going on and a Kiwi grandma of 54 who looked 74 and was talking nonsense all the time. But of course there were normal people as well. The German girl from our room was very nice to talk to. When we arrived the sun was shining and so we spent the afternoon in the garden. I was finally sewing some of my clothes, Tina was writing her diary and I continued with writing a bit of my blog.
In the evening we went to the local cinema in a very old building to see “The Kingsmen. We had pre-booked an old couch instead of a normal seat. The film was cool and very funny indeed. I would have also liked to watch its action scenes again in slow motion to count the amount of deaths. There were exaggeratingly many, but that was part of the plot. After all it is a spy movie.
The next day we continued to Christchurch, our last permanent stop. We had booked three nights in “The Old Countryhouse”, a very cozy hostel. Except cooking dinner we didn’t do much that rainy day and tried to pre-pack our bags, spent time on the free internet (it is really hard to come by any of that) and made plans for the next two days. The next morning we first went to a pharmacy to get some anti-nausea-pills, because we had very cool plans for today: a swimming tour with dolphins in Kaikura. As we did not want to risk any seasickness we’d rather buy the pills. Unfortunately this and the fact that we were off our city center roadmap (and mind you, Christchurch is very big) we got lost a bit. None of the signs actually send us to a highway but to different suburbs which we didn’t know. So there is one thing, New Zealand, to improve: your way of signaling where people need to go, even people who might NOT know their way around without signs. It could all be way better! Well anyway, we got lost of track and time, which resulted in us being in a very big hurry, even being threatened that we might not make it to Kaikura to catch our boat at all.
As we had booked the tour for 170$ this would have been quite a pity. But as the trip was postponed a tiny little bit and we just arrived in time, had a gear fit on us which consisted of fins, a snorkel set (even with my eye condition), a wetsuit and a hood for the head and off we went to the tiny boat. There were 14 swimmers in total and a family who just wanted to watch the dolphins from the boat. And we were sooooo lucky. When we reached our destination there was a pod of at least 60-100 dusky dolphins swimming about. And we had 4-5 go’s to swim with them.
Some of them even swam 20 cm under my body or next to me, so near you could almost touch them, but I wouldn’t try as I was so overwhelmed and I could not quite believe that at one time there were 5 dolphins swimming underneath me at the same time. Woooow! They were very playful and some of them propelled themselves into the air and splashing back into the water.
To attract them we were told to make funny noises, so I kind of made a very high-pitched mock-dolphin noise, and sometimes, as this was very exhausting business and I lost a lot of air, a stranded whale-sound. When the lot of them were gone too far our boat would collect us and drove back around to them so we could have another go. It was soooo cool!
I actually skipped the last round because I was very exhausted and I could feel a flu creeping up on me. Even when the wetsuit was designed to keep you reasonably warm it was still quite chilly in the water and all this noise-making and swimming after the dolphins took a price. And I am paying that now as I have a very big cold at the moment, instantly arriving on me on the way back from Kaikura. We had a little snack in town before Tina drove back and I almost passed out for most of the 2.5-hour-journey.
The night was not pretty at all but still the next morning we headed on our last daytrip for the Banks Peninsula towards the pretty French town of Akaroa. The Banks Peninsula is actually an old volcano crater with the sea leading to the center of it.
The drive was another 1.5 hours around the crater with a stop at Hilltop Tavern, where you have a beautiful view onto the crater bottom filled with sea water and onto Akaroa at the far back.
The town itself was French-owned and still shows this by the street names (‘Rue …’). As the town has a tiny harbor and many very old picturesque wooden houses we could have stayed here for longer, but alas.. not enough time. We actually ran into an elderly couple we had stayed the night with at Catlins Beach House and so had a coffee with them in a beautiful rose garden café and caught up on what we had been doing the past week. They were really busy doing a course here and a tour there. We told them about our dolphin tour and they were on fire seeing a few of our photos. On our way back we desperately tried to find a do-it-yourself car wash because the next day we had to give back the car and it was REALLY dirty. And after that we actually managed to sell off most of our camping gear. We are only sitting with two mattresses and the roadmaps now. Hopefully we get rid of them today on our last day. We will only do a little bit of shopping now, maybe another op-shop (=second hand) and then we are off to the airport to give back the car. Tina will stay another night in Christchurch before heading North and I will fly back home. It was a cool journey and it will definitely not be my last one.

Invercargill - Catlins - Dunedin

The trip over to Invercargill – our next stop – was quite unspectacular though it took us 2 hours. A few scattered sheep, hills, green fields and a lot of wind on the coast. The southerly winds down here come directly from Antarctica, so they are quite chilly and very strong. You can see that on the trees on the Southern coast – they look as if paralyzed in a storm. When we reached Invercargill we just headed straight for the only BBH hostel in town, the Southern Comfort Hostel. It was very comfy indeed – being set in an old English-style wooden villa with old rugs on the ground, the cleanest kitchen we had ever seen and a portrait of Churchill on one of the walls. Our room was chilly but with very comfy bunk beds and a lot of space. There were just a few people which created a quiet and amiable atmosphere.
As Tina and I were both quite tired because of the lost sleep the two nights before, we just got into our beds and spent some lovely hours just dozing off and listening to audio books, the first one being Ronja Räubertochter (eng.: Ronia, the robber’s daughter by Astrid Lindgren), which made people entering our 4-bed-room looking strangely at us, but I didn’t care. It was just lovely and relaxing. In the evening we were just getting up to have some dinner and had a talk to some very nice people in the living room, Liz from Montreal and Simon from Arles. After dinner I stayed a little to do some work when Tina already went to bed but it did not take long for me to follow. The next morning we enjoyed breakfast with Liz and Simon and another German guy who looked quite young. We told him to cook his eggs (which he did not know what to do with) for eating on his journey that day, but he obviously had never cooked any eggs… He just got a cup full of hot water and put the raw egg into it. We just looked at him laughing and told him that it was not a teabag. He looked very puzzled and did not know what to do. In the end he just left the hostel and left the half-raw eggs for anybody to scoop away. Thanks a lot, dumbo.
We took a little ride through town (not very pretty as most NZ-towns, but with a few old buildings scattered hither and thither) to find our beloved Pack’n’Save-Supermarket. After putting half the supermarket’s products into our cart we looked for some fresh ginger beer…and were told that in Invercargill you could buy alcohol at special stores only… and guess what? When we went there later on: hardly any ginger beer, especially no Mac’s ginger beer. I was devastated…and bought two bottles of another company.
In the afternoon we hopped into the car and drove down to Bluff peninsula with Simon and Liz to have a look around on the Bluff hill. We could see a few small islands nearby and Stewart Island on the horizon. The other guys wanted to go there the next day, but we had given up on the idea because of the high costs involved (160$ ferry only, plus a lot of water taxi tours etc.), so instead we just wanted to cross through the Catlins, a natural area on the coast set between Invercargill and Dunedin. Our first stop in the Catlins the next day was Slope Point, the Southern-most point on the Southern Island where there was a small sign indicating the equator and the South Pole (similar to the one on the Northern point on the North Island). All around was amazing nature: beaches, coves and of course the sea. While the sun was shining we could feel the cold breeze that would accompany us throughout the Catlins whenever we were at a beach. We took the coastal road being mostly gravel which took us again through hills with sheep and rainforest next to the road. After a short stop at Weir Beach, a tiny beach with a lush picknick area, where we had our lunch picknick (a classic one on a coloured spread, though made of plastic) we drove on to Curio Bay, which had been highly recommended by several people and so, yes, we were curious. We had been told that you could swim with dolphins there (for free, just like that) and that they had yellow-eyed penguins.
First we went on the dolphin side of the bay, called Porpoise Bay where there was also a camping. But the camping lady told us that, yes, there were heavy showers coming in that night and so we relinquished and tried to phone other accommodations, which either were fully booked or didn’t answer the phone. We said goodbye to the 2 dolphins swimming near the shore and tried the row of motels/hotels/beach houses that we had seen earlier on this bay. And YES, the very last one had a sign saying VACANCY, so we knocked. An elderly man answered us, but he was not the landlord but a guest who showed us around anyway and told us to fill in the form on the table. This stated that we could stay, write our name down (the only dorm was 30$ pp and nobody else in there) and call the owners. Cool! (The owners actually never showed up until after 10 am the next morning to collect payment of everybody (there was another German couple that arrived later) and further they didn’t really bother with the business. Come in – make yourself at home – the door was just open.
And the beach house was a dream, we could have spent weeks there, looking onto the bay from the living room and spotting some occasional animals around. It was called Catlins Beachhouse and is just gorgeous. In the garden I spotted a hedgehog which wandered around sniffing for insects and it reminded me a lot of the local kiwi.
The evening we spent with a warm blanket and a hot tea on the beach at Curio Bay where the yellow-eyed penguins are usually appearing between 7-9 pm. We waited a long time until one tiny penguin appeared in the far distance. He took a long time to freshen himself up and then making a very cute walk and hop to his home in the bushes next to the lookout. His home bay is actually a petrified forest which has turned to stone and is washed over every day by sea water.
After this we went back to the beach house and dropped directly into bed. The next morning we took a walk to the dolphins along our bay beach and enjoyed them a lot surfing the waves. There were some occasional swimmers (with and without wetsuit) who approached them and sometimes they got near to have a look at the humans, but we decided that it was much too cold to swim just in a bikini (especially when already threatened by a cold), so we just took lots of photos. In the afternoon we took a double tour about 20km away to two attractions near each other: McLean Falls and then Cathedral Coves. Both were about 40 min return and both took us through the natural rainforest of New Zealand, which is very wet, very green and very mossy. The McLean Falls were quite cool as they cascade in different small falls and over stone steps into a very broad fall.
The Cathedral Coves could only be reached at low tide, so around 6 pm that day, and lead us to a very broad sandy beach where at its end there were 2 tunnels in the rocks, meeting each other in the back. It really could have been a natural kind of church. After this we went back home again and after dinner it was again bedtime. It must be the sea air, that is making us that tired.
The next morning we took a detour to the camping ground again and explored the cliff there, but except some birds there was nothing special to see. So we drove further to the East, first having a very special bird’s concert at a small beach on the way. Then we visited Purakaunui Waterfalls, one of the most photographed waterfalls in New Zealand, I had read. Well, it looked a lot like the one the day before. Just a bit easier to reach and just one broad waterfall falling down stone steps. But it looked nice. After this we skipped a lot of the Catlins until we reached Nugget Point, where there is a lighthouse and many tiny rocky islands off shore that are called nuggets. We also visited Roaring Bay on the way to the lighthouse, where you normally can see penguins, but we just spotted our first sea lion who took a sunbath on the grass.
After this we headed onwards over Balclutha (having fantastic chips again – they are getting better as we go south) to Dunedin. We had just phoned earlier to Penny’s Backpackers and they had a special room for us, a bunk bed in a separate room, which was only 20 pp. Wow. They said it was their worst room. It was not. What was bad was the entire hostel. You could call it the weird people den and it was absolutely not very clean, for the rest it receives the mark ‘ok’. We could also not park our car nearby so the next morning we had to get up very earlier to set the car someplace else. After that we took some time off for ourselves. Writing, reading a book…lovely. Especially as it was raining outside most of the time and very very chilly. In the afternoon we managed to get up again and head towards the Otago Peninsula, which Dunedin is located next to. The drive was over a very windy road along the coast but the peninsula was such a contrast program to our Dunedin neighbourhood, which was very run down. We were in nature again and were heading to a penguin place, where they guaranteed you to actually see the rare yellow-eyed penguin. It did come with a price though, 52$ pp. But it was cool! A Maori named Tama took us around the sheep farm where they have built a penguin hospital and many secluded ways to watch the penguins from close-by without them spotting you. They are quite shy. First we went to the hospital where they help injured or underweight penguins. Mostly they have the yellow-eyed ones there, but there were also two other cute ones: a rock hopper and a fiordland crested penguin.
The free roaming penguins in the bay were mostly in moulting, which means that they changed their feathers so they would continue to be water-resistant. But it also meant that they were hiding away in the bushes waiting for their feathers to renew and not going out for a swim. We even met two couples in the bushes which were very cute with each other.
After having a chat with Tama after the tour we continued towards the cape Taiaroa Head, where there was the iciest wind blowing I had ever blown over me in summer.
After this we went to Allans Bay where they said you could see penguins and sea lions again. It was absolutely gorgeous, because it was huge with no other soul around, just two sea lions which we practically stumbled over. They were so cute sticking up their hand-fins and taking their beauty toilet seriously waggling their tails.
The next morning we wanted to take a look at downtown Dunedin before leaving. We actually ended up in the ‘octagon’, which is a kind of roundabout in the city center. We saw the famous Art Deco train station and went to the Art Museum. But the very best thing we did that morning was visiting a couple of OpShops (=second hand) trying on or browsing through the vintage clothes from the 70s. I ended up with a beautiful blue vintage suitcase and a blue handbag which should both fit with my 70s dress I had bought earlier. Yeah! I also donated the hand bag I had bought in Kuala Lumpur and felt mighty good about being rid of it.