So I finally made it to the South Island of NZ!! The whole week was jampacked and so much fun! It was absolutely beautiful and the geology everywhere was amazing (but I’ll get to that later). The weather looked like it was going to be dodgy, but it ended up being perfect the whole week, which was definitely some good luck. Anyways, here are all the details about the week! It started very early on a Monday. Dan had driven down to Wellington that weekend to watch the rugby super 8 semi-final on Saturday, but I had to work so I flew in to meet him extremely early on Monday. Jess drove me to the airport for my 5:25am flight (thanks Jess!) and it went off without a hitch. Except for the man that snored SO LOUDLY right across from me for the ENTIRE trip. It got so bad that the man sitting behind me actually hit him with his magazine to wake him up. Dan picked me up from the airport and we headed straight to the ferry terminal to catch the 8:00am ferry to the South Island! On the way, we went through one of the biggest, possibly the biggest, roundabout in New Zealand, which has a cricket pitch in the middle of it. After waiting in line, we boarded the ferry and enjoyed the 3 and ½ hour ride to the South Island across the Cook Strait. This is the name of the water that lies between the Islands. It is considered one of the most dangerous and unpredictable waters in the world (it definitely didn’t feel like that while we were on the ferry, don’t worry). The strait is named after James Cook, who was the first European commander to sail through it in 1770. In fact, a lot of things around the islands were named because of Cook. The ferry was cool; you get to see Wellington on the way out, there’s a small amount of time where it feels like you’re in open ocean, and then you can see the South Island! It takes almost an hour and a half to make it through the sounds to get to Picton, where the ferry docks. It was extremely windy, but I loved that part, my first taste of the beauty of the South Island. Once we landed, we got on the road immediately; we were headed to Christchurch in 1 day! On the way we had a few stops though. Just before we reached Kaikoura, we stopped at Ohau stream and waterfall, which is famous for the baby seals pups that stay there while their mothers hunt for fish in the ocean. There was an American volunteer there to tell people about the seals, and turns out he’s from Florida too! That was a pretty cool moment. I was taking some photos of this little seal that I swear was posing for my camera, and then all of a sudden he started hopping towards my camera. Curious little one, but it made me jump a little! It was so cute. We stopped for lunch in Kaikoura at the BBQ seafood caravan. It was such fresh seafood caught right offshore! We had some delicious scallops and a look around town before getting back on the road. Our final stop was in Christchurch for the night, but before we hit the hay we took a drive out to Lyttleton Harbour to check out a smaller harbour town and to go through the Lyttleton road tunnel which, at 1,970 metres (6,460 ft) is currently the longest road tunnel in New Zealand. Apparently it won’t be next year when it gets surpassed by another tunnel that’s currently being built. Good thing I saw it this year! The next day we took some time to explore the city of Christchurch before moving on. This city was largely destroyed by a massive earthquake in 2010 and is still in the process of rebuilding. The main cathedral that sat in the city center sustained a lot of damage and has not yet been rebuilt. We walked around it and through the rest of the old city center to the pop up shipping container mall that was built after the earthquake. It was a pretty cool idea and definitely something to check out! From there we walked over to the cardboard cathedral, which was made as a temporary replacement to the original. It’s not quite all made out of cardboard, a lot of it is metal and plastic that can be taken down, but the basic framework is made from cardboard, which is pretty neat. Through all of our walking, we got to see a lot of the art that has built up around the city. Much of it is in mural form, but many places that were demolished have been turned into parks or had art pieces erected instead of buildings. It was pretty cool to see. We headed out to Sumner beach for a picnic lunch before starting our drive to Dunedin. Which included a stop at the Cookie Time factory on the way out of town (well known cookie company in New Zealand). My favorite stop of the day was at Moeraki, where you can see what are known as the Moeraki boulders! They’re fascinating in a geologic sense, as they’re not quite sure how they were formed, though there are other boulders similar in other areas of the world. They’re hollow and more appear each year as the waves erode the mudstone that encloses them. The boulders consist of mud, fine silt and clay and are cemented together by calcite. They were SO COOL and I took a photo of one that I swear looks like the death star from star wars. We got to Dunedin when it was dark, but we drove up to the top of a hill so we could take in the city at night before heading to the pool for a swim and grabbing indian for dinner. Dunedin was really cool, despite the fact that it was raining the whole time. We started the day at this really neat coffee shop before we headed to my favorite stop of the day: we went to Baldwin Street, which is the steepest residential street in the world! There is an annual charity event on the street which involves rolling over 30,000 Jaffas (a sort of larger whopper, but with a chocolate middle and an outside similar to a m&m). People can buy each Jaffa for a dollar and then the first one to come out the shoot at the end wins a prize, with all the funds raised going to charity. Pretty crazy and neat idea. It was actually scary driving up and down it, it was so steep. We ran out of the car at the top to take a bunch of photos real quick before we got soaking wet and then drove back down. I swear we almost died. Dunedin is where Dan went to college (or uni, as it’s called here. College is actually high school...weird, right?), so he gave me a little tour down Castle street, which is well known for its iconic student apartments, including the number 660, which is where the band 660 lived while at uni and the inspiration for their name! If you haven’t heard them before, here is one of their songs. We took a look in at the building he used to flat in at student housing as well as one of the flats he rented over the course of his 5 years there. And we went and saw the fancy indoor rugby stadium. With the rain, we couldn’t do too much so we stopped in at Emerson’s Brewery, which we later found out had just opened their new fancy tasting room in the last couple of months. We shared a beer sampler, and they even let me take a bottle cap home for my collection! They hadn’t popped any that day, but they went straight to production and I got a brand new one. Pretty sweet. We took a look in at St. Clair Beach (which was cool, because I lived on St. Clair while I was in college) before meeting one of Dan’s friends for lunch and getting on the road to Te Anua. Which we almost didn’t make it! The number one thing I wanted to see was Milford sound, but until about 2pm in the afternoon the day we were leaving Dunedin, the road to Milford Sound from Te Anua had been shut due to snow. But luckily it was reopened and we could make it! So we spent the night in Te Anua and woke up super early to head out to Milford Sound. That drive was beautiful. A little foggy in the morning, but the sun breaking through the clouds was amazing. We stopped to take some photos and got up close and personal with a kea. It’s a kind of aggressive bird; they like shiny things and will sit and peck on the roof of cars to get all the shiny parts off. We saw this in action on the drive back from Milford Sound where two kea’s were sitting on the car in front of us pecking away while it was moving! We also saw a mini avalanche on the drive out there as well - don’t worry, we were more than far enough away, though Dan did stop on the road to check it out right next to a sign that said no stopping….Anyways, we made it out to Milford Sound safely and hopped on our 9:45am cruise through the Sound, which goes all the way out to the Tasman Sea. I don’t think my description of it would do it justice at all, so hopefully my photos can. It was so breathtaking. And there were waterfalls cascading over the rock faces, you could see glaciers in the mountains and we even saw some seals on the way back to the dock. It was calm on the way out because we were moving with the wind but as soon as we turned around we smacked right into it and it was extremely windy and a little cold for the ride back. I would 10/10 recommend as something to do on the South Island; it did not disappoint. I think an even cooler way to see the Sounds would be to fly over them, but you need a bit of cash to do that one. We had a picnic lunch in the sounds where Dan decided to make friends with a weka, another bird. This one posed for a selfie before taking off with my avocado pit like he’d won the lottery. Hopefully he didn’t try to swallow it whole. From Milford we headed out to Queenstown. It’s a pretty cool city, it reminds me of the smaller ski towns in Colorado. It was pretty cool, and I totally forgot to take pictures of myself there. But that’s okay. We walked around and took in the city, and bought some fudge. Because why not. I even had a few minutes to see Mckinlee, a girl I used to play water polo with/against in high school. It was neat to see a familiar face. Our driving wasn’t done for the day though, we stayed the night in Wanaka, which I loved. I think I liked it better than Queenstown; it’s just as cute and definitely less touristy. We got in after dark and it was cold, so we went into a bar and I got some mulled wine. Very reminiscent of the streets of Prague. We got to see Wanaka in the daylight the next morning. It sits on a lake and it was so pretty. We decided to do something a little different before heading out of town: we went to Puzzling World! We completed the maze (Dan made it to all four corners first, but I made it back to the exit first, so who really won?) and we explored the illusion rooms, which were really neat. Then we started our drive up the west coast of the South Island. Besides the drive out to Milford Sound, this was my favorite section of driving, along the coast. The sun was shining, you could see the ocean and the mountains were still in the background. The ultimate goal for the evening was Greymouth, we had a couple of stops at some glaciers though! The first was Fox Glacier, we drove up to a lookout for it before we headed out to the walk to get up close! It’s an 8.1 mile long glacier that was advancing all the way up until 2009, but since then there has been significant retreat. It was so cool to see something I’d studied up so close! On the way to our next stop, we passed through the town of Fox Glacier, which made us think: why isn’t the town just called Fox? What happens when the glacier fully disappears, will the town still be called Fox Glacier? Side rant, and probably not as funny as it was when we were driving. The next stop was Franz Josef Glacier. It descends all the way to 300 feet above sea level, which is pretty cool, and it’s 7.5 miles long. It was also in a period of advancement until about 2008 and since then has been declining. We saw it, but only from a distance at the lookout point. It was getting dark and was much, much colder so we didn’t make it all the way to the glacier face. We made the rest of the drive to Greymouth with ease and after a solid dinner at the pub just out of town went to sleep at the Noah’s Ark backpackers. All of the rooms were themed with different animals, ours was the monkey room. And it was a pretty good night, despite the incessant snoring of one of the other travellers in the room (this seemed to be a recurring theme on this trip…). The final day on the South Island started with exploring the Greymouth wharf, which is well known for it’s fishing boat population. We completed our drive up the west coast with a stop at the famous pancake rocks and blowholes. They are in a heavily eroded limestone area and the sea is able to burst through vertical blowholes during high tides. Luckily we were there about an hour before high tide, so we got to see them! They’re called the pancake rocks because of they’re layered limestone, which looks like stacks of pancakes. These layers are created by immense pressure on alternating hard and soft layers of limestone which include marine creatures and plant sediments. They were so neat, and I got to geologically freak out yet again. We also stopped at the Biller Gorge Swing Bridge, which is this super narrow swing bridge near Murchison. There was a fault line that occurred after some uplift from an earthquake in the area. It was cool because they labeled where the fault line was, which you could miss very easily as it’s just like walking over a hill. It was a pretty neat pit stop. We stopped for something to eat in Murchison, and then the craziest thing happened: we experienced an earthquake! I was sitting in the car and at first it felt as though the wind was blowing harder and harder and then all of a sudden the car was shaking like a big bus had blown by, which had very obviously not happened. I was so confused, and then Dan ran outside from the store all excited about the earthquake. It was a 3.6 on the Richter scale and occurred 10 kilometers away from where we were, 20 kilometers underground. I realize this isn’t huge, but it’s the first earthquake I’ve ever felt! And it was the first one that Murchison had experienced in a while. We got to our final stop for the night in Nelson while it was still light out, so we went to go look at the beach and grabbed a drink at a bar that used to be a church. Which was kind of cool. We went out to watch the rugby Super 8 final (in which the New Zealand team beat the South African team) and I had an amazing meal of mussel and clam linguine! On the last day of the road trip, we woke up at 6:30am to catch the ferry back to the North Island (and got to catch some of the Olympics on the ferry and it was still cool, even though the waves were a lot choppier than the ride to the South Island) and then make the long, 8 hour drive from Wellington to Auckland. Which we made it, before midnight. And now onto future plans. I have my last week here in Auckland wrapping up some loose ends before I move back to Minnesota on Sunday. I got a job coaching soccer! I love travel, but I’m looking forward to coming home very much. I’ll let you all know how that goes, promise. But for now, the next adventure: I have to somehow get rid of about 8kgs worth of clothes and shoes. Wish me luck!
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Meet AnyaHi, Hola, Bonjour, Ciao!
I’m Anya Phillips, a data analyst and travel enthusiast who is always on the lookout for the next adventure! Categories
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