Furthest South

After another bit of a delay on account of there just being too much to do in New Zealand, here comes a bit of a rundown of the last couple of weeks, starting with the end of my time on the South Island. 

From Franz Josef, I hitched what just might be the best and luckiest ride of my trip: the second I put down my bags on the roadside and stuck my thumb out to passing traffic, a car pulled over - literally the first one that spotted me. I didn't think things like that happened, but there you go! It turned out to be a family who, by complete chance, I had taken a photo of the day before at Franz Josef Glacier, although we only realised this once I was in the car. The Kinlochs - Dean, Annie, Riley (10) and Claudia (8) turned out to be delightful company and the perfect ride: we ended up stopping at loads of little attractions and roadside scenic spots, making the long and beautiful drive to Queenstown all the more pleasant. 

Our first stop was at Fox Glacier. Practically down the road from Franz Josef, it looks far smaller on maps and photos but is actually a lot more impressive mostly because it is possible to walk far closer to it. The subglacial channels where water drains from beneath the glacier are also clearly visible and give rise to the river flowing downvalley. The second photo is of me with the Kinlochs. 

After this, the road to Queenstown became increasingly more scenic (I'm running out of superlatives here...), veering inland from the coast and across one of the major passes crossing the Southern Alps before descending again into the lake country at the southern tip of New Zealand. 

A valley completely shrounded in clouds. Dean steered the car right to the edge of the precipice, giving the kids a good scare!

Queenstown itself was even more fully booked up than can be expected for the high season on account of a concert held nearby which seemed to attract an enormous crowd of middle-aged people looking for a good time. With my tent, I was not overly worried about finding a spot to sleep - campsites never fill up completely - but I was in for a rather more pleasant surprise. 

Having been driven all the way to Queenstown - a 7-hour trip at our leisurely pace - the Kinlochs found they had a spare guest bed in their stunning motel room and promptly offered for me to crash there, and to then drive me part of the way to Te Anau the next day. Such a spontaneous display of kindness caught me completely off guard, but has reinforced my belief in Kiwis as generally amazing people. 

And so it was, after tasty steaks and cider for dinner - what a change from the standard backpacker fare of pasta and cereals! - that we continued on towards Te Anau together the next day. Te Anau is the end of the road as far as settlements in the Fiordland region are concerned, and it lies on the road towards Milford Sound, my ultimate destination down here. 

Just out of Queenstown, looking across at the Remarkables once more.

A short drive later, then, I said goodbye to this lovely family at the intersection where they'd be heading off in the direction of Invercargill, and was promptly picked up by a friendly 18-year-old German called Simon who slept on a mattress in the back of his sedan. Te Anau, being at just over 45 degrees southern latitude, was not only my "furthest South" but also my "furthest from home": 18920 km/11755 miles from Cambridge, and accordingly slightly less from Vienna and London. I had planned to do a bit of hiking in this mountainous area not dissimilar from some parts of the Alps, but as there were reports of the weather turning I decided to head to Milford Sound sooner rather than later: the 6-hour guided kayaking trip I was planning to do here was my biggest one-off expenditure on anything other than flights so far, and as such I figured it would be best to maximise my chances of fair weather. 

Early morning in Te Anau - it was getting rather chilly at this point, so the time came to break out the powertraveller stash...

The Milford Road is famous for its desolation and its rise to steadily greater heights into fiord country, but mostly it was littered with tour buses standing by the roadside disgorging camera-wielding tourists. I couldn't help but feel a little smug as Simon and I cruised past all these at our leisurely pace - although we couldn't help but stop and stare ourselves a few times...

The Homer Tunnel leading down to Milford Sound. Being used to the spotless, clinical tunnels one finds in the Alps, I was more than a bit surprised to find this rough-hewn, practically unlit, one-lane-with-passing-bays, steeply descending affair at one of New Zealand's main tourist throughfares! 

Milford Sound itself is an odd one. Enormous parking lots and the ugliest, most jarringly out-of-place grey-faux-marble boat/cruise ship terminal in history apart, it is a place of exceptional beauty. Since the internet is bursting with stock photos significantly better than mine, see here and here for what sort of place we're talking about. It really does have the lot - beautifully clear cobalt blue water (although it is normally murky due to sediment-heavy runoff, recent droughts meant it was nice and clear), steeply rising peaks some 2000m high, ice fields at their tops and waterfalls crashing down from phenomenal heights. And, let us not forget, a constant drone of propeller plane engines and cruise ships making an absolutely outrageous profit. A few of my own impressions of the place at daytime are below. 

Naturally, I couldn't miss the chance to try for some good shots at sunset, too - although to my dismay heavy clouds began rolling into the fiord in the evening, dampening my hopes for a clear morning the next day. This peak, illuminated by the last vestiges of the setting sun and reflected in a stagnant bit of water coloured red for some reason, is my only result even vaguely worth showing. 

Interesting light as the sun sets behind jagged mountains - it briefly illuminated the sky much like one of those giant Las Vegas searchlight things would.

The next morning, clouds lay heavy on the fiord. As expected, this meant that the peaks surrounding the water were out of sight, it did mean that the light on the water itself was a lot more pleasant while the sun burned steadily away at the layers of cloud above us. We saw the lot - during the 6-hour trip which saw us kayak from the harbour all the way out into the Tasman Sea (23km), we came across a pod of dolphins, a big and playful group of fur seals throwing themselves into various yoga-like poses - and a couple of rarely seen yellow-crested penguins which I completely failed to photograph but which were exactly as one might expect penguins to be: hilariously clumsy and dopey-looking. 

 

We also got to paddle past and under a few stunning waterfalls - the water crashing down from over 100m creates a fair bit of wind which pushes the kayak right back out of the danger zone once you stop paddling. 

On the way back in we were picked up by a speedboat - just as well, as my core was not impressed at this amount of kayaking and my knee seemed to have taken a hit from being pushed against the kayak's plastic hull for hours. As it turned out, the morning clouds were actually a blessing: by the time we hopped onto the boat, the sun was as bright as ever so we got the best of both worlds. 

Hitchhiking back out from Milford Sound had the potential to be a tricky affair due to a complete lack of good places for cars to pull over - but fortune was kind to me yet again. I was slightly confused to see a car stop for me which I had just seen go down to the Sound 5 minutes before - it turned out the driver, Beth from Michigan/Colorado, had gone to all the trouble of turning around to give me a lift out! My knee hurting from the kayaking to an extent that made me doubt I'd get much hiking done in Te Anau, I decided on a whim to go all the way back to Queenstown with her and chill there for a few days before catching my flight to Wellington.

This turned out to be a good choice as my knee took several days to improve so that I spent my days in Queenstown doing very little, and thoroughly enjoying it. It is, it has to be said, an almost ludicrously picturesque town, although its posh, Aspen-style shops did not really cater to my taste or budget. Still, walking around its fringes and finding pleasant spots to sit and read provided me with plenty of entertainment, as did a trip out the historic mining community of Arrowtown with Beth. 

Right - this concludes my adventures on the South Island. Hope this wasn't too long or gruelling a read - as always, feedback is much appreciated!

Towards Glaciers!

After finishing my trek around the Abel Tasman Coast Track and scoffing one of the brilliant, gargantuan fish & chips portions they serve here for all of 3-4 pounds, the time came to make my way along the scenic west coast of the South Island to its southern end; here awaited Fiordland, the alpine, rugged part of the country famous for its mirror-flat blue lakes and, as the name implies, for its fjords, most of which have been misnamed "sounds" or "inlets". 

Hitchhiking these ~500 miles of varied, breathtaking countryside was one of the best decisions I ever made. The road is frequented by a great many travellers which means they are often keen to stop at various landmarks, scenic viewpoints and even just random hard shoulders to gape and take photos and try to take in all they see around them. This beats the experience of sitting on a point-to-point coach or - God forbid - flying and missing out on the fantastic western highway altogether. 

Just one of many hairpin corners too pretty to just drive by...sorry about the irritating lack of straightness!

In total, I took 4 days to get from Nelson to Te Anau, traversing most of the island and ending up at 45-odd degrees South. On the first of these days, getting out of Nelson proved the trickiest part of all as no-stopping zones and commuting traffic turned against me. In the end, a Nursery assistant in her mid-60s drove me to the town's outskirts where the going became easier, and from here a single mum and her young daughter stopped to take me to the crossing where the road to the west coast branches off from the main road back to Christchurch. The fact that members of these two particular demographics even stopped for a solo male hitchhiker says a lot about the generally positive light in which hitchhiking is overwhelmingly seen down here! 

The greatest part of my first day, though, was spent with two German biologists, Benni and Sarah, who were working in Brisbane studying a strange species of stingerless bee. Sounds like a perfect little honey factory, really! It was surprisingly pleasant talking to a couple of scientists about our respective fields and interests and the world in general - a more than welcome change from the repetitive, often slightly inane exchange of travellers' tales in hostels. We took a scenic route which allowed us to stop at Punakaiki Rocks, conveniently anglicised to Pancake Rocks. The name is descriptive, too - limestone layers have been lifted up out of the sea and eroded so that they look like monstrous American-style stacks of pancakes some 150ft high. It took me a while to make this connection as I was expecting large, flat rocks more like the single, thin pancakes you'd roll up. 

Somewhere far below sits sea level...during high tide there are some spectacular surges of water through the narrow gaps between the pillars, but we missed this during our visit.

 In the end I got dropped off at Greymouth as they were heading back inland and it was getting late. There is nothing much in this little roadside town aside from a spectacular bridge whose single lane also doubled for the railway line; it says a lot about how infeasible and underused the railway is in this country that there wasn't even a barrier so drivers are expected to check for themselves that no train is near. Despite the general drabness of Greymouth, though, I found the loveliest little hostel here called Noah's Ark. Back in the 1980s, all of Greymouth was flooded and only this building, situated fortuitously, got away unharmed, prompting the name. I spent a thoroughly pleasant night in its gardens, making the most of my tent and the savings it allows for.

Out of Greymouth, my next destination was Franz Josef, a tiny one-street affair catering solely to tourists vising the Glacier that gave the place its name. First explored by an Austrian, it is named after the great emperor with what just might be the greatest beard in history. After a short ride with a commuter going to the next town to sell agricultural fertilisers, I was driven here by a young couple in a campervan who turned out to be on their honeymoon - I thought it was rather kind of them to take me on given this fact! As so often, it was their having hitchhiked themselves that motivated them to stop for me. Richard was a Londoner and Kim from near Edinburgh, and they'd married over a year ago but had only done a small honeymoon then, instead saving up for this big New Zealand trip. We chatted about home and about the Scottish independence referendum, a topic I felt slightly less unqualified to discuss after talking to Steve about it in India. The only mildly stressful aspect of this ride was that we were all pretty sure it was illegal as I was sat on the sofa in the back of the van with no seatbelt. This turned out to be surprisingly stressful on a winding road, especially as I had to lie down flat whenever we got a whiff of a police car. 

Franz Josef itself offers very little indeed of any particular interest, with the obvious exception of the nearby glacier. This is a rapidly receding affair in an enormous valley which it carved during the last glacial period; in fact I found it a little depressing, wallowing in its relatively puny state among all the evidence of its former grand self. Increasing portions of the glacier are also covered in debris which may be good news for future mass loss, but I would suspect this would make it less attractive to tourists, too. 

The glacier's most remarkable feature by far is that it flows right down into the middle of the temperate rainforest surrounding it. Nowhere else on Earth do glaciers flow to such low altitudes at latitudes of just under 45 degrees. Franz Josef's high snowfall rates up high, coupled with fast flow speed, mean that the ice can travel far downslope despite warm temperatures.
 

The path leading up to the glacier valley. Doesn't feel like one's about to encounter a river of ice!

The boulder-strewn valley left behind by the retreating glacier.

One of the many rainfall-fed waterfalls crashing down to the valley - sadly their upper parts are pretty inaccessible!

Finally the glacier creeps into view around a corner, ever further removed from the huge main valley...

At the terminus, access to the glacier is restricted. Probably for the best given the cavern opening visible in the bottom right here!