Groundhog Flight

For the first time, really, we were able to see New Zealand's fantastic scenery. For three weeks nearly all we had seen was cloud, but now, on a bus journey on our last day, we passed beautiful mountains that we could actually see. As soon as we moved a bit further East than Queenstown it cleared up. When we were planning New Zealand we had asked lots of people their opinion regarding the North versus the South Islands. In retrospect we should have asked about the West versus the East: presumably then everyone would have said “Oh yeah, the West is the most dramatic, but if you're going in winter you won't see any of, so you might as well skip it”.

The bus travelled through a region which had, in the past, been designated the hunting region, and huge areas of forest had been cleared. Now the scenery went from looking quite like Scotland to looking exactly like Scotland: I was almost expecting to come round the next bend and see a sign for Braemar. So just as in most of Scotland, there were some parts of New Zealand where the English had cut down the trees. The difference is that in New Zealand they have since exterminated the forest-destroying wild deer and have now replanted large parts of the country. In New Zealand you still see quite a lot of deer but the fences keep the deer in, not like in Scotland where the fences are to keep the deer out. So in Scotland there is almost no native forest and there can be no serious programme of reforestation until something is done to curb deer numbers. Somehow legislating on the price of venison seems like the way forward to me; how the meat of vermin can be sold at such high prices seems outrageous to me. In Scotland we should refuse to eat an beef at all and switch to venison so hopefully we can eat enough of the beasts to allow trees to grow again. Or we could just reintroduce wolves. And bears.

Lake Tekapo

Further on, we passed right next to two large lakes with Mount Cook in the background, New Zealand's highest mountain. The bus driver / tour guide told us that the reason the lakes are so turquoise-blue, particularly the first one, Lake Pukaki, is that they are full of glacial flour; the particles of rock ground off the mountains by the glaciers are so fine that when they eventually wash into the lakes they are suspended in the water, affecting the way they reflect and diffract light. We stopped at Lake Tekapo for lunch and had a proper chance to admire the scenery. What a waste that we had spent three weeks missing all of this!

Lake Tekapo

Lake Tekapo

Eventually we arrived in Christchurch and found our hostel. They seemed very friendly, but we declined the included pasta dinner and instead went out for a steak special we had seen advertised on the way to the hostel. The next day we were going to South America, where we would be able to get even better steak, but I just couldn't resist a NZ$10 steak.

Christchurch

We had to get up early the next day, but it turned out that the Wednesday included dinner deal they run at the hostel turns into a drunken party after the food is eaten. Our room was right next to the kitchen and it was about 4am when the manager, who seemed to be the ring-leader, and the partying guests finally went to bed. We had to get up at 6am for our flight to Auckland.

We dragged ourselves to the airport minibus in time and on the way the driver entertained us with stories of gap-year kids in New Zealand going wild on daddy's credit card or getting themselves pregnant and, either way, being too scared to go home. Certainly there had been a lot of young travellers in New Zealand and, as we had endured that night, plenty of partying. In Auckland it was lovely and sunny and we finally got to see what Auckland looks like. Quite nice. I wished again we had asked about West-East instead of North-South.

Goodbye New Zealand

The flight from Auckland to Santiago was another nightmare flight. When we checked in the woman asked if we wanted emergency exit seats, which we thought was very kind, what with all the extra leg-room. What we did not reckon with was the fact that they were right next to the toilets. Perhaps because of the accelerated night when flying East, nobody seemed to feel like sleeping on the flight and, instead, they spent the whole night going to the toilet and slamming the door behind them. I hate night flights. We took off at 4pm and landed at 11:30am in Chile, although the flight was only twelve hours long, so people were only really ready to go to sleep about the time they were preparing to serve us breakfast. Another oddity is, because we crossed the dateline just after taking off from New Zealand, we arrived the same day we took off, only earlier in the day, even though we had gone though another night. We get to live the same day all over again! Maybe this time we'll ask to sit somewhere away from the toilets... we might have been one day younger but we didn't feel it after that flight.

So that was New Zealand. We had some fun, it cost a lot of money, but really we missed most of it, especially the bits I wanted to see, just because the weather was too bad. I had originally only planned to stay a few days in Auckland as we had to stop there on the way to South America, because I wasn't that interested in New Zealand culturally as I expected it to be quite like home; it was, only very empty. However when Joanne expressed more interest in seeing the place, we extended the time there. We couldn't really choose the time of year to arrive and, given when we were arriving, we probably should just have stuck to the three days. Or stayed away from the West. I can't complain, though; if someone went to the West of Scotland in winter then moaned about it raining, I'd have to quote Billy Connolly: Well of course it bloody rained! It's f-ing Scotland isn't it?. It seems New Zealand is much the same.

written by  The Happy Couple on September 3, 2009 from Christchurch, New Zealand
from the travel blog: Michael's Round-the-World honeymoon
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