And so to Christchurch

North west of Nelson you can drive along the edge of Marlborough/Picton(?) Sound. It must be one of the most beatiful drives in the world. Perhaps because of our couple of days breathing traffic fumes in Nelson, being jostled by crowds and shopping in a supermarket my weariness with beautiful countryside was gone. Perhaps you can see why.


Someone suggested I sound a bit cynical about NZ which isn't true. I think NZ is wonderful. We watched a TV program last night about New Zealanders buying homes abroad and our reaction was "Why bother?". Nothing we say seemed as good as what we've seen here. And apart from driving through it we've also looked in estate agents' windows. You can buy a virgin plot or a house very cheaply compared to Bristol prices. However it is a bit like drinking only champagne sometimes. There is a competition in one of the papers to find the best view that anyone has from their work place. As you can imagine some are amazing but one just showed a scruffy yard with rusting tractors and junk. Sometimes water is a necessary change to champagne.

Before I get all gushy about NZ, and after drooling all the way along the road from Nelson, we encountered a useful corrective. I sort of imagined, naive fool that I am, that the Marlborough wine region would be full of cosy little vinyards, hugging the hillside, where wine lovers would buy a few acres and live the dream of creating the perfect wine. In fact it is a soul-less place. It's flat with (though there are mountains in the far distance) and full of big, professional, identical square blocks of vinyards (sorry 'wineries'). Each one has a carefully designed logo to make them look modern. There are three sorts of logo: a) give it a Maori name with some vaguely ethnic looking design, b) make it look classic and elegant (Domaine George-Michel) c) try to suggest NZ beauty (Cloudy Bay). The logos are all different but somehow the same spirit comes through all of them.

As we drove past mile after mile of identical flat fields, each vinyard we realised we had come to a new New Zealand. I'd just learnt a NZ phrase, "Number 8 'll fix it". Number 8 is fencing wire and the saying reflects the traditional strength of the country. You invent, mend, improvise and use what comes to hand. Sometimes whole houses seem to be built with Number 8 and a few old planks. That's old New Zealand. New New Zealand (does New Labour spring, ever so slightly, to mind) is planned, researched, big on image. You don't need Number 8 if you've got good enough PR to make what you do seem different, and you can add on a fancy restaurant (as many have done) which you enter through a shop where you can order a few cases, or you can order as you leave.

Which raises one slight problem. There is a nationwide anti drink-driving campaign with hundreds of different posters (I like the one which shows a foot with an id tag on the toe poking out from under a sheet - slogan "If you drink-drive you might get a ticket"). So come to a restaurant on a winery and don't drink? My guess is that the aim is at the coach loads of Americans doing "the Kiwi experience".

I'm just an old fogey. Never mind (and I do like NZ wine), we won't stay. On to Kaikoura ... but first to camp.

Throughout this trip Eleanor has had a secret sense of shame. This camper van stuff isn't real camping. We should be in the bush, listening to the sea, watching the stars, at one with nature. It is, I freely admit, my fault we haven't done it. I like hot showers, clean toilets, internet access, a box of exchangeable books to root through, a list of what's on at the local cinema. We aren't equiped for real camping but, driving beside the sea we found a camp site which is closer to the ideal. It is almost deserted (I wonder why?), the sea is only a few yards away, it's almost in the bush (or maybe the bush is moving in to the camp). There is electricity but it isn't working (end of season - not worth it). There are showers but not hot and, as a bonus, there is more local fauna in the shower than I've seen in the whole trip. Probably both NZ's venomous spiders, certainly an interesting assortment of mosquitos, sandflies and cockroaches. And you can't shut the doors in the gents so any other nature can just walk right in.

We had quite a good night, pity about the sandflies, and, because we are far away from the civilized world where people might compain, the tiny railway we hadn't noticed can carry rumbly something or other on it's squeaking, rattling rolling stock all night. To balance the scales a bit, we did buy from the camp manager a freshly cooked rock lobster, caught that day by her husband. Nature has its place.

Next day along the coast, stopping now and then to watch the seals, to Kaikoura a pleasant seaside town. To my surprise Eleanor wanted to stay at a modern campsite with a promosing restaurant opposite the entrance and only 5 minutes walk from the town centre. I pointed out there was a more 'natural' alternative with just the sort of shady sites next to a creek which would encourage wildlife.

We took a short flight in a light airplane to look for whales. Kaikoura is at the head of the (underwater) Kaikoura Canyon where, in addition to very deep water, two currents meet making it an ideal breeding ground for plankton and krill and so popular with sperm whale. Especially hoons. Hoons is the NZ word for stroppy teenagers and though, as far as I know, young whales neither play loud music nor sleep all day, they get the label anyway. So we flew over the Kaikoura Canyon with a pilot who seemed more an age to be playing computer games than flying a real planes. We saw one big hoon which did look magnificent. Alas he only appeared late in the trip - no doubt he'd been lounging around in his room playing hip-hop.

Not a very good picture but we were overhead and the vibrations of the plane probably affected it.

Which brings us to the end of the South Island. We spent a couple of days in Christchurch site seeing and then left our campervan at the airport. Off to Auckland.

Och Aye, the Noo and Beyond

Dunedin is big by New Zealand standards.

A population of 100,000, of which about 40,000 are students at the university or polytechnic (they still have polys here, how sweet). It must be a lot quieter during the vacation when half the town, sorry city, leaves for Wherami Flats or Hopeful Gully or wherever.

The local paper had a big article about the university. Harvard, they said, is famous for Law, MIT for Computing, Oxford for English but Otago is famous for the bad behaviour of its students despite being an excellent university, noted for its Dentistry and Sports degrees. Apparently the bad behaviour includes: missing lectures, drinking, smoking illegal substances, not keeping accomodation clean, being noisey late at night and playing loud, so called, music. "Hoon" is the NZ term for people who behave in such an appalling way. "Young" is the word the rest of us use. I fear the author of the article would be appalled to hear that not every Oxford student spends their time reading "The Fairie Queene" and singing madrigals. I'd guess that students have been known to shout in within Harvard's ivy-ed walls as well. Of course it isn't like that in Bristol, UWE students at least would never do such things.

You have to remember that Dunedin calls itself "The New Edinburgh" (why not the new Dunedin?) and the Scots take education seriously. Actually, lots of dentists seem to have trained in Sotland, perhaps because the Scots live on deep fried Mars bars and need more dentists? Anyway, another link with Dunedin.

Anyway, Dunedin likes to think of itself as the epitome of Scottish-New Zealand. So there are lots of sandflies and lots of rain. There is a Burn's Society and the Scottish Social Club has regular nights of reels and such, where, I imagine, middle aged bank managers in kilts feel the blood of Rob Roy and William Wallace beating in their veins for a few exhilarating minutes. The Dunedin Summer Festival included Pipe Bands, Scottish Country Dancing, the New Edinburgh Folk Club. Probably cabers were tossed and "Och Aye" muttered more than once.

There are also shops, a theatre (at which the Beatles once performed, no doubt an event strongly opposed by city elders at the time) and all the trapping of civilisation. We also had the best meal we've had on our holiday to date and so the fierce Calvinism must be abating slightly.

A sign of its superiority is that it is in Otago. The south island is divided into, Northland, Southland, Westland, Otago and Canterbury (around Christchurch). Only big places get a proper name for where they are, the rest just a geographical shorthand.

We stayed two nights (in the rain) and watched albatrosses and glow worms. But I'm going to whizz on because I'm blogging more slowly than I'm travelling.

From Dunedin another cross country drive through mountains and past lakes (all adjectives apply) gets you to Waneka.


Waneka, I'm afraid, brought out the cynic in me. It is a pretty site for a town but it is in the process of being "life-styled". Life-style is big in NZ, it's a word used more often than 'sheep' or 'historic' and that's saying something. Wherever there are views of lakes or mountains (almost everywhere) you are starting to see posters advertising sales of life-style blocks of land. And life-style is getting big in Waneka. Soon the views will be obscured by the life-style houses (which in some cases seems to mean a second home, in others escape to the good life). And these aren't little beach houses, several we saw were over $1,000,000 which is a lot in NZ. One came complete with 'boutique farm', another with 'boutique winery' - "because you deserve it".

'Boutique' is even bigger than 'life-style' and has about three meanings: there are boutique hotels (i.e. each room individually designed etc), boutique breweries (i.e. small and probably producing special beers) and boutique farms and wineries, for which an alternative adjective might be 'expensive toy'. I'm not sure who 'deserves' a boutique winery, nurses? primary school teachers? social workers?, university lecturers? (no, we don't).

From Wanaka, driving up into the mountains around the northern edge of the lake, you reach, eventually, the west coast and the Fox and Franz-Josef glaciers. We looked at Fox


but I was suffering from a bit of mountain/glacier/lake/island/river/waterfall/pass/green pasture/forest overload. I wanted something ordinary so we continued north until we reached our favourite NZ town of Nelson.

Nelson is that rarest of things in NZ, just a reasonably sized town. There is some tourism but it isn't intrusive. There are cafes, coffee shops, art galleries, second-hand book stores. I could imagine living in Nelson, you don't need a life-style (though a hobby might help during the winter evenings). We stayed three nights, the longest we've stayed anywhere in NZ and even as we left spent an hour or two meandering through quiet streets, edged with streams and divided by parks and gardens.

Here's a shot of the ordinary little restaurant where we had a meal, and one of the ordinary view it had as we were leaving.

Things to Look Out For

From Mannipouri we cross the whole country again from west to east (knowing we'll be coming back the other way quite soon). There is a logic to this but I won't bore you with it. Having discussed ways of staying sane on long drives I'll add an extra one. History and Culture, the Kiwis are mad on it.

Every three kilometres or so they are signs to points of historical, cultural or topographical interest. We've been trying to find the most bizarre. You rapidly give up on historical houses, 'historical' here means anything before about 1920. If you follow a notice board saying 'Ancient Homestead' you'll probably find a small house which would be newer than most of us live in. Another popular option is 'Unusual Rock Formation' - can you imagine, just on the basis of random erosion, how many odd looking rocks you get in a country composed mostly of mountains? Bridges are also popular, "you are passing over an historic 100 year old bridge", can be slightly nerve wracking as the division between 'unsafe' and 'historic' seems to blur at times.

Clifden Bridge (guess who they copied)

A whole subcategory are places where white people did unpleasant things to Maoris, Maoris did ditto to white people or Maoris did equally nasty things to each other. Presumably when whites were that unpleasnt to each other there was nobody left to record the fact. Often (to avoid upsetting people?) the sign say 'Historic Plaque' so you can stop and read it rather than just 'Historic Massacre' (where you'd just think, 'Oh, another one" and drive on).

We have three favourite signs. "Windswept Trees" is on section of coastal road with a strong prevailing wind. The "Concrete Horse Trough" sign is on one side of the road and points to the other where there is, guess what? And finally, "Gate" shown as a tourist attraction in the road atlas. You have to go about twenty miles down gravel roads to find out what is historic about it so we didn't bother. Probably missed the high light of the trip.

This one isn't in any of the categories but it still puzzles me


Having resisted several hundred historic homesteads, we succumbed to an historic lighthouse. It seemed a possible place to have lunch though as the road got longer and longer and the gravel worse and worse we began to have our doubts. But "It's not our car", we thought callously. And eventually reached a pretty spot with the required odd shaped rocks stretching into the sea and an old lighthouse. It looked much like lighthouses everywhere else but a bit smaller. Still we went down to the rocky beach to have lunch.

We got a slight shock when one of the rocks went "Humph" and then kicked sand in the air. Just as well we hadn't sat on it - it was a big bull sealion, sleeping. As we looked around we realised there were others, and indeed two, with a look which clearly said "This neighbourhood is going downhill", pulled themselves out of the sand and headed for the sea. There were five left. The big bull had almost dug himself into the sand, he looked as though he was there for the day. Every so often he'd snort and flip sand over himself with a lazy flipper (sandflies aren't afraid of sealions). The others were smaller and I decided they were a family. Near the bull was a mother and not far from her two small ones lying side by side (the twins). Considerably further off the teenager who wanted to be alone and did nothing and hardly moved the whole time we were there.

Sorry they aren't very photogenic. Mostly they just look like sand and rock.


They seemed to work themselves into the sand by wriggling which worked best for the bull - the twins just wriggled about but nothing happened. On the other hand their sand flipping had the advantage that though they often missed themselves they often managed to spray the other one.

I'd like to report that they barked, clapped their flippers and balanced plastic balls on their snouts but they didn't. They slept and grunted with an air of sleeping off a truly wild night before. Once the bull dragged himself up for a couple of seconds, looked around and, realising it was all just too much, collapsed back in the sand.

Further along the coast was a petrified forest. Voila -

Though it was amazing to see, the thick kelp that grows all along this coast is almost more so. It annoying for fishermen but strangely beautiful when it fills rock crevices with thousands of green, brown and black strands which can be up to twenty feet long and over a foot wide.

After that we forced ourselves to resist odd rocks, strange caves and "New Zealand's Own Niagra Falls" (with cafe). Sometimes you can have just too much excitement.

According to the tourist guide, cafe society has come to Glenfurley (an increase of one in the number of cafes making, well, one) and the Middlemarch Singles' Dance attracts women from as far away as Auckland but Dunedin is the New Edinburgh so we went there.

Another Beautiful Day in Doubtful Sound

If you want to sail in Milford sound it is easy. Book a trip, drive to the harbour and get on a boat. Unfortunately we failed at the first hurdle. For some reason lots of people seem to think February 14th is a good date for romantic trips - it was all booked out as was the rest of the week. So we went to Doubtful Sound which is harder to reach so tough outdoor folk like us go to it.

We set of at about 9am from the quay at Lake Mannipouri. It took about 1/2 hour to cross the lake which is beautiful even by NZ's high standards. I'm not sure my list of geographic features included islands but the lake has lots of them. They are small and thickly covered with local trees (this is deep NZ, not much of your foreign stuff here). Around the lake are thickly forested mountains from which the cloud was just lifting, it cleared by the end of the crossing.


You land at a nameless pier and until 1950 you would have had to set off walking, for a full day if you were fit, through a hail of sandflies along thickly wooded tracks to Deep Cove, a tiny hamlet on Doubtful Sound. Actually Deep Cove is the only hamlet on or near the Sound. Today however life is softer and easier.

A hydro-electric power station was built at the end of lake at the end of the 40's, the water comes from the lake and drives the turbines before running out through a tunnel into Doubtful Sound. It is an incredible feat of engineering: the turbine hall is 1.5km down in solid rock, the run off is 30km, again through solid rock. The whole thing is now remote controlled from hundreds of miles away except for a few maintenance staff (who take a boat ride to and from Mannipouri each day - a big improvement on city commuting!). We descended (by bus) to the turbine room but, to be honest, one turbine looks much like another to me. I'm suitably impressed that they did it in the first place and it is a bit odd to feel that you are that far below ground but I don't think I'd want to work there. Apparently the rock is so solid they they don't notice earthquakes.

The important side effect of the power station is that the electricity company built a road from the station to Deep Cove so now tourists can skip the one day walk and go by bus which we did. Even in a bus you feel quite brave, it's not exactly a three lane highway. It is pretty though.



As we went the driver talked about history, flora, fauna, eartquakes and weather. Even when he was edging around a bus going the other way and we were on the outside with several hundred feet of rock and scrub below us he chatted unperturbed. In due course we did safely reach Deep Cove and we boarded the next boat. It was a beautiful day. To put it in perspective, Deep Cove gets over 250" of rain a year, typically it rains two days out of three which must averages out at about 1" a day when it is raining. We were very lucky.

The boat idled down the sound (which is a fiord by the way, I'm told a 'sound' is a drowned river valley, a fiord a drowned glacial valley). The captain explored side channels, the mountains come down to the water so there would be little chance of getting ashore. There are occasional big scars without trees where earthquakes or storms have dislodged the more precarious vegetation. The sides are several hundred feet high with water cascading down every few hundred yards.

The mouth of the sound is shielded from the force of the sea by a line of rocks where fur seals were basking. Since coming on this trip I've seen a lot of seals and they must be one of the most accomplished animals at just lolling about. After sailing as close as we could we continued down a side channel where we were joined by a pod of
dolphins which jumped and raced the boat.

A few more pics, note the earthquake damage. It was only a couple of days old.



And so, eventually back to Deep Cove, back up through the valley to the lake and then home. We ended our trip by walking along a little track beside the lake listening to the birds until we got back to our camp site. No more earthquakes, but after over eight hours of sun, water, boats, dolphins and seals I doubt if we'd have noticed the tea cups rattling.

Doubtful Sound(s)

If you visit NZ you have to go to Fiordland. Nobody we met suggested there was an alternative but there is now a small choice of where in Fiordland you go: between Milford Sound and Doubtful Sound. Milford is apparently getting much more busy and a couple of people we met, who had visited both, preferred Doubtful so we went there. I like the name Doubtful Sound - a good name for an experimental band maybe.

But first we had to get there, or at least to Mannipouri the nearest town. We have got used to long drives across country and in NZ they are very easy. The main roads (Southern Highways 1-99) are single track each way with overtaking zones every 10kms or so. They are well surfaced, often straight for long distances and empty. You often meet two or three cars an hour, one of which at least will be a camper van. Even away from passing places, in the rare cases where the view ahead isn't clear, cars going slowly will pull over to let you overtake.

For the first couple of thousand kilometres you can just go "ooh" and "aah" at the scenery


and make comments on the odd names on signposts. The first destination here isn't very encouraging

while "Hopeless Creek" and "Dismal Flats" probably hide lifetimes of misery. Next you can play spot the road kill. It's usually possum. I have a theory that, feeling guilty about all the damage they have done, depresson has set in and they've started throwing themselves under cars. Which is very depressing if you have to wait an hour or so for one to come along and even then they are going too slowly to do more than give you a headache.

Next stage, when you've counted 100 possum, you foolishly try the radio. Near posh places like Dunedin and Christchurch there are even Radio 3-ish stations. Even Invercargill has a station playing non-stop 60s classics. But in Dead Horse Gully you get Radio Pacific (aka Radio Pathetic) phone ins, golden hits of 1953 and the odd religious program.

We listened to a bit of a phone-in but had to stop after ten minutes. Do you remember my theory that those totally lacking communication and inter-personal skills as well as interest in or empathy with humanity worked at Information Bureaus in Australia? In NZ Infomation Bureau staff are friendly, helpful and knowledgable, the otherwise unemployable work for Radio Pacific. And if your speech sounds like "Well .... err .... hello to ... err ... every.... errr I .... um .... mean ... listen .... errr .... s" then you've got it made.

Then we had a few minutes of how Jahweh smote the Abhimeleks or some other bunch who'd upset him. It occurred to me that a story of how a bunch of poor sheep farmers living in tents get the better of all those smart city folk would appeal to lots of poor sheep farmers living in places like Hopeless Gully.

Journeys were getting a bit desperate when a second-hand book seller gave us a tape he'd found in a box of books. It was unlabelled but anything's better than nothing. Unless it turns out to be the Silver Strings Hawaiian Guitar Umpah Band playing pop jingles like "Tie a Yellow Ribbon to the Old Oak Tree". Personally I'd suggest a noose rather than a yellow ribbon and the arranger for the Silver etc would get first use. I didn't think you could make "Tie a Yellow Ribbon" worse. And even worse than the that, someone thought it was worth copying the original album onto a tape!

Eventually, at a very strange road-side cafe (lock your car doors, don't stay after dark and count how many fingers everyone has) we found "Rock and Roll Paradise" with tracks by Carl Perkins, Elvis, Gene Pitney, Guy Orbison, ..... We've been singing along ever since. Which, to an outsider, is probably worse than listening to Radio Pacific.

Finally we are in Mannipourri where we experience two of NZ's unsung tourist features. The first we didn't even notice we are experiencing, the second we haven't stopped noticing ever since.

One thing rarely mentioned in tourist propaganda is that there is an earthquake a week out here. Apparently we had one while eating supper in a little campsite over looking the lake (all usual adjectives apply to lake). It was quite a big earthquake, 6 or so on the Richter scale, but it didn't even rattle the tea cups. The epicenter was below an island about 20kms away but no-one noticed. How very New Zealand-ish not to make a fuss. There have been a couple more since, papers duly report them: "It was a dry warm day, max temp 25. min temp 12, small earthquake at about 20:15 (about 6.3)". It think earthquakes have taken on board the Kiwi approach to life.

The second feature, which is never mentioned, are sandflies. Give me earthquakes any day. The sandfly was named by Captain Cook who should have stuck to sailoring and steered clear of entymology. The sandfly has nothing to do with sand specifically and is just as partial to urban lawns. A better name would have been the "evil blood-sucking crazed monster fly" (or whatever that is in Latin). It bites people. The bites grow into bumps about 1/2" across which turn purplish. They itch - if you are very sensitive to them you may decide to apply a power sander to an afflicted point or maybe saw off a limb with a rusty tin can. And then they itch some more. And more. They can keep itching for a couple of weeks I'm told.

We haven't been as badly affected as some people. Eleanor bought some super-strength insect repellant. Wear it walking down a crowded street and people leave a space for you. There is a rumour that NZ made Agent Orange during the Vietnam war, now I know what they made next. Sandflies are however cunning creatures. My worst bites came in a space of about ten seconds walking across a stretch of grass. I didn't think it was worth the full body armour and ended up being pebble dashed with tiny vampires.

Now I don't want to be accused of blanket anti-sandfly-ism. The males are quiet inoffensive creatures. Vegetarians even. They probably practise meditation and support charities and good causes. It's the females that are the problem. Even they have apologists. "The sandfly doesn't want to bite you! They don't really like human blood. They prefer bird blood but sometimes, well you know how it is, there just isn't time for a proper meal and you grab what's going." Which is a great consolation: you aren't chef's special just a quick Happy Eater road-kill burger. I feel better already. I'll put the radio on, perhaps that will soothe me.

Burning Up the Strip

We had planned to spend a second night in Arrowtown, just so that I could sneer at consumer capitalism ... and have a meal at the restaurant. But the next day was cold and wet and we decided to spend a couple of days in Invercargill instead. This was somewhat perverse geographical choice since it meant we would later have to retrace our steps to get back to Fiordland which we had planned to visit next. On the other hand, setting out for a region with an annual rainfall of over 6 metres when it is already pouring down needs tourists made of sterner stuff than we can manage.

Invercargill is an odd place. We camped in town on what turned out to be the agricultural show ground. The 'facilities' were planned for the days when hundreds of rough tough farmers would be wanting a quick sluice after leading the love of their life (usually a cow, sometimes a sheep) around the ring. Big breeze block barns with concrete floors is what you need, no frills. Also there was a railway track going down one side and a prison formed another boundary. In the road outside young lads revved up their engines at night. Big city life, eh?

It was the first town that warranted the name since Christchurch. The population must have been over 25000 and it had several long streets, crossed in grid fashion by shorter ones in the shopping area alone. (Street names include, Tweed, Spey, Clyde, Teviot, Ettrick, ... you can probably guess which country supplied the founders of the town.) There is a museum, gardens, a cinema (we went to see 'Ray') and, surely a true sign of sophistication, a full size model of an elephant made entirely of corrugated iron. It was also our first experience of a rather unlikely throwback to England. At the better schools, adolescent boys are still forced to wear grey flannel shorts, a form of ritual humiliation which I had hoped was extinct. Wearing shorts in NZ generally is common and lots of kids would wear them anyway, it's the grey flannel which looks so odd. Girls from similar schools, as in the UK, wear calf length tartan skirts. In Invercargill, with its strong Scottish roots, tartan seems more appropriate than it does in England.

It doesn't take a long time to 'do' the most southerly city in NZ (and in the world, unless Tierra del Fuego has a competitor town). Eleanor visited the museum and saw the tuatara. Another unique NZ special, they are lizard-like reptiles but more closely related to dinosaurs than western lizards are. One of the specimens is 127 years old. The age is due to the tuataras' ability to cut its repiration rate to under ten heart beats a minute and become comatose for long periods. It would be invidious to suggest that skipping hours or days on end until something happened would be a useful skill to have in Invercargill.

Given it is so remote (go south and the next land is Antarctica and after that somewhere in W Africa probably), one of the surprising high spots of the town is an excellent restaurant called 'The Fat Indian' which serves excellent and unusual Indian meals. It appears to be run entirely by two lads in their early twenties. I longed to ask, but they were a bit too busy, how a couple of young Indians ended up in Invercargill. I'm sure the answer would be dreadfully mundane but I love the thought that one day, one of them just thought "Why don't we leave Uttar Pradesh and go somewhere really exciting, like Invercargill?"

I don't have a picture of the Fat Indian, there was another restaurant which we didn't go to called the Cabbage Tree, cabbage trees are a sort of palm and are found everywhere. What they have to do with cabbage I don't know. Equally common is NZ flax which has in common with the cabbage tree that it looks nothing like its namesake. So here are pictures of both.


Just to add to the images, this is what you get if you gou to the south of the town and look out (OK there is a bit more land to the south but it is empty)

For the young locals, excitement comes on weekend evenings. Kids customise their cars, add big exhausts and burn up main street. They sort of race but since there are traffic lights at the end of every block, and they are all very law abiding, it is mostly a matter of gunning the engine and doing 0 - 25 mph in a few seconds before getting stopped at the lights. The less expert practice outside the camp site and we can confirm that some of the engines are very loud.

It feels like one of those small American towns which have featured in so many movies about juvenile rites of passage. You would say (especially if, like me, you've just been reading about T H Huxley) that it's a form of sexual display with souped up cars replacing peacock feathers. Except we almost never saw a girl. It rather reminded me of of the kakapo, a flightless NZ parrot whose numbers have dropped almost to zero. Apart from predators the kakapo's problem appears to be that the male's display is positively offputting to the females who waddle off as quickly as possible. Young men of Invercargill, be warned or the love of your life may have to be a cow or sheep.

Ups and Downs

After a couple of nights at Lake Takapoe we visited Mt Cook. There's not a lot to say really, Mt Cook is a big mountain. Extract almost any adjectives from the list in the last blog and apply to any geographical features.


Most of the area at the foot is owned by the grey, forbidding, ugly and expensive Hermitage Hotel. The only independent business is the Old Mountaineers Cafe which has wonderful pictures of the early days of NZ mountaineering. It also tells the story of the first ascent of Cook which is illuminating.

In the early years of the 20th Century a group of British climbers decided it was time to make the first ascent in the name of Queen and Empire. A party was assembled and the long trip made to NZ. Since they had to come by boat, and even now Mt Cook is fairly inaccessible, it must have taken months but in due course a camp was set up ready for the assault. The day before the climb three local Kiwi lads slipped up to the top without telling anyone, left a flag and descended quietly. Mt Cook is claimed for New Zealand not the British Empire. One very small nail extracted from the Imperial edifice in a very New Zealandish sort of way. I can imagine a shy, modest but satisfied smile spreading across the two islands.

Mt Cook also marks the end of the Tasmin Glacier which gets very little press compared with its partners, the Franz Josef and the Fox. Probably this is because it ends in what looks like an explosion in a gravel pit. Not pretty blue green ice caves, just a massive wall of gravel beneath which are hundreds of feet of ice. And just to completely blow Tasman's chances of becoming a major tourist site, the melt water fails to form a pretty blue lake but instead looks like industrial effluent.

We climbed up to see it anyway on an exceptionally hot day and, because it was so close, forgot to take water. When we arrived, tired and thirsty but pleased with ourselves, we found a group of Japanese old age pensioners just pouring away the last of their unwanted drinking water as they set off back down to the car park. Rather a Mt Cook sort of experience.

We spent the night in Omarama. It mention this just as a warning to anyone visiting NZ. The camp site was very clean and tidy but the 'town' is best forgotten. If it wants a name for itself (as most small towns seem to: 'Town of Trees' - in a country with billions of them; 'Town of Lights' - so now they have electricity), I'd suggest 'Town whose name is almost a palindrome'. Assuming of course that 'Hot Sweaty Armpit' is already taken.

The logical next stop would be Queenstown but as we approached, a plethora of signs (and the Lonely Planet Guide) made it clear that this was a town for sailing, kayaking, rafting, jet skiing, water skiing, para-gliding, wind surfing, heli-gliding, jet boating and everything else suitable for lithe, tanned and, especially, young bodies. And worse was to come. It's a big centre for bungy jumping. To slightly modify P G Wodehouse, "There is enough pain and suffering in the world without attaching elastic bands to your feet and falling off bridges". So we went to Arrowtown instead.

As you enter it, Arrowtown looks like everything Queenstown is not. Rather superior bungalows in big well kept gardens, all full of roses, dahlia and every sort of European as well as NZ flower. There were lots of aliums so you knew it was posh. Tree lined streets gave shade and everything was calm and orderly. Not a para-glider in sight but instead, at the Arrowtown Bowling Club, elderly white attired ladies and gentlemen (you wouldn't dream of just calling them 'women and men') played bowls with restrained passion. The click of wood on wood, followed I imagined by a G+T in the club house.

And that is what three quarters of the town is like. The last quarter is 'historic main street'. The original town was built in the 19th Century and must have originally looked like a small version of the towns you see in westerns. The single street wouldn't have been wide enough for a gun fight (fortunately Kiwi's don't do that sort of thing) and many of the painted wooden buildings seems slightly smaller than you would expect but, still, here they are: the old post office, the post master's house, the stables, the village store with their logos intact. Except that the livery stable sells designer clothes, the village store has posh jewellery and the post master's house is 'one of the best two restaurants in New Zealand'.

When we last visited, fifteen years ago, being one of the best two restaurants in NZ was no great accolade. If you had a chip fryer and a fridge of frozen mutton chops you were in with a chance. Now food is big to the extent that the opinion about the restaurant was that of the New York Times food critic! They came to Arrowtown!

Despite sneering at the unreality of it all, we did stay and have a coffee. And then discovered there was a cinema showing 'Cosami' which is an excellent Italian movie so we stayed. The Cinema was as unreal as the rest of the town but was so 'life-style' that it reached a new level. First it has only seven rows of seats, six seats per row. The seat are big enough for two people and you sink into them. You can stretch your legs out full length. There is silent air conditioning but, just in case, there is an intermission when you can buy a glass of chilled wine with a choice of New Zealand cheeses to nibble or a superior organic ice-cream.

Walking back through the dark, silent streets to our camp-site we passed a house with a sign that read "Arrowtown Stress Management Consultancy". I kid you not.

on the road again

I meandered off my topic in the last blog, also you may have noticed that the ducks obviously weren't in Sydney, I meant to write 'Christchurch'. And now back to Christchurch and on the road again.

The land around Christchurch is flat and in winter the wind comes from the South, i.e. from the Antarctic Ocean and then Antarctica. It can, I'm told, be chilly. One solution to protect stock is shelter hedges. These can be one, two, three or even all sides of a field and are based mostly on local pine - though some look much more like Leylandia. They are an impressive feature near Christchurch, you can be driving along for hundreds of yards next to a thirty foot high fir hedge, trimmed flat to topiary standard and 10-15 feet deep at base. Gates are 'carved' into them and look like the entrance to some strange estate.

Further out as the land becomes more rolling there is more natural shelter but wind brakes are often planted of poplar and silver birch. In this part of NZ there are so many imported trees you could easily be in Europe. In fact Eleanor pointed out that as the fields become more rolling, the lines of poplar give a Tuscan look.

We passed through a few small hamlets. In NZ you often just get four or five houses, maybe a shop, at the side of the road and it counts as a village on the map. The real status sign is a board showing the place's history. One example went, roughly,

• 1880 - Col. Smith buys land
  
• 1885 - Col. Smith begins farming
  
• 1890 - Bakery built
  
• 1892 - Bakery burned down
  
• 1895 - Bakery rebuilt
  

I chose that as the most exciting period in the town's history. After 1895 not much happened. Though we couldn't see any sign of the bakery. May be it fell down and nobody noticed.

The only town of any size we passed through that day was Fairlie (pop about 200 I'd guess). Fairlie is cursed by it's name: there's the 'Fairlie Good Butcher' and the 'Fairlie Good Bakery' and after that imagination failed them. If they were big enough to have a doctor you could have 'Fairlie Treated' or 'Un-Fairlie Treated' for a firm of lawyers. How about builders called 'Fairlie and Squarely'?

On the edge of town was an ostrich farm ('Fairlie Unlikely to Succeed') but beyond that the view was (last time, I promise) fairlie impressive

Following the road through Burke's pass took us to the unreasonably beautiful Lake Takapoe (and my photos really don't do it justice)

At this point something needs to be made clear. New Zealand is a country of ocean, beachs, rivers, glaciers, fiords, waterfalls, mountains and lakes. They are all beautiful/amazing/breath taking/stunning/fabulous/incredible. In addition mountains are either snow capped, cloud shrouded or both (occasionally they may be majestic, awe-inspiring, somber or forbidding). Lakes will always be 'fringed' with mountains down which 'magnificent' waterfalls cascade. Waterfalls always 'cascade' and never just 'fall'. This a requirement of the all powerful Department of Conservation. Unfortunately while it is easy to sneer at the cliches it is difficult to avoid them. If your knowledge of NZ landscape is based on documentaries and the Lord of the Rings films, well, the reality is better. So from now onwards when I say 'waterfall' think 'magnificent waterfall cascading majestically into the crystal clear blue waters of the stunning Lake XXX which is fringed with awe-inspiring snow capped mountains carpeted with natural pine' (sorry, I forgot to say earlier, some mountains can be carpeted).

We parked out van at Lake Tekapoe for a couple of nights. We spent one morning climbing Mt St. John which is next to the lake. Not a hard climb but the temperature was about 35^o. Here am I looking like some "stout Cortez" who's landed on the wrong continent (emphasis on 'stout' here) while Eleanor strides across the bush having just turned her back on the other view of Takapoe.


On the second night we went on a star viewing trip. Takapoe is one of the clearest sites in NZ. This is the only time in my life that it's been almost impossible to see Orion because it is blanketed out by all the stars you don't see in the UK. The Milky Way was, well, like milk. The Megallenic Clouds were so big and bright you thought they were clouds till you looked through binoculars. Using a big telescope we saw the rings of Saturn and amazing clusters of stars.

In the Nothern Hemisphere finding North at night is easy if you can see the stars. We were taught how to do it in the South. You find these, they point to that, two of which almost point to something else and halfway between that and the star you first thought of is south! I have a simpler method: go north till you cross the equator. Find the pole star. Go in the opposite direction.

I've just realised the logical flaw in my method. Method 2: get a couple of friends to give you an ephemeris of the southern sky. From the time, date and where Orion is you can read off south (thanks to Barbara and Steve - we might have been stuck here forever). Failing that ring Patrick Moore.

Our tour ended with astronomy as it should be done. While other people were clamouring for a second look through the telescope, Eleanor and I lay side by side on a big blanket and watched the stars above us. That you can't do with Patrick Moore (thank goodness!).

Daphne the Duck is Dead

We were sitting in the Departure Lounge at Sydney airport having spent all but three of our Australian dollars. Just enough to buy a Sunday paper. The Australian is OK, and good on foreign news. In general Australians tend to be outward looking, they have to be, and coverage of SE Asia in particular is good. So we read about the likely impact of George Bush's second term, the landslide victory of the Thai Prime Minister, rumblings from Pyongyang, the state of the Hong Kong dollar, progress towards reform in China. But what about New Zealand? Culturally Oz's nearest neigbour and our next destination. After a lot of searching we found one reference to NZ.

In preparation for a big golf tournament in Christchurch, a cull had been made of ducks living on the course. An accidental victim had been Daphne, a duck beloved of local school children. Everyone was very sad. That is the news from New Zealand.

The emotional relationship between Australia and NZ is a complex one. It sometimes seems as if Oz is the big brother; noisey, brash and generally making fun of his much smaller sibling. NZ is the small quiet child who takes teasing in good part, either because he really believes he is a silly kid or maybe because, secretly, he feels he's smarter. There is in a great deal of NZ life an understatedness which sometimes seems likes shyness, sometimes modesty, sometimes just a wish to be left alone.

One example came within 20 minutes of picking up our camper van. We tried to follow the map to the campsite but got lost and stopped at a petrol station to ask the way. The assistant said not a word in reply but reached under the desk and silently handed us a photocopied map with the route from there to the campsite marked in high lighter. We apologised for bothering him. "Happens about four times a day" he said without discernable emotion.

The suburb in which we camped that night was like a slightly scruffy part of Folkstone or Bexhill-on-Sea. Streets of mostly brick, occasionally wood, bungalows. In England you'd call them retirement cottages. Each set in a small square of garden, each with a lawn, each with a border of chrysanthemums, dahlias, roses and red hot pokers. Alliums are only at the posher houses, they've only just started to reach NZ. The current national flower appears to be the red-hot poker. It appears everywhere, in gardens and bush, as does pampas grass. It is really difficult to tell what is native NZ and what is imported. However, here is a yellowy red-hot poker.

Christchurch is on a very flat plain which isn't typical of NZ. Most of the country reminds us of Scotland. Outside the mountains themselves (which are twice as tall as the Scottish ones), farmland is very like the borders. Rolling hills, soft, green and rounded, always with a wall of mountains somewhere towards the horizon.

As we set off we saw the first stock: a field of alpaca. In the course of one day we saw sheep (of course, more sheep than people etc), cattle (about as many as people), deer (next in numbers after cattle and mostly the big American sort, some smaller but one signpost said 'Elk Farm'). Rather less expected other than the alpaca were llamas and ostriches. New Zealanders will farm anything if they get the chance. At least the big animals have done less damage than the smaller ones, rabbits (fur and meat) and possums (fur!) were both a bad mistake.

When the rabbits escaped and became a pest an 'ecological' solution was attempted. Stoats, weasels and ferrets were imported to control them. Unfortunately nobody told the rodents they shouldn't eat eggs and NZ's bird population was devastated. One recent attempt at solution has been to de-vermin islands in the hope bird populations can be strengthened there. There seems little prospect of a wide scale re-colonisation by birds however and some woodland seems ominously quiet.

The possums have destroyed large areas of forest (as have escaped deer). Dogs and cats haven't helped. Cats look decidedly shifty and nervous - at least the three we have seen in ten days do - as if they fear their days may be numbered. Rats escape from cargo boats, we've even seen hedgehogs. A farmer we met said a hedgehog had made it's home under her chickens' nest box. It took some time to discover why the hens didn't seem to be laying so well.

Before this gets too depressing, I'll leave you for now with some wildlife that isn't upsetting anyone. A couple of sealions that didn't want to share a beach with us and a not very good picture of of dolphins playing catch.