A South Island Adventure Home Next
The sky was a leaden, heavy curtain
descending and obscuring the horizon. The lake mirrored a grey sky, while
rolling grassy hills stretched beyond our view. Small birds surfed the
continual wind. Curious cattle
came
wandering by to check us out. We had arrived, after a long day of driving from
Christchurch, at Braemar Station, our first stopping point on a 14-day adventure
tour of New Zealand’s South Island. We had chosen the Rimu trip with Active New
Zealand after extensive research and well-documented endorsements – an ad in
“Outside Magazine” and a quick tour of their website.
We’d thought to plan our own trek through the natural wonders of the S. Island to take advantage of our early arrival here and the expected arrival of summer there. But as we contemplated the logistics and uncertainties of planning a trip like this for 4 of us – Barry, Jodie, Eli and his partner Amelia – we began to suspect that the depth of our ignorance was matched only by our overloaded schedules in DC as we prepared to leave. Professional help sounded like a good option.
We’d never taken an organized tour anywhere before. We wondered what we were getting into. Would we be surrounded by couch potato geeks festooned with video cameras and knee-high Banlon socks for 14 days? Or would our companions be hunky alpha fe/males covered in Polartec and technical trekking gear, bursting their hiking shorts with bulging thighs and scoffing at our pasty, pillowy desk bound profiles? Would it turn out NZ’s idea of “active” would be a long walk from the bus to a hotel? Or would we be spending our nights stretched out on rocky ground covered only by ripstop nylon, eating gorp and energy bars, showering only when it rained, cleaning our utensils with sand and stream water and spending our days in forced marches through rough country?
So when we met the bus at Christchurch airport on Dec. 29, we were…nervous. We had taken care to “kit out” so we’d fit in: Tevas, Supplex shorts, newly purchased backpacks (for Jodie and me), polypro hiking shirts, trekking poles, a minimum of cotton and a maximum of fleece. True, the Fannie Mae logos on nearly all my fleece might have been a giveaway, but we were hoping to pass.
We’d come to the S. Island a few days
earlier after Eli and Amelia arrived in Wellington on Christmas day. The only
route between the N. and S. Islands is by ocean going ferry. The Cook Straits
can be one of the wildest short passages anywhere. The prevailing westerly
winds from AUS sweep in and are funneled
by NZ’s boomerang shape and mountain ranges straight into this narrow passage.
Luckily we missed any real dramatics. Our “fast ferry” was a gigantic catamaran
model with jet thruster engines of some kind that really earned the name,
getting us and our newly purchased, used car across and into magical inlets
garlanded by aquaculture stations, evergreen covered hills and calm water in the
Marlborough Sounds in about 2-1/2 hours.
We spent several days in this area on our own. We stayed in some lovely B&B’s, met some great Kiwi hosts, and sampled lots of Sauvignon Blanc, etc. at the famous Marlborough vineyards. We learned quickly that the roads, while high quality sealed asphalt and well marked, are not for the faint of heart or those in a hurry. Two lanes are the rule nearly everywhere. There are no alternative superhighway routes, so everything travels the same roads. If you read our Turkey reports from 2001, this will sound familiar – it sure did to us! Of course, here we have the added excitement (which Jodie particularly enjoys) of driving on the “wrong” side of the road. And most of the bridges in the S. Island are narrow, one-way crossings. So imagine us careering down one of these babies behind double trailer lorry rigs carrying sheep, once again skirting a breathtaking coastline, packed four to the car in our 1996 Subaru Legacy wagon, off on our adventure.
These are some views of the scenery we passed on our way through the upper part of the S. Island. The farms and vineyards are reminiscent of Tuscany. The shoreline ranges from rocky beaches to black sand. But the water is cold at every one!
It took us three days to work our way down this incredible countryside. We saw hillsides covered in grape vines fade to sheep stations dotted with woolly herds. From time to time paddocks with herds of farmed deer would interrupt, or rough pastures with cattle. Mountains began to loom, and then crowd in toward the sea, narrowing the track on which the road ran. At one point the road and the railroad running parallel to it shrank to a few dozen meters and snaked through rough cut tunnels bored right through the encroaching hillsides. At the B&B’s we wandered through vineyards, sheep paddocks and fields of flowering lavender grown for a local artisanal cosmetics line.