The Camps in New Zealand--The South Island

 

From Australia we flew to New Zealand’s South Island.

Although there are many islands in New Zealand, the two main ones—and by far the largest—are the South Island and the North Island. We spent time on both, but this week’s post will concentrate on the South Island.

We flew into Queenstown, New Zealand and took a gondola ride up Bob’s Peak while we waited for our rooms to be ready. The photo at the top of this post shows Roland and me at the top of Bob’s Peak with Lake Wakatipu in the background.

New Zealand’s scenery is very different from Australia’s, filled with barren mountains and lakes. Just because the mountains are barren doesn’t mean they aren’t beautiful, though. The next photos show the mountains surrounding the airport, Lake Wakatipu, Queenstown from above, and the telephone in the bathroom of our room at the Hilton. (Roland just had to have that photo).

We spent the next day in Queenstown, which was my least favorite place on the trip. It reminds me of Traverse City, Michigan, or any other lakeside town that caters to tourists. Nothing against those towns, which are fine for people who like small shops or watersports (Queenstown also had parasailing, ziplining, etc.). Even I like them fine for an hour or two, but then they start boring me. We spent most of our time walking through a park that they called a botanical garden but wasn’t as heavy on the flowers as I’m used to. The highlight of Queenstown was Fergburger, which advertises the best burger in the world. It was very good and worth the long wait. The next two photos show Queenstown and the long line at Fergburger.

We were late leaving for our hotel because our bus got into an argument with a camper van. The bus was parked and suffered only minor damage and the driver wasn’t hurt at all, but the accident delayed us for about an hour when I was already bored with Queenstown.

The original idea had been to spend two nights in Queenstown back to back, but there was some event going on (a marathon or a bicycle race?) that made hotel rooms hard to come by, so we drove from Queenstown to Te Anau, where we spent two nights. On the way, we drove through farming country, where there are lots of sheep. They don’t pay for themselves these days, though, so many of the farmers are also planting hops. I don’t think we saw any hops fields, but I did get a number of photos of sheep, all taken from the bus window as we drove by. Since they look like any other sheep, I won’t include a photo.

The next morning we drove to Mitford Sound in Fiordland National Park. On the way we stopped at Mirror Lake. We also passed a snow-covered mountain, which I photographed from the bus window as we drove by. Those are the next two photos.

The highlight of the day, however, and also one of the highlights of the trip, was our cruise on Mitford Sound (which is really a fiord). Our cruise director was very excited that the clear weather allowed us to see the top of Mitre Peak (so named because it is shaped like a Roman Catholic Cardinal’s mitre hat). Apparently it is like Denali in Alaska, where you can see the top only about 10% of the time. There were also a number of waterfalls along Mitford Sound. The next two photos show Mitre Peak and one of the waterfalls.                           

That night we took a tour through the interconnected Glow Worm Caves, which was really cool. The roof of the caves looked like a clear sky filled with stars. That’s my description, anyway. All I could see was the white glow that stars give off. Roland saw some green and blue. Photographs weren’t allowed, but they wouldn’t have come out, anyway.

On Monday we returned to Queensland with two stops on the way. The first was at the Kawarau Bridge, which is the suspension bridge where bungy jumping was born. We didn’t have time for anyone from our group to do it, but I got a photo of someone leaving the platform. Look for the red shirt. The other photo is the bathroom sign there.

The second stop was at Arrowtown, which was a gold rush town in the mid-1800s and is now a tourist stop. The second-most interesting thing at Arrowtown is an area that shows how the Chinese lived in those days. They weren’t allowed to dig for gold until the whites decided it was too much work to try to get anything else from a spot, but the Chinese were hard workers and made out okay. The next two photos show the main street of modern-day Arrowtown and one of the Chinese houses, which, as you can see by comparing it with Roland, was pretty small.

But the most interesting thing in Arrowtown was the public toilets. They were totally electronic, and the only manual thing in them was the person using them. They give you ten minutes to do your business (with a warning at minute nine). If you aren’t done by then, the door automatically opens and puts you on view to the world. In fact, there were a number of interesting toilet signs in New Zealand. The next two photos show the bank of toilets and the sign warning you about the time limit, and the last two are signs that appeared in a number of public toilets around the country.

That night we ordered room service and watched the St. Paul’s service on the internet. Then we went to bed since we had an early flight to the North Island on Valentine’s Day. More about that next week.