Day 9 in New Zealand: Across the Southern Alps to Christchurch

In all the New Zealand travel Facebook groups that I joined in preparation for this trip, pretty much everyone else in every group was all, "I'm going to spend three months in New Zealand--where should I go first?" or "I'm going to buy a car in New Zealand, travel in that car for eight months, then sell it before I go home--any free car camping tips?"

And I can see why! There is SO much to do and see that it was agony to narrow down our itinerary to a doable nine days, and then even more agony to stick to that itinerary once we were there. So cool places like Milford Sound and Lake Taupo will have to stay on my must-see-someday list, as will, I am so bummed to say, seeing the Southern Cross with my very own eyes. I'd measured my expectations, because I'd read that it can be pretty rainy in the Spring, but come on! Not even one clear night for stargazing?!?

Next time, I guess!

But we DID get to every other must-see-on-*this*-trip on our lists. The kid wanted to see kiwis, albatrosses (she actually saw plenty of those at sea!), and a rainforest, and she did. I wanted to see glowworms and geothermal stuff, and I wanted to show the kid her first glacier--and I did! My partner wanted to see Hobbiton and Weta Workshop, and the Southern Alps by train--and on this day, he finished off that list!

We had plenty of time that morning for the drive back up the west coast to the train station in Greymouth, so we got to stop whenever something looked pretty, and browse around the little towns we passed through:

I also did the last of our souvenir and Christmas stocking shopping in one last grocery store--the Cadbury and Whittakers did okay in the checked luggage on the way home, but the smaller chocolates and the Jaffa Cakes got mauled nearly to crumbs, dang it. 

In the early afternoon we returned our rental car in Greymouth, and boarded the TranzAlpine train to cross the Southern Alps. It was so pretty!

We spent a LOT of time out in the open-air observation car, where the best views--and the best photos!--lived--

--but it was a five-hour trip, so we also had a lot of time to just hang out together, which was really, really nice, too:

Like, even though we'd been practically living in each other's pockets for the past nine days, almost all of that time had been either sitting facing the same direction in the car, or doing some kind of activity that required most of our attention and all of our breath. We're not really restaurant people, so we'd actually spent very little time facing each over a table and chatting. It was nice to have all the downtime in the world to chat, trade crossword puzzles (the New York Times Wednesday puzzles are our sweet spot) back and forth, and set out all our snacks for a proper feast:

We didn't see much more of Christchurch than the view out of various taxi driver's windows, so add that to my to-do list for next time, too! I also didn't see much more of my kid, as she was booked on a separate--and MUCH more convenient!--ticket. Even though her first flight left Christchurch just an hour before ours, she ended up getting back to Indianapolis TEN HOURS before us! She was nearly to Auckland by the time we boarded our own flight there--

--already in the international terminal and getting ready to board her flight across the Pacific by the time we arrived, and by the time we had settled in to our long layover in Houston, she was picking up our car from the economy parking lot at the Indy airport and heading home for a nap and a shower!

Also, Air New Zealand food isn't the worst, but it's not great, either. The roll and the two glasses of wine were the only real winners here:

When we FINALLY got back, and the kid rolled up to the curb at Arrivals to pick us up, my partner was so hungry that he basically had her take us straight to Wendy's, which was kind of gross and hilarious. We'd joked the whole time in New Zealand that we were on a "corn fast," on account of none of the foods we'd consumed--not even the sodas!--had high fructose corn syrup, so I guess ending the corn fast also meant that our vacation was really over, too!

Here's our whole trip:

Day 1: Auckland

Day 2: Hobbiton

Day 3: Rotorua

Day 4: Glowworms and Kiwis

Day 5: South to Wellington

Day 6: Wellington

Day 7: South Island

Day 8: Franz Josef Glacier

Day 9: TranzAlpine Train to Christchurch

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Day 8 in New Zealand: I Meet a Glacier

This day is all about mountain hiking and meeting a glacier.

But first--breakfast!

Serving pancake stacks at the cafe across the street from Pancake Rocks is pretty much the best synergy I've ever seen. OBVIOUSLY we simply had to have them!

Also, flat whites:

Fun fact: I now want a twinkle light kiwi sooooo badly, but probably not badly enough to change up my electrical outlet for it...

It was another beautiful drive, snugged between the mountain and the sea, down to Westland Tai Poutini National Park, where the goal was to introduce our kid to her very first glacier.

Hopefully she'll see many more in her life, but just in case they all melt before she can, she'll always have the memory of Franz Josef Glacier.

I was surprised to discover that you can actually see the Franz Josef Glacier from the parking lot!

Honestly, that's not a bad option if you've got some other hikes that you'd rather do, because the view isn't *that* much better from where the most popular walk ends at the Trident Creek Falls, but still. If 3000 meters is as close as you can get, then 3000 meters is where we're going!

Fortunately, this early in the day the weather was PERFECT for hiking--

--AND for seeing a real, live glacier from just 3000 meters away!

It's kind of a bummer, though, when you look at that long plain of gravel and you realize that if it hadn't melted, Franz Josef glacier would actually be right THERE where you could touch it. Sigh...

We wanted to do another hike in the area while the weather was so nice, so we decided to follow Roberts Point Track to the first of the cool swing bridges I'd read about.

Peters Pool was just as prettily reflective as we'd been told it would be, although you could see that the weather was already changing...

But it was still lovely and light when we got to the first swing bridge on the trail:

My partner isn't much for swing bridges over glacial streams, so he hung back and took our pretty pictures while we enjoyed the bridge crossing:

The big kid and I thoroughly enjoyed ourselves, however. This was our best look at the "glacial flour" that makes the rivers coming from the glacier look so milky:

On the far side of the bridge, we spent a little time looking around while a few other hikers crossed--

--and then we all enjoyed the hike back, especially when the glacier came back into view. 

This was such an exciting warning sign! 

The weather later that afternoon didn't feel workable for the whole Fox Glacier walk, so instead we drove over to this viewpoint outside of town. It was pretty overcast, but fortunately we could still see enough of Fox Glacier to say we'd seen it:

Definitely too overcast to see Mount Cook, though, which was kind of a bummer:

The evening's major adventure was more prosaic: repack all our crap so we could all fly home the day after tomorrow! My partner hadn't been very impressed by my purchase of this luggage scale, but omg did it come in handy, because he was VERY impressed (in a horrified way...) of my purchase of books and crow-like scavenging of lovely rocks over our trip. We had to divvy up the books and the rocks to keep my luggage from being overweight, and we further divided up the delicious snacks so that if someone's bag got lost, perhaps not all of our Whittakers and Cadbury and wine would be. And then I had to practically sit on the kid to convince her not to leave behind her foul weather rainsuit, she was so sick of it, but I'm sorry to say that I could not save her rain boots. I hope that they're happy on the feet of some other New Zealand adventurer right this minute.

Ah, well. I'm sure she'll regret it when she says she needs rain boots for the next round of bizarre environmental scientist antics that she's currently applying to and I tell her that I already bought her perfectly nice rain boots so the next pair is on her, humph.

All packed up and ready to go, we await tomorrow's adventure: the TranzAlpine Train across the Southern Alps!

Day 1: Auckland

Day 2: Hobbiton

Day 3: Rotorua

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I Read Death, Daring, and Disaster, Because People Keep Dying in National Parks and I Want to Know about it

Death, Daring, & Disaster - Search and Rescue in the National Parks by Charles R. "Butch" Farabee Jr.
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book is probably more of a deep-dive than most readers would want, especially if you were mostly interested in deaths and extreme rescues in a specific park. For the best deep-dive into deaths in specific national parks, I’d recommend the Death in series. Out of all the volumes, I’ve only read Death in Yellowstone, but that one is SO good and I still quote it all the time. I even once made a small detour to visit a couple of bear cubs mentioned in that book--they’re now residents of a very nice zoo, and I’m sure they don’t even remember that time when they were babies and they ate literal humans.

However, if you’re also very interested in specific types of misadventures across the national parks, then this book is perfect as a round-up of all of them (and could really use an Index for that!). For instance, I enjoy reading about misadventures while caving, and it wouldn’t have occurred to me that one of the first recorded misadventures would be in Sequoia National Park, the story of a soldier discovering Lost Soldiers Cave in 1909 or 1910 and then promptly disappearing into it. The cave itself was apparently then lost for nearly 40 years before being rediscovered. I think this is the cave that is now referred to just as Soldiers Cave on the Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Park site, and that site also doesn’t say anything about this origin story… or if the remains of that original lost soldier were ever discovered!

It was also easy to get drawn into dramatic stories I’ve never before heard about, like the time in 1941 that part of a squadron of P-40 Warhawks crashed in Kings Canyon National Park. Four pilots died and four bailed out over the High Sierras--and then two bombers also crashed while searching for survivors! The wrecked plane of one of the survivors was eventually found, and there are anecdotes online about casual hikers perhaps finding other pieces of wreckage, but some planes are still officially missing. THIS is the kind of stuff that I find so interesting--imagine not even just actual humans, but actual AIRPLANES, we know exactly when they crashed, we know approximately where they crashed, and we still can’t find them! Blows my mind.

Okay, this story made me cry: in 1959, a park ranger in Glacier National Park got word that a grizzly bear was literally currently in the act of eating a hiker. So he ran over there, found that indeed, a 250-pound grizzly bear was eating a guy, tried to scare the bear away, couldn’t, and so instead he risked his own life to shoot the bear, even though this was super risky because what if the bear turned on him instead, or what if he shot the hiker? He did shoot the bear without shooting the hiker, though, rendered first aid, directed the rescue operation, and the hiker lived. I was curious about this story, so after reading it I Googled to see if there was more info, and y’all, here is where I started crying: fifty years after this event, Ranger Dayton and the bear attack survivor had a reunion! This post tells even more about that day and what followed. 

Okay, but then after all that I had to double-check that afterwards, Ranger Dayton had continued on in peace and happiness with no further crazy events. HOWEVER, he was actually the superintendent of Carlsbad Caverns during that time in the 1970s when terrorists tried to take it over, so yeah, he’s had himself more than his fair share of adventures.             

Here’s a photo of Ranger Dayton. I’m a big fan.

There are also some really awful stories, like the dentist who got caught in a blizzard on Mount Rainier with his two children and died saving their lives by blocking the entrance to the snow shelter they’d dug. Three mountain climbers, including a nine-year-old, died after falling into a snow cavern in Grand Teton National Park, causing an avalanche that buried them up to their necks in snow, and then drowning when that avalanche dammed the stream that was running through the cavern. Another mountaineer actually jumped into the cavern right after them but couldn’t save them because they were buried so deeply, and reading his report of how he kept trying to pull the nine-year-old out of the snow by his helmet and his little jacket while having to witness him drown was so awful. There are some photos here. 

One more interesting through-line is how every now and then the families of someone who has died because of their own carelessness in a national park have sued the national park service… and won?!? In 1993, two of the chaperones of a Mormon Church Explorer Scout group died when they led their kids through an extremely risky route that nobody had the training to do. Their families sued and got 1.49 million dollars. I was also an Explorer Scout that year, and Sergeant Martin would NEVER have put us in danger like that.

A lot of the stories are actually reprints of news articles of the time, which made the book a little more challenging to read, as the tone and style often changed, but I really liked seeing how each event was reported within its own particular cultural context. There were several block quotes that were harder to figure out the provenance of, which would be more problematic for citation, but didn’t bother me as a casual reader. To add to the confusion, sometimes the included photos related to the specific event being described, sometimes they depicted a similar event, and sometimes they didn’t seem to be chronologically or thematically relevant at all. I loved the photos, but I definitely wanted a clear, concrete association between each photo and the event it recorded. 

Honestly, what I think this book wanted to be was an encyclopedia. It has all the great stories, but it’s not the most pleasant experience to read cover-to-cover. But if it had a keyword index and more graphics and citations, it would be a stellar reference for one of my favorite Special Interests.

P.S. View all my reviews

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Day 7 in New Zealand: To the South Island, and Then We Kept Going South

Time has no meaning, because honestly it was zero problem to hop up at 4:15 am and drive through a sleeping Wellington to the Interislander Ferry. 

Really, I preferred it. There's no traffic to fight at 4:15 am!

My favorite thing about riding in a ferry is how well you're herded. I genuinely love nothing better than driving nose to tail at 3 miles per hour in a single line, and at every decision point there's a friendly figure in a high-vis vest to tell me exactly what to do. It's so stress-free not to have to think for myself!

I'm not much of a sailor, and I'd heard that the Cook Strait can be very rough, so as soon as the captain came on the intercom and said that our passage would "not be optimal," omg I started popping the Dramamine like they were Pez.

Not so my beloved and loving partner. Just as he does in every situation in which his spouse might desire comfort, entertainment, and distraction (*cough, cough* 14-hour flight *cough*), he found a seat, sat in it, and proceeded to fall deeply asleep, ne'er to awaken until the announcement came 3+ hours later that it was time to get back to our cars:

We have barely pulled out of the dock, and the man is sound asleep.

Fortunately, we had a bit of time before we actually entered the Cook Strait for me to enjoy myself:

Eventually, however, they closed the outside deck and began to make periodic announcements that people should vomit in a baggie and not in the ferry toilets, and so I spent the next good long while sitting at the furthest window forward and watching the bow go up and down, periodically overdosing on Dramamine and thinking VERY firmly to myself that I was not going to vomit.

Also, I'd left my earbuds in my other fucking bag. Not all adventures are pleasant!

Also also, Cook Strait IS genuinely notorious. I wasn't just being a baby!

I swear to god I about kissed the ground when we arrived in Picton, but above all, we must carry on with the sightseeing, so rather than engage in my most preferred activity of the moment, which was to die, we instead bought some Christmas candy at a local candymaker, and did a wine tasting and bought some wine at a local winemaker:

I actually just finished that bottle of wine a couple of nights ago, and I miss it! I don't normally love white wines, but this one was very nice. Also, fun fact: instead of a tasting room, the New Zealand wineries have a "cellar door." More semantic translation fun!

So... it may have been after-effects of the seasickness, or it may have been jetlag, or to be honest I definitely overdosed on Dramamine in an anxious panic there on the Cook Strait, so it may have been that, but after we got back in the car I dunno what happened for a good long while. I just sort of greyed out, and when I was back online we were on the coast!

Did we even eat lunch at some point? I really have no fucking idea. All I really recall from the entire drive from Hunter's Winery to the coast is that in this rental car, every time we turned it on it would connect to my phone via Bluetooth, which was AWESOME because there was a screen that would display my Google Maps on the dash for my partner to see. Do newer American cars do that, too? I wouldn't know, because our personal American cars are a billion years old, ahem. Anyway, when it did that, it would also for some reason connect to my Spotify and just start playing the Fleet Foxes radio playlist, which... is fine, I guess? I mean, it was almost Thanksgiving at that point, which means that White Winter Hymnal is pretty much required daily consumption. But also, that playlist is less than three hours long, and it came on EVERY time we started the car, and played continuously the entire time we were in the car, and the couple of times I tried to turn it off, or even to change playlists, it fucked up the GPS so my partner suddenly couldn't see where he was going in the middle of traffic, so I eventually was too scared to touch it and we just listened to Fleet Foxes radio whenever we were in the car. So ANYWAY, I'm not sure what else happened during that drive, but what I recall from it is just sort of a Fleet Foxes, and Fleet Foxes adjacent, sense memory. 

This Vampire Weekend song is very good, by the way. I heard it maybe 1,000 times over the nine days we were in New Zealand?

Oh, you know what, you guys? I have literally just had the realization that I probably should NOT have chased 3+ Dramamine with a couple of glasses of wine at 11:00 am. Whatever, it's fine. Neither of my travel companions can remember whether or not we had a proper lunch that day, either, and neither of them were compromised.

By the time we reached the trailhead for the Cape Foulwind Seal Colony Lookout (three and a half hours later, ahem...), I was more or less fine-ish and ready for a nice hike in the brisk fresh air!

The hike was almost exactly as was described--there were no "foul" winds (although it was VERY windy... was that what they meant by "foul?"), but there were rocks, and there was a lookout, and from the lookout, we could see seals on the rocks!

There is no soap opera that can match the drama of seals fighting over nothing on their rocks:

The drive down the coast afterwards was breathtaking (my partner states that the drive across the island was also breathtaking, particularly the part that followed the river, but I have no memory of this), and we got to our last stop at Punakaiki at just the right time, right at high tide so we could see the blowholes near the Pancake Rocks:

Lol at the photo below, because I was fighting for my life on those stairs!

Our hotel was in a beautiful spot sandwiched between the cliffs and the beach, and the kid and I had a lovely, long walk along that beach before it started spitting down rain again. We had a delicious, hot pub dinner, long, hot showers, and we were going to try to find a movie on the local cable, but I fell asleep before it even got started.

Tomorrow, we see the glaciers!

Here's the rest of our trip!

Day 1: Auckland

Day 2: Hobbiton

Day 3: Rotorua

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, dog-walking mishaps, encounters with Chainsaw Helicopters, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!