Dunedin to Queenstown

You will have to excuse our lack of blogging ... the last several days have been quite full of adventure, excitement, and driving. Also I forgot to pack an Ethernet cable and the B&B at which we were staying at Te Anau only has wired internet access.

On Friday, we did the Otago peninsula, just to the East of Dunedin. The driving was moderately terrifying, as the Kiwis apparently do not believe in guard rails. Our first stop was Larnach Castle. We were as surprised as you to learn that there is a castle in New Zealand.

The castle and its ground were gorgeous, but the sordid tale of the Larnach family was like a train wreck: you really want to look away, but have to keep finding out more. To sum up: Larnach had five children by his first wife. His first wife died suddenly, so Larnach married her sister with some sort of fancy prenuptial agreement to protect him from his creditors. His second wife died in surgery and there was some shenanigans with him forcing his children to sign an agreement without knowing what it contained to get all of his holdings back. He married a third wife: a sweet, young thing about 30 years his junior. Everything was super until one of his sons started having an affair with her. That ended with Larnach shooting himself in the Parliament building (he was a politician) and later the son killing himself as well. Soap opera writers could not make that sort if thing up.

After a perilous drive back down the mountain, we continued up the coast towards the wharf from which we were to depart for our albatross and seal viewing cruise. The cruise was pretty cool: we happened upon a port bound fishing boat which was trailed by a couple hundred sea birds, amongst which were Royal Northern, Royal Southern, and two other species of albatross. The guy driving the ship said that this was a very rare occurrence, as albatrosses do not normally follow shipping vessels that close to shore. In addition to the albatrosses, we also saw myriad other species of sea bird and New Zealand Fur Seals.



To cap off the afternoon, we went further up the coast to the Royal Albatross Centre, where we got to see four of the twenty-three chicks currently nesting on the Otago peninsula. A Royal Albatross chick will, at its heaviest, weigh in at 12-14 kilograms! That is 26-31 pounds for those of you, like me, who can't convert metric to American units in your head.

The drive back to Dunedin was not quite as nerve wracking as the drive out, as the west-bound lane was against the cliff face, instead of on the water side (with no guard rail and a shoulder whose width is best measured in millimeters), but it was still arduous. We had dinner at a hip little place called Craft, where I had lamb shank and Jen had a bowl of kumara pumpkin soup as big as her head (kumara is what they call a sweet potato here). We were greeted by a lovely little NZ$10 parking ticket when we got back to the car.

On Saturday, we had to drive up to Te Anau. Since it was not that far of a drive and we had all day, we decided to take the scenic southern route, rather than the more direct (and apparently not as scenic) route. Things were fairly slow going, due to all of the sharp, steep turns that driving through the mountains entails.

And then we saw the sign: Cannibal Bay, 400 m Turn Left. Jen and I experienced one of those moments of near-telepathic nonverbal communication that can only exist between two people who have been married as long as we have been (5 days, at that point), and we immediately turned off and drove 14 km over an unsealed (unpaved to you Yanks) road to a little beach with all sorts of cool rocks, cliffs, sea lions, and tourists attempting to be eaten by the sea lions. I'll let the pictures speak for them selves:





After scampering over rocks and around sea lions for longer than we should have we headed back to the car and realized that we might or might not be able to make it to Te Anau for the glow worm cruise that was scheduled for that evening. Contributing to the delay was the dinner we had in Invercargill at a place called Hell, which serves gourmet pizzas and had old Tom and Jerry cartoons playing on the plasma a screen. We managed to make it with minutes to spare, but only by leaving local speed ordinances crying and bleeding in the corner. Despite the name, the glow worm cruise was really cool. We took a boat across Lake Te Anau to the cave entrance, where they have built a wee lodge with refreshments and such for people taking the glow worm tour.

In the lodge at the entrance to the cave, they showed us a couple of time-lapse, infrared videos of glow worms in action. One of them was of a territorial fight between two glow worms that started with one glow worm knocking the other off the ceiling of the cave and ended with the knocked off glow worm getting eaten by the other one after a valiant, but ultimately futile counter attack. Several of the senior citizens who made up the rest of the tour group where quite shocked to see the brutality of the life of a glow worm.

Once the videos were done, we walked a couple hundred meters into the cave. There, we hopped onto a small, 10 person boat, the guide turned off all of the lights and we went deeper into the cave on the water to view the glow worms. Now, when I say "we went deeper into the cave on the water", what I mean is that in the pitch black darkness (the glow worms did not emit enough light to actually see anything) the guide stood at the bow of the boat and pulled us through the cave along chains that had been set into the cave wall. Alas, we could not take pictures of the glow worms, so you'll just have to take our word for it that they were cool.

The whole thing took about 2.5 hours and, once again, had us checking into our B&B after 10:30. This place was decorated in a fashion that I can only describe as ultramodern. Jen and I both felt like we were not cool enough to stay there. But, we had already booked it and they didn't have any other guests, so we stayed.



On Sunday, we had a free day in Te Anau. Having slept past all of the interesting cruises and tours departing from places near Te Anau, we decided to drive up to Milford Sound and do some short hikes and see a fiord. That is not a typo, apparently only the Scandinavians spell it fjord. We did six little side hikes, each 20-40 minutes in length: Lake Mistletoe, Walker Creek, Lake Gunn, Lake Marian Falls, and The Chasm. All of these were incredible in their own way. The best, however, were The Chasm (where a river has carved the rock into huge, intricate, swirling shapes that go down about 15 meters) and Lake Gunn (which was a walk through a beech tree forest that predated European knowledge of the Americas).



After the last side hike, we hoofed it up to Milford, where we hoped to catch a quick dinner and then try to head back to Te Anau before the sun went down. We missed the cafe closing by mere minutes and the bar did not start serving food for another half hour, so Jen had great fun taking pictures of the fiord until the batteries in the camera died. For dinner, Jen had a steak sandwich that was served with an enormous pile of beer-battered fries and I had pork sirloin garnished with fried apple and a beer-honey sauce that I am going to try to make once I get access to a kitchen again (I even went and asked the chef how it was made).



The drive back was uneventful once we got out of the clouds, except that the traffic signal at the kilometer long tunnel turns off at 6, so we had an interesting time navigating around oncoming traffic in the 1.5 lane tunnel. We also pulled off the road and killed the car to look at the stars in the clear, moonless sky without any light pollution.

That sums it up for the last couple of days. We are in Queenstown now, getting ready to head out for the evening. I'll tell you about our adventures this morning with a bloke named Fraser and Jen's first experience with left-side driving tomorrow.