First We Tramp, and Then We Luge: Mar. 2-4

After three days in New Zealand, Sarah and I both thought that it was a very beautiful place; we had mostly just driven around, though, and we needed to stretch out our legs.  New Zealand, we would find out, is a great place for tramping (Kiwi translation: hiking), and we got some great ones in over the next couple of days.

 

We left our pretty little campsite below the mountains around Omarama (the hot tub town from Sarah’s last blog) bright and early in the morning.  The Hoff is a complex sytem of transportation and accomodation rolled into one, and it required about a week of tinkering in order to figure out how to make it work well for us.  For instance, we quickly figured out that bungy cords could be stretched across the oh-I-would-never-think-of-saying-that-bad-word bars that people grab when about to get in a wreck, thus providing us with clothes lines to dry our towels on during the day and hang our headlamps from while reading at night.  That was a victory, but we hadn’t figured out the best way of sleeping.  If we slept all the way inside, it was sort of uncomfortable and would fog up The Hoff as if he were still on Babewatch, sucking in his gut by the sea.  If we slept with the tent cover attached to the open rear door, it was much more comfortable to stretch out but also cold (eventually, I lined the bottom with our sleeping bags with good results).  Anyway, what I should have said before wasting the last 30 seconds of your lives (a minute if you are engineers and tried to analyze what the hell I’m talking about), is that it was really cold, so we headed out early that morning.

Our destination for the day was Mt. Cook Village, home of the highest mountain in Australasia.  We had neither the time nor the fitness level to even consider a climb, but we were hoping to get some nice views and hike around in it’s vicinity.  After hitting the road early (see gigantic paragraph above), we stopped off in the town of Twizel, in which I resisted the urgent temptation to ask every local whether he/she called themselves “Twizzlers,” for provisons before heading up the scenic highway towards the mountain.

Mt. Cook is actually closely surrounded by a bunch of other larger mountains, so your attention is not immediately drawn to it from the highway; instead Mt. Sefton’s jaggedly carved glaciers dominate the landscape, with Mt. Cook sort of tucked in farther behind.  It’s good to get there early in the day because it tends to hide behind the clouds on most afternoons.  Along the way, we passed some more of the pristine blue lakes that seem to cover most of the South Island.

Mt. Cook’s native Maori name is Aoraki, named after one of their Gods, and the name means “cloud piercer.”  I think that it is a very fitting name for the majestic peak, much more so than the name chosen by some brown-nosing survey ship’s captain.  In any case, I had been personally interested in Aoraki for quite a while, so I was really excited to see clear skies and hoped that we would get a really good look at it that morning.

We were in luck!  As we hiked up the Hooker Valley that stems from Aoraki’s Hooker Glacier, we enjoyed all kinds of magnicent mountain views.  At first, we got some unexpected entertainment as nearby Mt. Sefton sent avalanche after avalanche of snow down it’s flanks.  After following a stream to the point where it met a wide river, we got our first view of Aoraki, which dominated the scene in front of us for the rest of our hike.  The peak looked sort of like a dragon, with a large pyramid-like summit surrounded by smaller points on each side.  Interestingly, the 3,755 m summit was actually 10 m taller before 1991, when the top inexplicibly fell off!  We took our luch at Hooker Lake and spent equal time checking out the Hooker Glacier (original summit route, climbed in 1884) and the nunmerous chunks of glacial ice floating in the lake.  What an amazing place to be!

That afternoon, we got out of The Hoff at the public shelter when an unfamiliar voice called out, “Heeeyy Guys!  How are you?!”  Drawing a blank as I turned around, the girl helped me out; we had met her and her husband in Nepal at Annapurna Base Camp!  She had a very good memory, but I knew exactly who she was once she said Nepal because she had wondered if we were climbers since our packs had looked so large on the trek.  Anyway, Carla and John were on their own extended journey, and it was really fun to hear about their experiences during the four months since we’d met them.  They also gave us some good tips for sightseeing in New Zealand.  Who knew that we would ever again run into a couple that we had met at 4600 m elevation clear across the world!  We may run into them again in Peru later this year, and I hope we do; they are really nice.

We had planned to take a longer hike the following day before leaving Mt. Cook, but the weather had other ideas.  It began to rain around mid-evening and continued to pour all night and into the mornng.  We awoke to pea soup fog and a constant drizzle, so we headed down the hill towards a lake town called Wanaka.  Originally, we had scratched it from our list because of time constraints, but now we had an extra day; good thing, too, because Wanaka ended up being my favorite spot in New Zealand. 

Wanaka is a beautiful little spot that is known to be a more laidback version of crazy Queenstown, which is about 100 km south of Wanaka.  Set at one end of the beautiful crystal blue waters of Lake Wanaka and surrounded by the mountains of the Mt. Ascribing Range, Wanaka is a place where everyone seems to be busy running, hiking, rock climbing (we tried to find a place that would rent us gear but no luck), and skiing in the winter.  It was my kind of place–you could make it hurt all day and then finish with a cold one in a laidback pub while enjoying a sunset over the lake.

We spent the afternoon hiking up to a place called Rocky Point, which overlooked pretty much the entire Lake Wanaka region.  We ascended briefly up an open hill before hiking past Diamond Lake’s cattail-covered shores, and then we climbed for nearly an hour through the forest, noting a couple of really overhung sport routes that someone had put up on the cliff walls next to the trail.  Some pretty little bell birds–green breasts and puffy feathers that looked ready to moult–twittered above us as we walked along.  From there, the trail opened up above tree line, and we hiked the final half hour to the top.  The whole thing was nonstop gorgeous; layer after layer of mountain–some snowcapped and some covered with green treetops–rose up into the sky with Lake Wanaka glistening below and stretching seemingly forever, with Wanaka’s rooftops across the nearest shore.  We later learned that this was a filming area for Lord of the Rings, and I can see why!

That night, we had dinner out (a special occasion for us during our travels in Australia and New Zealand) at the local pub.  They had good food and good beer, and great views of the lake.  I’d never eaten rabbit before, so I tried rabbit stew pot pie; it was really tasty (Elmer Fudd was right) but became very awkward for me later as a group of rabbits sat huddled near the camp bathrooms, eyeing me as if they knew…what’s up with animals waiting for me outside of bathrooms on this world tour?  Anyways, I survived and got back up to Sarah and The Hoff in time to enjoy a lovely sunset over the lake–Wanaka had treated us right!

Our final stop before making our way down to the Fiordlands, where we would spend most of the following week exploring, was Queenstown.  Most people make this tourist haven a main stop on their trip; it’s got lots of shopping, rowdy bars, and opportunities for adrenalin-junkies that included bungy-jumping (apparently a Kiwi invention) and sky-diving.  To us, that meant it would also be loud, crowded, and full of obnoxious tourists who felt the need to bump their chests and get tattoos that said bad-azz, so we decided to put Queenstown on speed dial and move on.

There was a wine region between Wanaka and Queenstown, so we did a little tasting along the way.  We stopped in at two of the better known ones in the area, Peregrine and the Chard Farm.  New Zealand is known mostly for Sauvignon Blanc, but pinot apparently grows well here too–the climate is actually pretty similar to the Willamette.  The pourers in both places had heard of our area’s pinots, which I thought was pretty cool.  They both had decent pinots themselves, but they were pretty expensive and not quite as pleasing as the ones at home.  The Chard Farm had a really good view of the river gorge below it, as well as a really weird “bike tree.”

Queenstown is home to the most famous burgers in New Zealand, although I’m not sure how much of an honor that is in a country dominated by sheep and sheep-eating people.  :)  Anyway, the line outside of Fergburger wrapped around the corner, but we braved the crowd so that I could order The Big Al, which was basically cardiac arrest oozing out of two buttered buns.  In case you’re wondering, that would be:  1/2 lb. of beef, double cheese, 2 fried eggs, lettuce, onion, tomato (they don’t say it right here, though), onion, and beetroot.  It was awesome…I almost puked.

 

After heading up the hill, Sarah walking and I waddling behind her, we took a gondola ride up the hillside overlooking pretty Lake Waipatu and downtown Queenstown.  You can do all kinds of stuff up here (we wished that we had time and money to mountainbike), but our task for the afternoon was luging.  They had two curvy tracks running down the mountain, and you could climb into these little luges, like a cross between a wagon and a go-kart, and zoom down the hill.  We tried out the “scenic” (slow) course first, and I locked up the brake because I am too big to to brake hard on the slow curves, but both of us flew down the “adventure” track, zooming and squealing and laughing as we sped through the curves and turns.  Luging was a blast!

 

Having Ferged and luged, we had seen all of Queenstown that we wanted to see during our two hour stay, so we headed down the road along the beautiful lakeside highway to Te Anau (“Tay Ah New), the gateway to the beautiful region known as the Fiordlands.  Life with the Kiwis was getting exciting for the Raffs!