Jamie's Latest Cinematic Masterpiece

So I probably shouldn't have promised that I wouldn't post about New Zealand again before Jamie finished up his latest video of our travels.  Hope you forgive me, because I want to share it now!  Please excuse the geekiness.

Back to non-New Zealand news soon...

Baby Bear.

Last post about New Zealand, I promise!

It's been a recent "tradition" to buy local yarn when we travel and knit something using it as a memento of our trip. This trip wasn't an exception and there was an abundance of great yarn stores all along our route through NZ.

There are a lot of sheep in New Zealand, so I was surprised to find that the "true" New Zealand yarn is actually made from possum.  At first, I pictured the possums that we have in the U.S. and was kind of grossed out.  Fortunately, New Zealand possums are a slightly more palatable and look like this.:

So, I bought some possum yarn and knitted our way from town to town.  My favorite project for this trip was this little hat (modeled here by "Wolfie").

Why so little?  Because it's my first knitted project for this little guy coming in the Fall!

My mom has been a bit more industrious and has already made multiple baby blankets, some booties, and I think she's working on a sweater.  Needless to say, he'll be plenty warm for his first Winter...

Day Thirteen and Fourteen: Taupo to Auckland

Man Boo and I were quickly coming to grips with the fact that our vacation was rapidly coming to a close.  There was a lot to see on the North Island, but we opted to call some audibles on our itinerary and re-routed ourselves a bit so that we could go to Waitomo Caves (glowworms!) and then do an ultra-touristy trip to Hobbiton.

I couldn't take pictures while we were in Waitomo Caves for obvious reasons (it needs to be super-dark in there to appreciate the glowworms) but here's a professional picture so that you can get the idea. It was like that, but less blue.

This ended up being another one of my trip favorites.  It was a very touristy thing to do, but it's popular for a reason.  It's pretty spectacular.  At one point we were floating down an underground river in pitch darkness, we turn a corner and suddenly GLOWWORMS. 

 In the same vein, Hobbiton was also surprisingly fun. For most of the trip we hadn't planned on going, but as we started getting closer to it, Jamie started to mention that we could try it. It wasn't until we missed out on a chance to go on Day 12 (they were sold-out) and Jamie was genuinely disappointed, that we realized that we needed to get there before we flew back,  Just think about all of the campy pictures we would have missed out on!

For those who don't know (I'm looking at you mom and dad), Hobbiton is a movie set used in the Lord of the Rings and Hobbit movies. It was built as a temporary set for the LOTR and when they went back to rebuild it for the Hobbit, the farmer upon whose land it was located stipulated that they must build it to be more permanent and maintain it.  A savvy farmer.  So now it's a fully-functioning farm (mostly for sheep/wool) and a cash cow (no pun intended) of a tourist attraction. 

(It's Bag End!)

(Sam's house...and also the final shot of the entire LOTR trilogy)

As a little bonus, the ticket included a free pint at The Green Dragon so we enjoyed a nice drink and a scone to finish out our mini-adventure.

Then, we had to pack up our things (including several boxes of Tim Tams) and headed to Auckland to catch an evening flight back home. Three things I learned from this trip:

1) New Zealand has such fascinating geological history. It was originally part of Gondwana Land so parts of the South Island looked just like the rainforests of South America. But, at the same time, the huge tectonic shifts created these big mountains and it's far enough south that it can get quite cold.  So you'll have rainforest-like jungle juxtaposed with snow-covered mountains in the same view.  

2) New Zealand only has one truly native mammal which is a type of bat. Most of the other quintessential New Zealand fauna are birds because they somehow made the journey to New Zealand thousands and thousands of years ago from elsewhere. Many of those birds (like the now extinct Moa and the Kiwi) became flightless after a time on New Zealand since there were no mammalian predators.  The only reason the bat survived as a native mammal was because at some point, New Zealand was largely underwater which wiped out most of the land-based mammals that originally lived on the New Zealand chunk of Gondwana.

3) It was way harder to get my head on straight coming back from New Zealand than it was flying to New Zealand. We left Auckland on Saturday evening, but got back to San Francisco on Saturday afternoon.  For the next two weeks, I kept on thinking we were a day ahead.

And of course, the best way to end a trip across the world is to have a layover in San Francisco to see the family...

(Riley showing Tio the new hammock)

While the nieces didn't seem fazed by the beard Tio had sprouted after almost two weeks, I kind of liked it...

Day Eleven and Twelve: Wellington

I need to get through these a lot faster! The good news is that we have made it to the North Island!

After a pretty comfy trip on the ferry across Cook Strait and ended up in lovely Wellington -- one of the most pleasant surprises of the trip.  After spending so many days in the quiet and sparsely populated western coast of the South Island, it was nice to be in a bustling city.  Especially one that was as beautiful as Wellington...

We walked to the "eat street" and grabbed a delicious meal (note: eating out in New Zealand is incredibly affordable!).  The next morning, we walked over to the awesome Te Papa, the National Museum and learned a ton about the Maori culture, the geological history of New Zealand, and even saw the "colossal squid" specimen with eyes the size of soccer balls...it totally looked like something out of Independence Day.

(This thing was HUGE)

Being in NZ's capital, we had to make the trek over to Parliament and Man Boo was in political geek heaven. We took a tour through the different government buildings and learned a ton about NZ's political workings.  We even learned that one of the sitting members of Parliament was a former Minnesotan by way of California.

(Lunch at a Chippery near our hotel which was awesome. And L&P, the "Inca Kola" of NZ)

Stopped at Huka Falls which was pretty spectacular -- a huge volume of water flowing through a pretty narrow waterfall.  Apparently the water flows at such a fast rate that it could fill an Olympic-sized pool in 11 seconds...

Day Nine and Ten: Abel Tasman and Kaiteritiri

Our day in Abel Tasman National Park included some of the best highlights (in my opinion) of the entire trip. We got up bright and early and headed to the north side of the park. While the south side is usually the most popular, the best hikes were only accessible by kayak and the weather was iffy.  I loved the tramps we ended up taking -- Jamie and I basically had the whole trail to ourselves and the weather cleared up just in time for our adventures.

We did a lovely tramp alongside a river, across a couple suspension bridges, and landed us at the base of a pretty great waterfall.

A day hike like this in the States would have been completely overrun by visitors...

We decided to head over to Takaka and Kahurangi National Park to check out Te Waikoropupu Springs (a.k.a. Pupu Springs....heh).  Ironically, the water in Pupu Springs is considered among the clearest fresh water in the world.  It was officially the clearest fresh water on inhabited land until a few years ago when it was "out-cleared" by another lake in a more remote location in Tasman. Still. It was pretty incredible.  It was hard to capture with my amateur photography skills and equipment, but trust me, you could see all the way to the bottom through the springs and it got pretty deep.

And of course, the drive along the coast back to our "bach" (i.e. NZ AirBnB equivalent) was gorgeous.  We had to stop and take a stroll...

Day Seven and Eight: Wanaka to Franz Josef Glacier

We had to put down a big deposit on the campervan which instilled all sorts of fear into me whenever we drove that huge honking piece of metal. Add to that the windy mountain roads, the left-side driving with the right-side wheel, and the wet weather and you can bet I was NOT going to drive the campervan. Fortunately, Jamie was/is an excellent driver and navigated the 7m vehicle expertly and managed the 13 days with nary a scratch.

The temperamental weather did offer some challenges to which I had to act as the "voice of reason" (read: pessimist) to Jamie's more adventurous optimism.  Take for example this "road":

There is clearly a river running through this road. I'm pretty sure Jamie knew that there were a few "fording" situations on this particular road to get to a hike he wanted to do, and thought that by the time we got to one of these fording sections I would be asleep or something.  Yeah, we turned around and did a different hike that required no fording of raging rivers in the campervan.  Fortunately, the drive back was quite lovely and I didn't mind having to do it twice.

Later that evening, the storm also decided to knock down a huge tree into our path.  Normally, I would be pretty freaked out at the prospect of being on a tiny mountain road, in the rain, at night and a certainty that AAA wouldn't be able to help us. But, being in New Zealand, it wasn't long before several muscle-bound men also got stopped by the tree blocking the road and took it upon themselves to clear the tree with their rugby-playing biceps.  

And, of course, the help of some chains and a strong truck. I don't know that a handful of Americans would have been as resourceful and quick to solve the crisis in a similar situation.  Those were some stereotypically-manly men.

After a lovely few days driving up the West Coast of New Zealand during which we saw glaciers! kiwis! rainbows! we ended up in Kaiteriteri with a lovely view of the Tasman Bay.

(There's a glacier somewhere behind those clouds...)

Day Five and Six: Milford Sound

Milford Sound is the wettest inhabited place in New Zealand, and is among the wettest in the world getting about 252 inches of rain each year on average.  In other words, 21 feet of rain on a normal year.  If it happens to be one of those days of sunshine when you visit, Milford Sound would look like this:

The picture above is not my picture.  We didn't get that type of day -- instead we got a rainy one that came after a huge storm.  So, while we didn't get mountain peaks and blue sky, we got LOTS of waterfalls which I thought were pretty cool.

(See that huge waterfall? We're about to get super-close to it and we're about to get soaked)

(See?)

(Kayaking among waterfalls -- the rain obligingly stopped for this kayaking adventure...)

We got to cruise around Milford Sound ate surprisingly tasty food, talked to some other travellers as we ventured briefly into the Tasman Sea then spent the night on the boat.  I believe this was Jamie's favorite excursion of our whole trip...it was pretty spectacular.

The next morning we headed out of the Sound and headed towards Lake Wanaka. In our first major deviation from our itinerary, we decided to skip an afternoon and evening in Te Anau (glowworm caves were flooded) and instead decided to start our long drive up the West Coast. Probably the best deviation of the trip!  The drive up was gorgeous...

...and we spent our first official night in the campervan which was surprisingly comfortable.

(This is the kitchen -- bathroom/shower on the right -- and the bed is behind me)

The first restful night of sleep convinced me that we should plan to spend more nights in the van and cancel some hotel reservations.  The other (more awesome) surprise was that the town of Wanaka had a pretty awesome bakery that sold dulce de leche-stuffed churros which is a treat I had resigned myself to only getting while in Peru.  I'll 'fess up that there was one of these bakeries in Queenstown too so we may have indulged a bit and gotten them twice on our trip.

Vacation is for indulging, right?