A Great 48 Hours in the South Island

The South Island is known as New Zealand's more dramatic island. The North Island has a lot going for it (including the best city, ahem, Wellington and supposedly the best one-day hike on the volcanos known by Lord of the Rings fans as Mordor). But as you'll see in the pictures below (spread over four posts), the SI has some pretty great stuff.

There's no way to do it all in one two-day visit, or probably even a two-month visit. We didn't do the glaciers, the sea and bird life, or the kayaking through the beautiful beaches, to name just a few things. But we did do a lot, and we were in the key skiing area without doing any skiing. If you're ever in New Zealand for 48 hours, here's a great way to do it.

Day 1:

• Leave Wellington at 10:30. Enjoy hassle-free check in: no ID check, no metal detector(!), no nothing. Just check in at the e-ticket kiosk, and you're off!
  
• Land at noon. Check into hotel. Enjoy views (see pics below).
  
• Head out to Gibbston Valley Winery about 20 minutes out of town. Good food. Great 2003 Pinot Noir.
  
• Spend rest of day walking around Queenstown.
• Eat dinner, head to casino for blackjack. Win NZ$275.

Day 2:

• Hop on a small plane over the Alps to Milford Sound.
  
• You can take a bus, but it's just as expensive, it takes 6 hours each way, and you miss the incredible sights (see pics below). Slightly nerve-wracking, but well worth it. The flight-cruise-flight package costs NZ$350. I thought that might be too much for a 4-hour trip, but it is by far one of the best values of anything I've ever done. The flight alone was worth the price. Highly, highly recommended.

• Enjoy a 1.5 hour cruise through Milford Sound. From sea level, it's almost more awe-inspring than the view from the air. (Pics below.)
  
• The key to the whole trip was that we had amazing weather. All the locals were saying we were very lucky, because the sunshine was unrelenting in all three of Queenstown, the flight over, and the Sound itself. I guess that's very rare. Of course, the skiers haven't had good snow, but, again, we weren't skiing.
  

• Fly back after the cruise on a different route.
• Our pilot was great--she was very skillful, informative, etc. We flew Air Fiordland, which I'd definitely recommend. However, the planes did seem a little, um, Wright Bros.-era. Combine that with landing on the grass runway back at Queenstown, and it had a fairly rustic feel to it. A company called Real Journeys seemed to have newer planes (at least they had two propellers).

• Return to hotel by 2:30. Enjoy views on balcony.
• Head 15 minutes north of town to the Shotover Jetboat. It's basically a roller coaster on a river, complete with 360-degree spins at breakneck speed and near-misses with the canyon walls. A blast.
• Take gondola up to the seemingly floating mountain chalet behind Queenstown. Enjoy beer and great views of sunset (see pics below).
• Eat dinner, head back to casino. Lose about $200 of last night's winnings at first, then hang tough and fight back to even, and then on up to another NZ$155 in the black, for a grand total of $430 in winnings for two evenings. Conveniently, this is just about the amount of plane ticket.

Day 3:

• Enjoy breakfast. Remark on the serendipity of having yet another perfectly sunny, 60-degree day in the middle of winter in the snow-covered Alps.
• Head to Millbrook in Arrowtown. Play 9 holes of golf in great weather, surrounded by towering mountains. Enjoy lunch.
  
• Depart at 4:15. Enjoy drinks outdoors during the Friday nightlife in Wellington.
  

Like I said, this was a great trip. It's up there with the best I've seen anywhere else. Hopefully the pictures below will give some indication of what we saw. But, as usual, pictures can't really do it justice.

(Remember, if you click on the picture, you'll get a bigger version on its own page. Then if you click again [at least if you're using Mozilla Firefox as your browser], you'll get a bigger picture within that window.)

Return from Milford Sound

Here's the return route from Milford Sound. Again, absolutely amazing. I'd hoped that some of the pictures would indicate the vastness of the Southern Alps, but none of these really capture how they just go on forever and ever. It's like a neverending ocean of stunning mountain peaks. In that respect, this range has something I've not seen in Europe or the US. Hopefully the first two suggest how close we got to the mountains (the second by the other plane's proximity, and the first because I wasn't using a zoom on the lens--click on it to magnify the picture). A bit scary. If you look in the distance on the third pic, that gives a small hint on the endlessness of the Alps. And then that waterfall was pretty cool, too--our pilot swooped right around in that canyon so that both sides of the plane got a good look.

Flight to Milford Sound

Amazing flight. The first picture features some land that was apparently heavily used in Lord of the Rings, though I'm having trouble placing which scenes were shot there. The other three have us entering Milford Sound itself, and the big mountain on the left is Mitre Peak. Then we swooped around and down over the mouth of the Tasman Sea on the South Island's West Coast and came back up the mouth of the Sound.

Queenstown

These pictures are of our base town in the South Island, Queenstown. Both pics feature The Remarkables, the mountain range in the background, and Lake Wakatipu. Most of the skiing in the area is actually behind where these are taken. The pic with the cables in view is from the ridiculously steep gondola at sunset. The other is from our hotel balcony(!). Queenstown is a pretty great town. You can do almost anything from there. Some prefer nearby Wanaka for being a little less touristy and a little more quiet. But Queenstown was pretty great, I thought.

Milford Sound

Here's the famed Milford Sound. Apparently, it's actually a fiord, technically. That is, it was caused by glacial movement, whereas sounds are created by the movement of water.

Nightmare

My dad has arrived from NYC. We had a nice time yesterday, and we're going to Paraparaumu Golf Course today (supposedly the 99th best GC in the world, but very affordable) and then down to the Southern Alps tomorrow.

That's not the nightmare. Yesterday, dear old Dad was telling me I needed a haircut. Which is true, actually. I needed one when I got here, and now it's been two months. I think I'm having trouble trusting Kiwi barbers, for some reason. Anyway, there were multiple discussions about the state of my hair. And then last night, I had an awful nightmare that my hair had taken on its own personality and grown into a mullet, which couldn't be undone. (For those of you unfamiliar with mullets, click here, and then click on "Top Mullets"--it's a good education.) Very scary. These are the nightmares I have--not about monsters or evil people even, but just about vanity. Sad.

Things I like about NZ, Part 2

A couple of weeks ago, my new friend (and colleague, and Head of Programme), Stuart, asked me what I so far think is clearly far and away better about N.Z. than what the U.S. has to offer. I had a hard time answering him. I mean, there are better things here, for sure. It's gorgeous, most obviously. If you could quantify natural beauty in aesthetic points, surely NZ would have more aesthetic points per square mile than most places on earth. And Wellington is no exception. In many ways, it's more beautiful than the very, very attractive US cities, such as Seattle, Portland, SF, or San Diego (and I'd add LA, but many don't appreciate its beauty, because they hang out in the wrong places). And it undoubtedly beats all those cities in terms of combined points for beauty, safety, accessibility, food, bars, etc. (though as far as I can tell it seriously lags in terms of music). But it's not clearly far and away better (CFAAB henceforth). Wellington doesn't have the mountain views of Portland or Seattle, or the sunshine of California.

So after struggling to find something that's CFAAB, I hit upon one item: progressive politics. It's especially nice being in such a progressive place when the U.S. is going into a moral tailspin. And you get real used to it, real quick. I shudder when I read things like good ole Bill Frist (R-Tenn.!) advocating teaching intelligent design. Here are some progressive things about NZ I particularly like, though there are many others (such as universal health care, strong environmentalism, etc.):

• No religious right. Well, I assume it's out there, but it's simply not on the political map. There's a fiscal right--hopefully Labour will beat back all of their tax-hating, debt-loving opponents in the upcoming election. But there's no cultural right. When they decided the other day that "values" should be taught in the schools, they meant "respect," "friendship," and "honesty" (literally--that's official policy), not "God is better than any secular morality." It's so refreshing to not have to listen to constant blather about Family Values, the need to have God in every domain of public life, and the idea of Intelligent Design. Those kinds of falsehood simply gain no purchase here, as far as I can tell. And that, no doubt, is partly due to the fact that...

• Religion itself is fairly unimportant. You never hear about it at all. At all. I know some people go to church, but they're few and far between. There was a study reported in today's paper about how no kids here know anything about Christianity anymore (and NZ, more than the US, is a British, Christian nation). Some gems:

• "Most [Kiwi kids] did not even realise that the Easter and Christmas stories can be found in the Bible"
• "When asked what single thing they found difficult about the Bible, a Year 6 pupil said: 'To sit there for hours reading its thin pages trying not to rip them.'"
• And this, no doubt, is partly responsible for the fact that...

• Marriage is fairly unimportant. I have a hard time figuring out why I like this, but I do. (It's not conceptually based on ownership of another person, even if that's the historical origin.) As far as I can tell, many, many Kiwis simply partner up and never get married. They have kids, they share lives, etc., but no formal marriage. The state recognizes common law marriage after two years of consecutive cohabitation, so if you ever lived with someone for two years, you'd own half their stuff and they'd own half yours. (Does that mean I should get Julie's Domino every other weekend?) So everything's set up so that formal marriage is, well, irrelevant, I guess.

Progressive Politics: CFAAB.

Red Rocks and Ann's Visit

My friend Ann was just visiting from Sydney. Unfortunately, the weather didn't cooperate very much--we got downpoured out of both Pinnacles and Mt. Taranaki. Of course, the upside of that is that you get a very convenient excuse to do a fair amount of eating and drinking. But there were a couple nice days. One had a spectacular view of the South Island (my first) from the south end of Welly, but the camera didn't want to come along that day. So I'll just have to report: it's pretty amazing how is just looks like these towering alps shooting straight out of the ocean. On another day, fortunately, we did get manage to remember the camera. So, here's Ann at Red Rocks, as well as what just looks like a pile of rocks but is really littered with large brown lumps, which are seals enjoying the last of the sun, and, finally, one of my favorite furry friends from that day--the seals here have attitude, I guess.

Deck View

Here's a slightly better version of the view from my deck. Still leaves a lot to be desired in terms of photo quality. I'm not very good at the whole digi pic thing yet.

Changes

I'm coming to the end of what I've been thinking of as my first phase in NZ. First, the first six-week half of the Uni's term is coming to an end on Friday. I've loaded up on teaching over these six weeks (three new preps!) so that after the "spring" break I only have to teach one (new) class for four of the six weeks. Then it's summer break here, plus next fall I've only got one course. In any case, my teaching/prep load has been grueling, so it's nice that that's ending.

Second, two months roughly marks the longest continuous time I've been out of the U.S., I think, and certainly represents the longest continuous time I've been in one country other than the U.S. I've done the two-month expat thing a couple of times, but never much longer. Hopefully I won't disintegrate or something when I cross that mark.

Third, on Friday, visitors are coming! Ann's flying in from Sydney for a few days, and then the following week, Dad will be here for about a week. Gonna get out and see some things, too, so hopefully I'll have more NZ pics soon.

And that is in part enabled by the fact that I got a car, finally! It's so totally liberating, that I can't wait to get out and use it more. (Damned work keeps getting in the way.) Anyway, since Wellington is more like S.F. than any other U.S. city (in terms of geography, good food, climate, etc., although the nightlife is more NYC), I figured I'd get the same car as almost everyone I know there. That's right...a Subaru. It's very nice so far, Japanese used import, so the manual is in Japanese, unfortunately, which is doubly difficult because the stereo makes no sense. Anyways, it's also the most popular car to steal in NZ, so keep your fingers crossed. (Not that there's much crime of any sort here.)

Hat tip to the other Glasgow clan for spotting the Subie trend early (and sticking with it, too).

A cultural faux pas, and Raffy Palmeiro

In the U.S. there's a common, free newspaper called Auto Trader (and Boat Trader, etc.) where people advertise their cars for sale. Hypothetically speaking, say that you were in a foreign country like, oh, I don't know, New Zealand, and you're looking to buy a car. In this thought experiment, you're at a "dairy" (NZ's equivalent of a convenience store), and you see a very similar newspaper called Auto Exchange. "Great," you think, "I'll pick one up!" In this story, you pick one up after buying your ordinary goods at the dairy. The clerk looks at you kind of funny, but you leave the store happy to have found a new resource.

Fast forward one week. You haven't yet bought a car, so you go to get this week's Auto Exchange. You go back to the same dairy and pick one up. But this time you notice that the cover loudly says "$3.00". You hadn't noticed that the first time, when you just took it and left the store. You immediately panic at the realisation that a week ago you inadvertently stole a newspaper, you drop the current issue, and run out of the store as fast as possible.

Like Rafael Palmeiro and steriods, you can claim that you didn't "knowingly or intentionally" do anything wrong. Unlike Raffy, you can say this sincerely. You'd probably feel somewhat consoled by that fact...not that I'd know personally or anything.