The Cloud Piercer
In January the South Island adventures continue at full speed. In this edition hiking with glaciers, petrified forests, and a trip to Pelennor Fields.
Aoraki (n): A way better name than Mt. Cook
After our little travel hiatus over the holidays Mere and I were naturally chomping at the bit to get back out on the road and make the most of these sunny southern days. Fortunately, a recently gifted Lord Of The Rings filming location tour provided the perfect opportunity for us to get out and check out a major National Park we haven't checked off yet, Mt. Cook.
The aforementioned LOTR tour I got for Meredith as a little Christmas surprise, it tours the primary filming location for the scenes on Pelennor Fields just outside the little town of Twizel. The town itself isn't much to write home about, just your standard NZ one-horse town that just happens to sit in open fields flanked by the Southern Alps, a juxtaposition that defined the visual vocabulary so forcefully for the films. The tour was a bit of a renegade operation, just one very enthusiastic tour guide, a bus, and us bouncing across the golden fields of Gondor. We opted for the twilight tour so we were able to wave around replica (and one real) props, take goofy pictures, and sip some wine as the sun set over the Alps. While the location may not be the most exciting, I have to tip my hat to our guide, Dawn, some curated factoids and accompanying film screenshots can take a site visit from hum-drum to exciting.
At first light the next morning we packed our things and hit the road, we had some serious sightseeing to do. Just a quick jaunt north from Twizel sits Mt. Cook National Park, which knocks your socks off right from the get-go. You turn off the highway into the heart of the mountains, come over a rise and one of New Zealand's most iconic vistas opens before you. The still waters of glacier-carved Lake Pukaki stretch away before you reflecting the highest peak in the land, Aoraki.
Aoraki is the Maori name for Mt. Cook, and its romanticized meaning for non-Maori speakers is "The Cloud Piercer". Upon learning this tidbit we decided to do away with this "Mt. Cook" nonsense for well and good. With such a grandiose name you know it is quite the peak. All of the surrounding mountains are truly impressive in their own right but all pale in comparison to this craggy peak, flanked by brilliant glaciers, reflected in the morning light rising over still waters. Thus, was our drive to the Mt. Cook Township. Mountains towering, lake shimmering, jaws hitting the steering wheel.
Closing in on the township you begin to realize just how different these mountains are than what we have back in Colorado. Yes, they are quite a bit shorter, Aoraki tops out at 12,218 ft, but god damn are they dramatic. Every mountainside is nearly a sheer cliff rising up to the glaciers that carved this beautiful landscape above. Driving into the township the cliff walls loom so imposingly above the smattering of buildings as to make the sky seemingly disappear. What a place to pitch our tent for the night.
The glaciers truly set this place apart, capping every peak around you, constantly grinding down the rock into fine "glacial flour". The main campsite in the park sits on the valley floor but looks thousands of feet up to the glaciers slowly, inexorably, descending. At all hours of the day, you can hear bits of the ice breaking off and cascading down the valley in an avalanche to create a thunder-like background rumble. So, once the tent was up we set out to get a little closer.
In a world of such vertical disparities "getting a little closer" means a whole lot of steps. We headed out on the Sealy Tarns track that climbs the canyon wall offering better views of the ice that clings to the slopes of Mt. Sefton. At the outset of the track, a hand-carved notice on the bottom step helpfully informs prospective hikers "Only 1,619 steps to go!"...Thanks for the encouragement kind stranger. Nevertheless Mere and I soldiered on up, up, and up urged along at every turn by ever-changing views to the glaciers, over the cloud-grey lakes (due to all the sediment), and down the valley. We hit the mid-way lookout just as storm clouds began rolling over the far ridge and had just enough time for a little PB&J and photo break before we had to boogie back down. One. Step. At. A. Time.
After a harrowing evening enduring chaotic mountain weather, from pounding rain to wind howling down from the peaks, in which our Kelty home-away-from-home really proved its mettle, we set out to get a closer look at the glacial lakes we had seen from above. Hooker & Tasman Lakes likely are two of the best examples of "proglacial" lakes anywhere in the world, and between a morning run and a midday hike I was able to check both of them out on our second day in the park. New Zealand is well known for its "braided" rivers that snake their turquoise lengths to the sea without ever becoming very wide or deep. These lakes are where they begin. Only here the sediment aka. "glacial flour" is so cloudy that the waters take on the slate grey hues of the rocks that surround them. On both lakes, small icebergs had shorn off and floated across chipping away at the galaciers up valley one bit at a time, a process that has sped up considerably since the formation of the lakes in the 1970s.
While the power of the glaciers surrounding Aoraki cannot be denied, they also come with a sense of melancholy loss. These formations that have sculpted the mountains so beautifully are truly in their dying days. Visual guides over Tasman Lake showed us just how much ice my parents would've seen on their trip through New Zealand in the 80s, or how much ice early explorers would have encountered, and it becomes painfully apparent that these glaciers are a dying breed. With the loss of the glaciers, over the millennia the mountains will soften, become less dramatic, and slowly lose their iconic look as water replaces ice as the dominant force of erosion. It makes me incredibly grateful to be out here to witness the carving of the Alps while I still can.
Porpoises, Penguins & Petrified Wood.
Since we had been on a bit longer of a travel hiatus than originally intended Meredith and I decided to head out the next week as well to country we visited in the early spring, The Catlins. To refresh your memory, The Catlins are rainforested hills that cover the southernmost reaches of the island. We appreciated our first trip out there and wanted to check things out in the height of summer, during a Southland "heatwave" nonetheless.
Heatwave in a rainforest along the 46th parallel south means "blistering" highs of 80 degrees and a few consecutive days without rain. Seriously, I think the mild climate has made most Kiwis incapable of temperature extremes, anything over 73 is unthinkably hot and below 38 may as well be Antarctic. For us, it made pleasant weather to cruise through the forest to check out a couple waterfalls for lunch and make our way to the southernmost point on the island, Slope Point. It wasn't much to see, just some seacliffs and wide open ocean, but it was still cool that if we ever wanted to head further south our options would be NZ's Stewart Island (which we likely won't do), Tierra Del Fuego, or Antarctica.
That afternoon we headed to the aptly named Porpoise Bay to camp along one of the prettiest beaches we've seen to date. Porpoise Bay is a very large, very circular beach with pristine white sands wrapping almost 270 degrees around. For rookie surfers like me, it can be an almost ideal break as a large head up near the campground shelters the beach and the waves gradually grow as the beach continues down. So, I grabbed the board and marched on down to some waves that looked manageable while Mere enjoyed some fine Southland sun rays. True to its name Porpoise Bay delivered when a couple of playful Hector's Dolphins came and splashed around in the surf a couple yards away from where I was getting rinsed.
Since there's never a dull moment way down south we took off on a short hike after dinner to the seaward coast side of the campground, an area called Curio Bay. Named for the great collection of petrified wood that sits in its tidal flats Curio Bay offers more than just that, namely penguins. As the sun set, campers headed down to the bay to watch some of the local Hoiho (rare NZ penguins with yellow stripes by their eyes, and a penchant for squawking, hence their Maori name meaning "noise maker") come in to roost for the evening. We saw a couple of them from afar as they began their cute yet perilous journey across the petrified forest to their nests in the dunes. We were happy enough to see the little guys from a ways away but had a special treat on the walk back to the tent when we came across several more nesting penguins in the dunes. Fortunately, the enterprising campground owners set up mesh netting along the walkway so that stumbling campers wouldn't scare away any sleepy penguins, and we were able to get an intimate view of papa penguin coming home after a long day fishing. Not bad for a days work way down south.
Our Route:
Welcome, This Is Our Farmhouse
After our epic-country spanning road trip we did a little local journeying and settled into a farmhouse by the sea.
Can't find a place to live? Screw it, go camping.
In all honesty, house hunting did not (at first) go terribly smoothly in our new hometown of Dunedin. Perhaps it was excessively optimistic to think that people would be trying to fill rooms mid-term in a college town. So, after several uninspiring days of hunting and burning money at Airbnbs, we decided to do what we do best and take to the country.
Thankfully, Meredith was chomping at the bit to one-up my kick-off road trip planning and laid out a stellar four-day trip around our new backyard. Whatsmore, thanks to lessons hard-learned on the road down here, and a little help from the awesome blog Fresh Off The Grid (seriously if you're going car camping check these guys out), she was also able to seriously step up our campsite culinary game.
So off we headed deep into the heart of Southland to likely the most remote campsite we will be able to access by car, Piano Flats. It was a stunning site, isolated, surrounded by lofty peaks, banked by a crystalline stream, and absolutely fucking overrun with sandflies. Surprisingly, this was our first encounter with the little bitches (we've since learned that the carnivorous ones are the females so yeah, bitches.) and we were caught completely unprepared. Hence we learned an invaluable NZ lesson: bring good bug spray with you everywhere you go.
On the optimistic side, sandflies: don't make noise when they fly around, don't have any interest in your food, don't hurt when they bite, and go to bed at night. On the negative side: they're everywhere, they want to eat you alive, and according to Maori legend they were created by the goddess of the underworld to remind people of their own mortality (a theory we now wholeheartedly endorse).
On the whole sandflies and rain had us beating a speedy retreat from an otherwise epic camping site to head back to Gore (the apparent 'Brown Trout Capital Of The World') to arm ourselves for these new conditions and regroup before we headed to our next spot on the Dunsdale Reserve.
Dunsdale in many ways embodies the beauty of camping in New Zealand to this day. A beautiful, isolated spot, hiking options right by, no fees, and not another soul to be found. It's this ease of access to peaceful isolation that I think will have us constantly heading back into the wilderness all throughout our time down here.
From Dunsdale we headed the scenic way south through an area that's mostly off the beaten track despite being basically on Dunedin's back doorstep, called The Catlins. This wildlife reserve encompasses some of the country's densest temperate rainforest and actually surrounds the southernmost tip of the island. We were a little early on the season for The Catlins so we got an especially solid dose of the RAINforest aspect, but the beauty was inescapable.
We saw the scenic vistas on Porpoise Bay, hiked the many-tiered McLean Falls, got very familiar with the small town of Owaka (and it's chief tourist attraction Teapot Land), checked out the seals at Nugget point, and proved the value of a New Zealand Automotive Association membership. It was an awesome couple of days, as I'm sure you'll see in the pictures, but most of all we're excited to head back in the heart of summer to see a whole new side of this remote area.
Our house, in the middle of a farm.
In all, it seems as though taking a quick camping trip was just the right balm for our lack of housing burn. Upon returning to Dunedin we trekked out to a suburb called Portobello on the Otago Peninsula to a farmhouse with which we promptly fell in love with and immediately moved into.
Otago Peninsula itself is a sight to behold. Dramatic green hills wind into Otago Harbor with remote beaches and endless rare wildlife from Dunedin to the albatross colony at Tairoa Head. Portobello township lies about 3/4 of the way out, and as my boss warned me ahead of time it takes about twice as long as you would think to drive into town on this side of the harbor. That's because the drive out is an absolute hoot. Two lanes barely 5 feet above the surf, winding back and forth along the shoreline. I'm sure we'll eventually get sick of it, but not quite yet.
We moved into an old farmhouse right on the water just outside of the Portobello township with a northlander named Gavin. He's a 28-year-old physics doctoral candidate at the University of Otago, and as we like to say he's 28 going on 68. The man could not be a more classic farm man if he tried, but goddamn if he doesn't know how to keep a nice home.
The home itself is simple. Heated by a log-burning stove, with windows facing the harbor, and positively surrounded by flocks of sheep (the lambs of which you may have seen in recent videos) it is a New Zealand farmhouse to the umpteenth degree. Classical music plays over the radio as the sun streams in through the large windows. A place more given to reading, drawing, and making large meals than it is to watching TV or browsing the internet, it is undoubtedly a peaceful place to live.
Tourists In Our Own Hometown.
With our first proper time off since landing in New Zealand Meredith and I decided it was time to give traveling a bit of a break. So, we played tourist in our new hometown. That meant doing the classics like visiting the public art gallery, having wine and cheese night in the botanic gardens, taking a million pictures at the famous Tunnel Beach, driving the world's steepest paved street (holy shit they weren't kidding, we were legitimately concerned the RAV might not make it up), and spending a good deal of time exploring the coves and vistas of the Otago Peninsula.
But we also did some local exploring while we had the time. We visited the nearby Waipori Falls and the neighboring town of Mosgiel. Suffice to say, while coastal Otago may feature prominently in many guidebooks it is a striking, and stunning place to call home.
Our Route
Tips For Prospective New Zealand Travelers
- You've heard it before. Sandflies are here, they are a problem, don't get caught out without insect repellant.
- If you're buying repellant in NZ pharmacies are the places to look, rather than grocery stores or gas stations (bonus: they'll also have anti-itch cream if you ignored tip #1).
- The bucolic green grass of many campsites is tempting for Colorado campers like us, but these fields aren't always the best spots. Look for elevated patches under trees to stay dry.
- Joining the AA (New Zealand Automotive Association) will save you if you're driving around an old beater like us. Buck up and spend the money, their response time is insanely fast even in remote areas.
- If you'd like to get a New Zealand drivers license while you're down here so you don't have to carry around your passport to get drinks make sure it was issued more than 2 years ago, otherwise you'll need to get a copy of your driving history from the DMV (aka. a living nightmare).