Monday - This was mostly a drive day for us. We made a lot of stops due to the fact that the scenery here is absolutely amazing. We ended up driving down the west coast and watching the waves hit the jagged rocks on the shore. There is just one problem - sand flies. These little bastards are vicious and bloodthirsty. They suck your blood for 2 minutes and they attack immediately. We have been covered in DEET this whole week and we are still covered in bites. We got out of the car at one point because we found a secluded beach with the aforementioned jagged rocks, and got destroyed immediately. Basically if you stand still and you are not fully covered, you are dead. Our only scheduled stop of the day was Punikaike which has a trail to pancake rocks and blowholes. Even a crappy cell phone photographer such as myself could capture the amazing nature here.Scientists are not exactly sure why the pancake rocks form which makes visiting the site even cooler. Also imagine the waves hitting the blowholes (like the top picture on the left hand side) with a loud bang and seeing the water surge in through all of the nooks and crannies. It was pretty damn incredible. The one thing that spoils this particular attraction for me was the insane amount of tourists here. The loop around is very accessible, and the walk is short, so everyone is basically on top of each other at all the lookout points. I might be spoiled by now, but I really prefer my sites to be secluded :)
Tuesday - we got to make knives!!! This was a recommendation from the Canadian couple that we met while hiking in Abel Tasman and boy oh boy was it cool. You start with a piece of steel that you heat and hammer out, cool, sand, and make the handle for. I got to be all sorts of handyman with power tools. It's a departure from what I am normally like, but this is a year of exploration and I will go with it. I will be totally honest here, and say that we had a lot of help from the man leading this class, and that we probably did more harm than good, and he just fixed our mistakes and did it the correct way. The coolest part for me, was that you could design your own knife, and so our knives looked completely different. Mike went for the utilitarian kitchen knife, mine is supposed to have the sharpest edge (and it looks like I'm about to rob you and take your horse and buggy) and Olichka's looks the coolest (it has a middle eastern bandit feel to it). The knives are not stainless steel, so there is a lot of care involved, but I still want to use mine when I get back! As a bonus the couple teaching the class had ninja stars and axes that you could throw, the tallest swing I have ever seen, and ponies! I know that ponies are usually assholes, but these were pretty cool and let us pet them without biting us, which I can't say for the parrot that was also on the premises. I know I'm no longer 12, but I really really want to own a pony now!Wednesday - We had a very chill day in the little town of Hokitika. It's a really cute place which has a lot of jade shops where you can see people carving necklaces and such, and it still has some gold mines so there are some jewelry stores that make for good window shopping. I saw a cool cafe on my morning run which was a combo of the following things:
- jade gallery/store
- second hand clothing store
- coffee shop
It had a really sweet back courtyard area and Olichka and I sat and relaxed there for a while after a hard day of window shopping. While we were there one of the owners told us that the Hokitika Driftwood and Sand festival had completed a week or so ago, so we should still be able to see some of the art on the beach (things that have not been destroyed by the weather yet) and it was pretty damn cool. My favorites are a sculpture of a woman playing the harp (made out of driftwood, with a found flip flop on one foot, and a kite string for the harp strings) and a sculpture of a motorcycle made entirely of driftwood with the "Gnarly Davidson" logo. I'm just sad that we missed the sand sculptures, they were washed away by the time that we got to Hokitika. The festival had such a burning man feel to it, especially because in front of the entrance to the beach there stood several chalkboard signs with the works "Before I die I want to:..." and some chalk for people to write in. This kind of stuff kinda melts my usually cynical heart. I also really like the funny responses, so I do get some of my jaded cool back :)
Thursday - There are two glacier walks to choose from in this part of the country: Franz Joseph and Fox, even though the name had nothing to do with our final decision, it seems a little poetic that we climbed Fox Glacier - The BM parallels continue! We booked a full day tour, and were really happy that we did. The glacier was incredible! I have always wanted to be cool enough to need crampons for my walks and now I have finally made it! We got to explore deep crevasses and look into moulins! Crevasses are large fissures in the ice due to different speed at which surface ice moves as opposed to the ice on the inside. You can straddle a crevasse and look down 30-40 meters and see the beautiful deep blue of the harder more compacted ice below the surface. In case you are wondering about the spelling here, crevice and crevasse are two different words. The word crevice refers to small cracks not large fissures, and yes I did look that up after the tour.A moulin is a hole made in the ice by the melting water on the surface, they can also be really deep and also have that amazing turquoise color. I actually almost fell into a big moulin as I was trying to see deeper in and gave Mike a small heart attack, but I managed to regain my balance and remain upright. My favorite part came at the very end of our tour when we got to walk through an ice tunnel. I took a really cool picture of Mike from the inside, but all of you dirty people just commented that it looks like a vagina, and maybe it does, but it's the most beautiful blue vagina that I have ever seen! As we were almost off the ice, we saw a giant boulder roll off the mountain and fall onto the glacier leaving a cloud of dust behind. This happens as the rocks are left by the receding glacier and the elements eventually erode the ground around the boulders. We were really lucky to see it in action!Our original plan was to drive to Wanaka after we came back from the glacier tour, but the only road that goes there closes between 6pm and 7am so we got stuck in the village of Haast for the night, had a couple of beers, and called it a night.
Friday - This was our last full day with Olichka, and we spent it in a pretty relaxing fashion. We wanted to spend the night in Queenstown, so that we don't have to hurry to the airport on Saturday, and we were going to stop by Wanaka on the way. Wanaka was another tourist recommendation from the Canadian couple - there is a beautiful lake there and a movie theater with big comfy couches that has an intermission and has fresh backed cookies, and a cafe to dine in. Kind of like some of the fancier movie theaters that started popping up around Chicago in recent times, but the laid back Kiwi version. In the morning we stopped on the road to check out the "Blue Pools". As the water from the glacier melts and flows down, most of the rock dust settles on the bottom, but some minerals, that are blue in color stay in the water, giving it the same deep turquoise color as the deep ice of the glacier (but for a completely different reason). We only spent about 40 minutes at the pools, since we didn't have time for a full on hike and then went back to the car. The weird thing about the pools was that leading up to them was a bridge with a max capacity of 10 people, but there were easily 20 on the bridge when we got to it. Since we do not take unnecessary risks, we let the crowd pass before proceeding to the bridge which shook with every step that we took, not for the faint of heart. It turned out that no good movies were playing in Wanaka, so we ate lunch by the lake and then paddle-boarded for a little while. I must have looked a little tense on my board because Olichka decided to help me correct my stance. "Imagine, that you are a man with the biggest penis in the world, and you want to show it off!", she advised me. I moved my hips forward and immediately fell in the water to the great enjoyment of both Mike and Olichka. Both of them also fell at some point, so I didn't feel too badly, on top of which, once I had already fallen off once, I relaxed and got a lot better, so I guess the advise was sound after all. As we left town we got to go through some portion of the Southern Alps and caught an amazing sunset which added the perfect ending to our day.
Today has been a utilitarian day. We took Olichka to the airport, caught up with parents and grandparents, did laundry and shopping and just caught up with our individual selves. We are planning to be in NZ for a couple more weeks, doing at least one more multi-day hike (maybe 2) and then we will go off to the land of OZ. I will write again when I have more adventures to tell about.
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