Tour de Sud

We just returned from nine days exploring eNZed's South Island. Despite coming down with the flu about twelve hours before our departure, I had a grand time. Getting the flu was worth it for one reason: it's been a while since I've seen Z smile so largely when he started calling me Croakie. Croakie quickly gave way to Squeaky which passed its baton to plain old Stuffy. There's not quite so much smokey-piano-bar-alto glamour in Stuffy, but she's apparently here to stay.

But I digress from my stories from the south...

1. Franz Josef Glacier
We drive south down the west coast in pouring rain. The land is brilliant green and the steep rise to our left is shrouded in mist and covered in lush growth. Every now and then, the clouds lift a little to hint at the immenseness of the peaks they hide. We arrive in town and learn that the rain has closed all access trails to the glacier so we check into a hostel and sit in the lounge to wait out the drenching. Z drinks beer with some friends; I take a nap. At about 5:00, the time when my stomach wakes from its lunch-induced torpor to request more food please, Z pokes his head outside and realized that the sky has lightened from ominous to pale gray. We jump in the car and drive up to the parking lot at the foot of the glacier. We pant our way through the drizzle up the trail to a look-out. And all of a sudden we see it: a curve of ice that seems to be caught in mid-flight down the mountain. It seems a live, wild thing. Around us are lush forests snaked with waterfalls that are incongruous with the tongue of ice. The clouds rush by occasionally clearing to give us a glimpse of a jagged snowy peak high above. We are the only people present and the silence seems not so much peaceful as like the inhalation before a roar.

2. Milford Sound, Fjordland
The drive to Milford is jaw-droppingly awesome. We start out of Te Anau in the sun, though we can see where the clouds have gathered around the peaks ahead. We drive along a wide, U-shaped valley crisscrossed by a small river and carpeted in brown tussocks. The steep sides are covered in a lush beech forest that drips with moss and lichen. Slowly, the walls around us rise as does the windy road we drive. And then we are in high country where the walls are sheer black rock glistening with water falls, too steep to support anything more than the odd grass and brave shrub. All around us we see where avalanches have rolled down from precarious cirques of snow. I drive about 10kph so that I can lean over the steering wheel to stare straight up through the windscreen at the towering walls above us. Right before the tunnel, we see the avalanche that closed the road the day before. A solitary man in a small yellow tractor works to clear it. We pass from daylight into the dark tunnel. Water drops from the rocky ceiling as we bump over the barely-paved road which is inclined just enough so that our headlights don't illuminate it at all. I drive almost blind into the depths of the mountain, thinking suitably dwarfish thoughts and gripping the wheel tightly as neither of us dare to breath much. Out the other side we are greeted by fog swirling around a sheer rock wall that's easily 1200 feet tall. The canyon we drive down is wet and damp and it feels like the glaciers only just packed up and moved out. All is raw rock and icy stone and cold water. By the time we reach the water, the rainforest has returned to cloak the sheer cliffs in lushness.

3. Riverton, pop 1850
It's a long drive south from Milford to Riverton, a drive that begins by skirting the impressive peaks and wide lakes of Fjordland and ends in the pastoral greeness of sheepland. For no particular reason, we decide to spend the night in Riverton. The bar-tender and hotelier is a woman named Caroline whose purple and gray streaked curls don't quite hide the fact that she's in her 40's. She and everyone else we meet in town is exceptionally friendly. The folks gathering in the bar for their Saturday night out all say hello and ask where we're from and where we're going. I'm more used to locals ignoring us - Riverton is a welcome change. We have a large room upstairs at the back of the pub with a fabulous view over the wide river that turns into a maze of sandbars at low tide. Unprovoked, Caroline gives us a run down of dining options in Riverton - all five of them. One is described as the "second best restaurant in New Zealand" and another supposedly serves (gasp!) salad. We opt for the salad and are halfway to the bar/restaurant when we decide that we can't face another crappy pub meal even if it claims to contain vegetables. So we jump in the car and drive out to the best place in the South Island telling ourselves to hell with the money. We've been warned that we might not get in, it being Saturday night and all. However, it being Riverton in low season, we are of course seated immediately. We both get glasses of wine and delicious entrees (mains) that are not battered and fried and re-battered and fried again, and finish off with a piece of moist honest-to-god chocolate cake. Total tab? $70. That's Kiwi dollars. We actually check the menu to make sure they didn't undercharge us. We return to our hotel, turn on the hot blankets, take blissfully hot showers that come with decent water pressure and crawl into bed together happy and content.

4. Penguins - at Milford Sound and in Oamaru. Yellow-crested and Yellow-eyed, they all look ridiculous waddling on land.

5. Lambs. Everywhere. Including one that was probably less than an hour old with mum still in labour right by the side of the road.

6. Taking Sassyass's advice and eating a spectacularly good meal at Cook 'N' With Gas in Christchurch. Their tag-line should read: Stupid name; great food.

... And so much more! Check out our pictures up on Z's site.