Today (I think it is
Tuesday) was mainly a travel day. But
even slow days here have a little bit of excitement. Morning was a 2 1/2 hour drive from Rotorua
to Auckland where we returned our rental car - oops - returned it to the
international terminal where we picked it up instead of the domestic terminal
where we were leaving from. BTW - I will
never complain about fuel prices in the US again. We were paying about $2.25/gallon before we
left. Here they pay almost that much per
liter. We paid $110 NZ to fill about 3/4
of a tank on our mid-sized car! We walked
what seemed like a mile to the domestic terminal to catch our flight - was a
little nervous about missing it, but we were good. Took the uneventful 1 hour flight to
Christchurch.
So I've mentioned
before that parts of NZ are under a severe drought - Canterbury (where
Christchurch is located) is one of those places. Flying over the area was unbelievable -
EVERYTHING is brown. You can see where
rivers - big ones - used to be, but they are nothing but dry gray sand now with
maybe a tiny trickle of a stream running down them. There are big bridges spanning nothing but
dirt. Again, I’m talking about pretty
good sized rivers - not streams or creeks - although those are bone dry,
too. Probably horrible of me to say, but
the weather is gorgeous - with no chance of rain (ouch)!
From the airport, we
went to pick up our Campervan - a Fiat Ducato, now named "The
Duke". The Duke rocks. It is a very spacious 2-person home on wheels
complete with a toilet and a shower. Or
should I say a toilet and a sink in a shower.
Stick shift, right side of car, left side of road, 18-20' of
vehicle. And for a bit of added cruelty,
the turn signals and wind shield wipers are reversed again, so now that Damon
learned the "wrong" side, they all switched back again. We have very clean windows. And no, there is no freaking chance in hell that I will be driving this thing.
Don't tell Damon,
but I was pretty white knuckled during our 2+ hour drive to our first stop -
Kaikoura. The roads are twisty and turn
with these flimsy guardrails "protecting" you from really big drops. Speed limits drop from 100k to 35k around
hairpin turns with a little warning, but not enough to keep me from near heart
attack. I'm told that it only gets worse
as we head through the mountains later in the week.
Kaikoura is known
for its marine life - seals and whales and apparently some delicious crayfish/lobster dinners which we intend to enjoy tomorrow night.
We arrived in town around 7:30pm (still light out) and went right to the
area known for having a ton of seal pups - there is an area where you can walk
up a stream and (hopefully) see a bunch of seal pups playing in a waterfall -
unfortunately, they weren't there, but we did see them all playing on the rocks
near the beach - hundreds of seals and tons of babies flopping around the rocks
and playing it tide pools.
After the pups, we
headed to our "freedom camping" spot on the beach - rules in NZ - if
you have a toilet and shower, you can camp pretty much anywhere. We made an awesome dinner, converted our
kitchen/living room/dining room to a bed, and crashed hard. But not before checking out the stars - and
when I say stars, there are STARS. Damon
has some celestial app on his phone, so once we found Orion's belt, we just
aimed the phone around the sky and found some other constellations. Kudos to explorers who could actually tell
one star from another - there are a billion of them out there and with few
exceptions, they just look like blobs of stars to me.
Tomorrow is our
whale watch tour and some hiking around Kaikoura.
For those of you
still reading - thanks for being interested enough in our lives to keep
reading! We do this partly to entertain
our friends and family, but mostly so we have a detailed accounting of our trip
so we can remember years from now.
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