NOTE: Kia Ora in Maori is the basic "hello,
goodbye, good tidings, good life" greeting that you get everywhere.
Well, here it is,
our last night in NZ and it has been an absolutely fabulous trip. Very sad to be leaving, but as anyone who
knows me knows, I'll be thankful to get home to Thorkey - of course we still
have one more adventure in Australia, but that is for later.
To round out the
last day or so, I left off yesterday on our way back to Manapouri. From Manapouri, we drove to Te Anau, about 20
minutes away and we did find wifi - more coffee, more dessert - you have to buy
something to get free wifi, and we have basically been eating our way through
these blog postings trying to find wifi anywhere in this country that actually
works!
We had one final
tour yesterday out of Te Anau to see the famous NZ glow worms. We took a (nother) boat out to more caves,
hiked into a cave with a guide, got on a boat and turned out all of the lights
and looked up - it is pitch black except for these little glowing blue dots all
over the cave ceiling. It is pretty
cool. Without going into too much detail
- the glow worms are some sort of fly in the larvae stage. The make "fishing lines" - sticky
silk lines (like spider webs,) a few inches long that hang from the
ceiling. Then the larvae butt (not the
official terminology) has some glowing blue junk (also not official
terminology) in it to attract other cave bugs who fly to the light and get
stuck in the sticky silk lines. All in all, it was pretty interesting.
As this was our last
scheduled outing in NZ and we had an 8 hour drive back to Christchurch to
return the Campervan, we decided to knock off as much as possible in the
evening. Plus, we still had 4 hours left
in The Martian. So, we basically drove
until the book ended somewhere North of Dunedin (we stopped for a delish
Italian dinner in Dunedin). I won't tell
you the ending - it is a great book, though.
Will be a movie one day.
We found a place to
freedom camp near the ocean - NZ is awesome about letting you camp in certain
areas gratis. In the morning, we were
very rudely woken up by a chicken. Damon says it was a rooster, but it looked like
a chicken. Anyhoo, this damn thing was
cockadoodle doing from a ways away and walked up to our camper pretty much
yelling at us to get out - about a foot from our front door. I have pix and video - it was kind of funny
and did get us moving.
We were going to
just knock out the last 3.5 hours but I convinced Damon to do 2 more stops that
our guidebook recommended, They were
right near where we camped and we had the time, so we went. The first stop was a lighthouse that somehow
became a penguin habitat for one of the rarest penguins around - the yellow
eyed penguin - or something like that.
We found the place and started walking around the bluff and sure enough,
we came across a few penguins, took like a billion pictures, and kept walking -
there were a bunch of penguins roaming around (always in pairs) and we got
close to a few of them - they are endangered and in a loosely enclosed area, so
no touching, but we were maybe a foot or two away from them. We kept walking - more penguins - and then we
saw the fur seals - everywhere, Lots of
babies playing in the water, and adults sunning all over the bluff - with no
barriers. NZ lets you get up close and
personal with nature a lot of the time - we are on a bluff, with huge cliff
drops on both sides, and a bunch of seals between us and where we wanted to
go. We just kept a few meters (I speak
metric now) between us and them and hoped none got pissy. I'm sure they are used to people up there,
but they are also very aware of what is going on. One movement and 25 seal heads turn in your
direction. The babies just race to the
water if they get scared. Lots of pix
and videos.
Back to the car and
to our second pit stop, the Moeraki Rocks - imagine a big gray sand beach at
low tide (there are not many beaches in NZ that we saw). In the middle of this huge beach, clumped
together, are these completely random out of place perfectly round rocks about
4-5' in diameter. Think big balls from
Wipeout, only rocks, not red balls. Some
of them have broken apart - almost like they have exploded - and you can see
some sort of yellow mineral all through the rocks - but the surfaces are
perfectly rounded rocks. I'm convinced they are alien rocks and the split ones
have just hatched already.
The last few hours
of driving were brutal mostly for Damon - we hit the "Iowa" section
of NZ - nothing but flat and farms for the last few hours. NZ has about a gazillion deer (on farms),
about 10 gazillion cows, and about 100 gazillion sheep. We saw a lot of them en route.
Got to our final
hotel in Christchurch and went downtown for dinner. You may have heard CHCH had two huge
earthquakes in Nov '10 and Feb '11. The
city was devastated. Here we are more
than 4 years later and the city is still in pretty bad shape. Buildings are down everywhere, lots of empty
spaces, tons of fences, buildings still being propped up and the early stages
of new construction. They made a
temporary shopping mall out of shipping containers which people say will be
permanent. We had dinner on the main restaurant
drag and I'd say easily 1/3 of the buildings were barricaded. Every building has cracks on it. Very sad.
The huge "Christchurch" cathedral is in ruins and there are
signs everywhere trying to get funding to restore it. Meanwhile, it stands as it was after the
earthquake, propped up with a gaping hole in the side and slightly crumbling.
We are now getting
ready for our 4:30am wake-up so we can spend our one day in Sydney
tomorrow. But before I sign off, a few
things about NZ toilets - first, while we love Duke, we have a no
"Duke" rule inside. It will be
nice to have regular toilets again.
Second, they have strange flushers here.
There are always two buttons - presumably one is for a light flush and
the other for a heavy flush. I've
flushed about 500 toilets and still have no idea which button does what. And finally, regardless of the button you
push, the toilets flush like a jet engine, no matter where you are - so for
anyone who wanted to know if NZ toilets swirl backwards, we have no idea - the
water generally just shoots out like a canon without swirling.
Off to Australia
tomorrow for our final blog post.
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