New Zealand: The South Island (or: Mountains, Mountains Everywhere!)

I’m posting from Queenstown, where right next to my hostel there’s a place with 4$/hour internet. Hooray! That means picture-uploading for you, and trust me, you’re going to enjoy it.

After my Lord of the Rings tour on Friday, I finally managed to meet up with Laura and the hopped-up-on-diet-coke version of Margaret for a drink. This is when we found out, completely by chance, that we would be spending part of the next two days on the EXACT same course – taking the ferry to Picton, then the train to Christchurch, and then the train to Greymouth. Isn’t that hilarious? It must have been FATED, I tell you. I got to meet Laura’s mother, who is awesome, and her niece as well, and we shared a table for the duration of the ferry ride.

I hadn’t realized that the ferry would be so close to land for most of the trip. Instead of an expanse of water, we got some AMAZING coastal views.

Just to bring you back to earth after all of that majesty, I’ll mention the newspaper headline that Laura’s mother discovered (as best I can remember it): “Experts blame feeding for duck explosion.” I was really excited until I realized that they meant a duck POPULATION explosion. We laughed about that one for a LONG time.

The train ride to Christchurch was fairly long, about six and a half hours as best I recall, but the scenery made it go by in a snap. I had a seat in the same car as Laura and the gang, so I occasionally visited them and for close to an hour I disappeared with Margaret onto the observation car, where we basically gaped at the views and said “Wow!” about a hundred thousand times. For a hundred kilometers the train followed the coast. Sometimes we were only a few meters away from the beach, which consisted of volcanic rock and black, black sand.

On the other side, in the meantime, was an increasingly mountainous expands of land, which eventually broke out into snow-capped mountains.

Once we were in Christchurch I hopped into a shuttle bus and got delivered to the doorstep of my hostel. After dropping off my things I went out to find Laura and the gang, as her mother had very kindly invited me out to dinner with them. And she paid for me too! Which was extremely nice of her, and very much appreciated, not in small part because I am on the poor side, and also because the food was extremely good. (Though the service was weird – there were some, ahem, language barriers, and for some reason each dish was brought out on its own, with a decent wait in between. But like I said – food was GREAT.) It was nice to get a little more time to spend with them, the company was wonderful (once nice thing about this road trip is that I’ve never gone ALL that long without seeing a familiar face. Not that this has in any way stopped me from making more of them along the way.)

The next morning we were on the same train again, this time going from the East to the West coast. We were in different cars this time so I saw less of the gang, though we did rendezvous now and then on the observation car. Unfortunately, two factors made the observation car a bit of a trial: it was only HALF a car this time, and there were about TEN TIMES more people on it than there had been the day before. People were pretty ruthless about getting in front of you to take photos, though Margaret is small enough that she could get up against the rail fairly easily. I did manage to get a few really good shots, though – the scenery was, amazingly enough, EVEN MORE… um… amazing, as the train brought us straight through the mountains this time.

About half way through the journey, somebody must have decided that they liked me, because they named a whole town after me!

See the sign on that red building in the distance? (Click on the image to bring up the full-sized one if you can’t.) Nice of ‘em, eh? Laura decided that we needed to have a writing retreat here at some point.

Once we were through the snow-capped mountains and over on the West coast, the terrain changed significantly. This is a temperate rain forest area, so it was suddenly a lot more GREEN. But the mountains here were no less interesting, shrouded in clouds and fog.

We parted ways in Greymouth, since I was staying there and the Laura Patrol was going back on the train to Christchurch. (I should be meeting up with Laura and the rest of the Script Frenzy gang a week from today, on my LAST NIGHT IN OZ. ACK. For some reason, time keeps on slippin’, slippin’, slippin’… you know where.)

Greymouth was a cute little down. Didn’t get to do a lot of exploring there, because everything was closed on a sleepy Sunday evening. But it was still early enough in the day for me to snap some photos.

(If you put these top two together side-by-side, they essentially form a panorama of Greymouth, as seen facing away from the ocean.)

Here’s what it looks like on the other side:

The hostel I stayed in was nestled up in this hill (it’s higher and steeper than it looks here – this is the hill you see in the second “panorama” shot I mentioned above.)

I was only in Greymouth (which they actually pronounce as “Grey Mouth”… did I mention that already? I have a feeling I did) for one night. The hostel used to be a bed and breakfast, I think – the keys to the rooms were these old skeleton keys and everything, and there is even a room there marked “Chapel.” (I’d say it might have been a funeral home, but it would have been MURDER getting corpses up and down the driveway to that house. Pun fully intended.)

When I got up in the morning to get my bus, it was WHIPPING wind and rain. It was a short-ish walk (maybe ten minutes?) but it was cold (yes, actually COLD) and wet and not very fun. My umbrella broke in the attempt to use it, but at least it did shelter me from the rain somewhat until I got to the bus stop. I threw it in the rubbish bin outside. It was a cheap umbrella anyway and I got more than my fair share of use out of it.

I called my folks for a couple of minutes from a payphone near the bus stop, but my bus came a little early so I cut the call short and climbed into the nice, warm vehicle for a few minutes. It was going to be another long day on the road down to Queenstown. But if you can believe it, the scenery slowly got even more amazing.

The picture above is of a riverbed, taken from one of many one-lane bridges. Several of these were even used for train traffic as well, on one lane! Golden rule: MAKE SURE THE PATH IS CLEAR BEFORE CROSSING THE BRIDGE. The riverbed is quite barren this time of year, but I imagine it gets much wetter in the spring.

This was where we had a break for coffee. Pictures do not capture the splendor. It was amazing 360 degrees. And just a minute down the road, we had to come to a complete stop for this:

Sheep!! And at this point we were completely surrounded – note the rear-view mirror!

Up to this point the scenery was similar in awesomeness to that which we witnessed on the train trips in previous days. And that’s when a new element was introduced: lakes.

It must be the contrast between the flat, glossiness of lakes and the bolt, jutting ruggedness of mountains, but they complement each other beautifully. As we slowly wound our way through mountains and around these gigantic lakes I basically just stared, slack-jawed, and took pictures whenever I thought that I might be able to capture some essential element of it all. Not easy through the window of a bus, but I tried.

I have more, which show the scenery slowly becoming drier and rockier (more… dare I say it? Rohan-esque?) The snow is also going to get more up-close and personal in this next batch. But I’ve been working on this for, like, an hour and a half, and I’m tired. So I’ll save the rest for my next post (which may come as soon as tomorrow night.)

For now, I’m going to hit the sack in preparation for a reasonably early morning and another day-long Lord of the Rings tour. Here’s hoping the weather is decent!

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