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Thursday, December 28, 9:20 pm
Sussex House Bed & Breakfast, Nelson, NZ

After three highly fattening days over Christmas in Queenstown, we now find ourselves at the top end of the Southern Island, almost ready for the crossing back over to the North Island. Much activity to cover over the last few days, of course!

Boxing Day progressed largely as predicted in our last post. Deer Park Heights is a strange kind of private petting zoo, spread out over a fantasticly beautiful rocky hill overlooking Lake Wakatipu, with Queenstown on the right, and remarkable mountains all around. (The Remarkables are to the left.) It has been used for several film shoots, and has a fake small North Korean-styled prison still standing near its Western peak, from a straight-to-video Disney production in the 80’s. Deer Park Heights was also used by Peter Jackson for filming several scenes from the Two Towers, most notably the flight of the Rohirrim towards Helm’s Deep and the fight against the warg-riding orc scouts sent by Saruman. It has a driving track leading up the hillside, and several very large field areas with various animals, most of them more or less used to humans coming up to them and feeding them. (Feed stations are conveniently provided for buying large canisters of feed.) The animals included deer (not so used to humans), llamas (somewhat pushy), opacas (a bit aloof — I might be mixing them up with the opacas though), goats (who mobbed Anne for food while I was off climbing rocks for views), and a few others I don’t recall right now. We had a fun couple of hours driving and hiking around to see most of them and then headed back to Queenstown.

From downtown Queenstown we got on the 2pm sailing of the TSS Earnslaw, a vintage steamship that’s been sailing Lake Wakatipu since 1912, and still equipped with twin steam engines powered by coal. We had a nice cruise across the lake to Walter’s Peak, a working farm whose main business is giving tourists an introduction to New Zealand farm life, including a sheep dog demonstration and a sheep shearing. It’s pretty staged, and it was hardly a private experience as the Earnslaw took 50 other people along with us, but it was still reasonably entertaining.

We ended the day with a very nice Thai dinner at Thai Siam in downtown Queenstown, and went back to the B&B to get packed.

Yesterday (the 27th) we said goodbye to Bill and Kari and set off (after another gut-expanding, four-course breakfast!). We drove east a bit and then up the mountain road north from Queenstown towards Wanaka. The morning started with scattered cloud, which still hadn’t fully set it by the time we got to Wanaka, and we stopped there for a couple of photos across that town’s beautiful lake, and an (expensive) visit to a woolen goods shop. And a couple of coffees.

Onwards, still heading north and eventually west towards the coast. As we crossed over the Haast Pass, the clouds descended thickly and the rain started coming down in sheets. We made our way to our overnight stop at Fox Glacier, which we were fully prepared to believe didn’t exist, as the clouds prevented any views at all.

And that was last night. The Fox Glacier Lodge was fairly spartan, but comfortable, clean and warm. We got up at 7am to see sunshine, but with clouds on the horizon. So we quickly dashed off for an hour-long walk around the nearby Lake Murcheson for some nice views of the mountains, before returning to finish packing and get some breakfast! Then we resumed our trip up the west coast to Nelson, stopping for some cool watery geology features at Punakaiki: the famous pancake rocks and blowholes.

Into the afternoon on this, our longest driving day of the trip, and towards the end of the day we had passed from the west coast to the central region and up into the suburbs of Nelson (pop. ~50k), where we’re staying now. We’ll be here for two nights, and we’re looking forward to a nice hike in the Abel Tasman National Park tomorrow — along with a whole lot of New Zealand’s own tourists, as this is a favourite holiday location in this, one of the busiest holiday periods of the year.