Week 10: Wanaka/Queenstown and Fiordland National Park

Greetings!

We spent seven days in the Wanaka/Queenstown area and didn’t scratch the surface of all there was to do. We hiked and mountain biked, but missed some trails that definitely are worth returning for one day.  We paid to ride luge carts at the top of a mountain, go river boarding, and explore a kiwi wildlife park, but you could spend a fortune doing all of the paid adventure activities in the area, some of which seem wildly unsafe (river boarding on a narrow river gorge is one thing, jet boating on a river on a narrow river gorge is another entirely).

The view of Lake Wakatipu in Queenstown

Lake Wanaka

Awesome restaurant in beautiful Arrowtown

As I mentioned, we went to a kiwi wildlife park where we finally saw some kiwis.  I was beginning to think that maybe this kiwi bird was a trick that New Zealand plays on tourists.  Like, they all got together and decided that they’d play up the existence of this non-existent, ridiculous looking, flightless, nocturnal bird that nobody ever sees but you miiiight sometimes hear.  I suppose it could still be a trick, more elaborately played using animatronic replicas.  It was quite dark in the kiwi viewing area (“You see, if we tell them the kiwi is nocturnal and that we therefore have to keep it dark in the viewing area, they won’t be able to tell that the mechanical birds aren’t real!”).  

Real or not, the “kiwi” is much larger than any of us expected.  Also very large is the size of the one egg that the female carries and then lays: it’s one third of the bird’s body size and weight.  They showed us an x-ray of a “kiwi” just before the egg was laid and sweet jesus was it terrifying.

The “kiwi” is endangered because a couple dummies brought over some possums from Australia to start a fur trade, not realizing that there are no possum predators on New Zealand.  As a result, the possum numbers started at two and ended up at 80 million, while the “kiwi” numbers went in the opposite direction.  There’s an impressive nationwide effort to completely eradicate all birdlife predators (the stoat and the feral cat being the primary other also-imported targets) by 2040.  They’ve reduced possum numbers by half since the eradication efforts began.

We’d show you photos of the “kiwi,” but – you guessed it – no photos allowed.  Suspect.

Cam and Aimee went river boarding (Wes is too young) and had an absolute blast.  Cam had a smile on his face the entire time and came out of the river saying that he felt rejuvenated.  I’m not sure when or how he got un-juvenated, but we’re glad that he’s juvenated again. I suppose a splash (or many splashes) of glacial cold river water in your face can make a pre-teen feel a bit better after spending days on end with his parents and little brother (and only his parents and little brother).

Our hikes have continued to be incredible, both in terms of the scenery and the boys’ ability/willingness to complete them with us.  As I think we’ve mentioned, getting them – particularly Wesley – to the top does require a mix of imagination, cajoling, and outright lying (“I think the top is right up here…just a little more”).  But it has taken less and less as we’ve done more hiking.  On our last hike in Wanaka to view the Rob Roy Glacier, he ran up the 5k trail, passing group after group of hikers.  We couldn’t keep up and he was waiting for us at the top.

Rob Roy Glacier

When he walks with us, Wesley never stops talking.  We’ve fallen into a pattern of me hiking up the trails with Wes and Aimee hiking back down with him.  He holds our hand most of the time and jabbers away, mostly about things like movies and video games but also about the beginning of the universe, the tallest or biggest things in the world, when Aimee and I decided to get married, and how babies get made.  Wes has provided some of the highlights and lowlights of this trip.  He's had a few tantrums and antagonizes the bejeezus out of his brother.  On the other hand, he says the funniest stuff, often injecting hilarity at just the right moment when Aimee and I are stressed about some thing or another.  On one occasion when I was either losing my patience with him hanging me during a hike or with Cam getting lost in his own head (I can't remember the context), Wes chimed in with, "Well, if you didn't want to have to deal with stuff like that, you shouldn't have become a daddy."  Aimee and I laughed so hard and now it's become a meme (no, I don't know if I'm using that word correctly) on this trip that we all use at times of stress.

We fudge the birds and bees thing with Wes, but we have taken the opportunity of this trip to talk a bit more about it with Cam.  We realized before we left when we asked him about how he thought it worked and he got the…um…insertion point…very incorrect that we needed to talk a bit more about the whole thing.  We’ve covered the anatomy of it, but also a bit of the science, along with more extensive discussions about appropriate male sexual behavior.  I'd say that he's not really enjoying it.

We left Wanaka/Queenstown on Tuesday and have been staying in a weird little campground in Manapouri for the last three nights.  Manapouri is in the Fiordlands (that’s how they spell it, with an “i” not a “j”) area of New Zealand, just outside the vast Fiordland National Park.  We did a wilderness day-cruise of Doubtful Sound – which we learned is a fjord, not a sound – and are headed off tonight for an overnight cruise of Milford Sound (also a fjord).  Fjords, you see, are water-filled valleys carved by glaciers; sounds are just sea or ocean inlets.

 

We did our longest hike of the trip so far on a portion of the Kepler Track, a 60k loop in the mountains above Lake Manapouri and Lake Te Anau.  The Kepler Track is one of New Zealand’s 10 “Great Walks,” long, multi-day hiking trails with huts where you can bunk and cook spaced along the trail. We hiked 10k in to the first hut on the Kepler Track, where we had lunch before returning back down the mountain. New Zealand raised the cost of staying in the huts last year because they realized they were losing a ton of money financing the hiking journeys of tourists.  The price of a night in the first hut on the Kepler Track, the Luxmore Hut, was raised from $12/night to $130/night for non-New Zealanders.  So, for a family of four to stay for one night, it would cost $520 (about $300-$350 in US dollars).  For that price you get bunks, a potty, and a sheltered place to cook your food – and that’s it.  Seems like there’s a bit of a deterrent factored into that price.  We passed on the night in the hut.

The southwest of NZ is incredibly beautiful.  The entire place seems like (and, in fact, was) the setting for the Lord of the Rings and Hobbit movies.  We’ve found our way to a few of the actual filming sites (we’ll do more of that when we return to the North Island next week, including a visit to Hobbiton) and sat last night in a booth in a restaurant that was once inhabited by Elijah Wood, Orlando Bloom, Ian McKellen, Billy Boyd, Jonathan Rhys-Davies, and a host (pod?  gaggle?  murder?) of other dwarves.

After our overnight cruise, we begin our return trip to the north of the South Island, where we’ll catch a ferry across the Cook Straight to the North Island, where we’ll have six nights before our flight home.  Stops in Dunedin and Christchurch remain on our South Island trip, and we’ll report on those in our next blog post.

We hope that warmer weather has started to return to the Northern Hemisphere and that signs of Spring are beginning to arrive.  It’s definitely turning toward Fall here.

We love and miss you all. Talk again soon.

Max, Aimee, Cam & Wes