Week 9: The West Coast

Greetings!

When we last wrote, we technically already had started the West Coast (South Island) portion of our travels up in Golden Bay and Farewell Spit.  From there, we drove through the mountains on the southern end of Kahurangi National Park to Westport, a small town about 150 kilometers further south along the coast.

Westport is an ok town; we were staying in that area solely in order to visit the Oparara Basin, which contains a series of limestone arches and caves carved by Oparara River.  The series of arches were pretty impressive.  You had to climb down through a small cave in order to get to one.  The other was enormous, with the top of the (mostly limestone) arch passing hundreds of feet overhead.

There also was a network of caves, featuring spiders, glowworms, and interesting tile formations in the hardened soil of the mud floor.  Aimee and the boys learned that I do not enjoy the confined spaces of caves and got a kick out of my near-panic level of anxiety, which ultimately sent me scurrying back out the opening each time things got a little too dark and a little too there's-only-one-way-out-of-here-and-something's-going-to-happen-and-we're-all-going-to-be-trapped-and-die.

We stayed at a lodge on the beach outside of Westport.  The lodge was nice and the beach setting beautiful, but the owner of the lodge was a bit off and ultimately it's the first bad-lodging experience that we've had on this long trip.  I suppose that like getting out of Chile without at least one flat tire, we couldn't expect to have a flawless experience with all of the AirBnBs, hotels, hostels, and campgrounds in almost 3 months.

From Westport, we drove south along Route 6, the PCH of the South Island, and then inland a bit into Arthur's Pass National Park.  APNP was the South Island's first national park, officially formed in 1929.  We stayed one night in a beautiful campground in the mountains and did a short day-hike near a ski field.

APNP is where we first started to encounter the South Island's famed sand flies, which we luckily didn't have any of up in Golden Bay.  The sand flies are tiny, but they feast in swarms on any exposed skin.  Bug repellent works only very temporarily.  As you travel south, you increasingly can actually see the evidence the carnage that sand flies have wreaked on the legs of travelers.

Our night in APNP gave us an amazing view of the stars, which Aimee was able to capture magnificently on her fancy camera, but it also gave us frigid temperatures.  Aimee, Cam, and I shivered through a sleepless night, while Wesley "Hot Box" Welsh slumbered warmly and peacefully.  As a result, we found a campground further south along the coast with little cottages made from insulated shipping containers.

Mt. Cook (right) and Mt. Tasman from the beach at sunset

Dinner at our shipping container campsite

Our next night - our last before arriving in Wanaka - was another campground on another beautiful beach.  We have continued our North Island beach experience on the South Island, spending more time on beaches than in the mountains, which is not what we expected.  What we didn't realize is that the Southern Alps, which run the length of the South Island, are mostly accessible only from the eastern side of the range, not the West Coast.  That is, unless you have a helicopter.

We decided to splurge for a helicopter tour over the glaciers of the Souther Alps.  There are dozens of glaciers, large and small; the largest/longest is the Tasman Glacier, followed by the Fox and Franz Josef Glaciers.  The Tasman flows off the eastern slopes of Mt. Tasman and Mt. Cook (Maori name: Aoraki), New Zealand's two tallest mountains.  Our trip included a landing on one of the smaller glaciers.  We had perfect weather and it was the first time the boys and I had ever been in a helicopter; Aimee had done a Niagara Falls flight when she was a kid.  It was very expensive, but worth every penny.  Flying mere meters over mountaintops and floating above the crevasses in the glacial ice is something we'll never forget.

Mt. Cook

The Tasman Glacier

The boys playing on a glacier at the top of a mountain

Quick, funny story.  If you've been reading this blog, you'll remember that I mentioned the confounding compulsion that Aimee has which requires her to disappear in airports precisely at the time that our plane begins to board.  It's a compulsion that I've become somewhat accustomed to; it remains frustrating, but it's no longer surprising.  I was, however, completely unprepared for it to manifest itself in the helicopter-boarding setting.

They had to bring in a larger, six-person helicopter to take the four of us and two other people on our tour, which meant we were all standing around for about ten minutes waiting for it to arrive.  And then you could hear it before you could see it coming around the mountain.  We all watched it approach, excitedly.

When it was about 100 feet from the landing area, Aimee turned to me and said, "I have to go to the bathroom," and trotted off.  I was...completely speechless.  It's one thing for the disappearance compulsion to strike when there are one hundred other people who also have to board the flight, which is going to take 30 minutes; it's another thing entirely when there are five, the rotors are spinning, and the pilot is holding the door for you.  We all boarded and then watched from inside a helicopter for Aimee to come running back from the bathroom.

We're in Wanaka now, staying in an AirBnB for a week.  Wanaka is a tourist- and adventure-focused town toward the southwest of the South Island.  Both Wanaka and its larger neighbor, Queenstown, are set on the shores of large, beautiful lakes surrounded by huge mountains, including a range called The Remarkables, which is my new favorite mountain range name.  It's hard to come up with a comparable place in the U.S.  Tahoe, but without a gaudy casino?  Burlington, but with much bigger mountains?  Anyway, it's breathtakingly beautiful.

We did a long, 16 kilometer (1,300 meter elevation gain) hike up Isthmus Peak on our first day here.  It was steep and seemingly never-ending, but once again the boys accomplished the whole thing.  Getting them to the top does take quite a combination of distraction, pleading, bribery, and outright lying (e.g., "this is the last switchback before the top, I promise), but I don't think that diminishes the accomplishment.  What's diminishing is how hobbled Aimee and I are by these hikes the next morning.

We'll report on the remainder of our time in Wanaka next week, when we move to our most-southern destination, the South Island's Fjordlands.

Talk to you soon!

Max, Aimee, Cam & Wes