There was little to see on the way up from the Otago region to Christchurch and the Banks Peninsula, but one interesting stop we made was at the Morekai Boulders. These are a group of a couple hundred stone spheres each measuring just over a metre in diameter, and as far as I can tell their existence is a mystery. Pretty neat.

The Banks Peninsula is a quaint place that has been developed to serve as a weekend getaway town for Christchurchers, but plenty of tourists also make the trip. Really the only thing to do here is to take a driving tour, as most of the land is privately owned. The peninsula is quite hilly though, and the drive was a bit on the stressful side. Actually, once we got up above the snow line and it started snowing pretty hard, it became quite the stressful drive as we wound around the sharp and guardrail-free curves taking the odd glance down the steep as slope on our left. I didn’t really take in too much of the scenery then, but hopefully Ashley enjoyed it. We got down below the snow just as darkness hit, and ended up finding a pretty good beach campsite. The winds that night were crazy, and the van literally rocked us to sleep.

We drove into Christchurch early the next day, circled our hostel over and over trying to figure out the crazy network of one way streets, and then began the dreaded task of emptying and cleaning the van. The drive to drop off our home of the last month was admittedly kind of sad, but at the same time I was really ready to move on from NZ at this point. I was actually really of mixed minds – on one hand I felt as if I had seen all there was to be seen, especially after the low-key final couple of days, and needed to switch things up and go somewhere new, but on the other hand there was so much of NZ left to be seen. If the trip had been scheduled to take two months and we moved more slowly, there’s no way I’d be ready to leave after one month, but unless we did some serious backtracking we were done. I think NZ can be toured in a month, but I would strongly recommend taking 2-3 if you could afford it. It would have been nice to do some of the longer walks, see some of the more offbeat places, and have the ability to stop in a place like Wanaka for a week if we wanted Oh well… so it goes.

We got back from the rental place in the early afternoon and spent some time running errands, picking up the odd souvenir, and seeing Christchurch. It felt very intimate for a city of its size, and probably would be entered at third on my list of places I would live in New Zealand. That night we decided to live large, and we feasted and drank merrily at a fantastic Thai restaurant. An appetizer of more of those delicious Havelock green mussels was probably the best part of the meal - it’s the only course I can remember two weeks later anyway. Afterwards we stopped by a fancy lounge where we drank beers by the fire. It seemed like an appropriately relaxing way to conclude such a whirlwind of a trip.

The next day Ashley began a marathon series of flights to get her to London the long way around the world, and I smiled thinking about my two hour hop over the Tasman Sea to Oz.

We took another driving day to get from Invercargill to Dunedin, pulling ahead of a storm that was advancing from the south, exploring until the rain caught up, and then racing north away from it again. Most of the stuff we saw were objectively magnificent, but for some reason none of the sights really stand out in my memory too strongly. A symptom of traveling through a ridiculously picturesque country for weeks I guess, or an illustration of how the weather affects one’s mood… One of the lighthouses made quite a nice stop though, and the trio of waterfall stops weren’t half bad.

In the late afternoon we stopped at Nugget Point to try to see some penguins coming ashore to nest after a long day’s fishing. The Department of Conservation has built a blind near the beach for such observation, and we stood in there for over an hour while the rain poured down outside. Nothing came out of the water that evening though, and we returned to the van damp and chilled to the bone. Thankfully our new van had working heat, something the buggered one lacked.

Finding a campsite was again difficult that night and we eventually settled on a rest stop that unfortunately, we thought, was right next to a driveway. We tried pretty hard throughout the trip to avoid camping near locals or where we might be in the way, trying to make sure that living out of a car remains an acceptable way to see New Zealand. I mean, what would you think if someone was camping at the foot of your driveway? Well, to the guy whose driveway we slept by that night, the answer was to come out and offer us the warmth of his house if it got too cold in the van overnight. “Just bang on the door and a hot pot of coffee or soup will be ready in no time.” That sentence really seems to sum up the attitudes of Kiwis. I wonder if it has anything to do with their custom of the Overseas Experience (OE) year. Virtually every single Kiwi takes what is also commonly called the “fuck off” year when they graduate high school - they pretty much are told to get out of New Zealand and not come back for 8-12 months. Kiwis are incredibly proud of this tradition, and it’s almost unheard of not to take such a trip. This probably has a lot to do with why I’ve met so many Kiwis in my travels (almost all on OE year trips). It also probably has something to do with the openmindedness of the culture, and with the generosity of the people. Everyone who offered us a hand probably hopes that their kids are treated the same way in wherever they are.

Back to the trip. We survived the night just fine, and headed into downtown Dunedin. Our first stop ended up being the best farmers market I’ve ever been to. The vibe was just so friendly and local, the food was great (and how many farmers markets are there where you can get a wicked latte?), and the prices were great. We loaded up produce to cook a feast for dinner and then set out to explore the town. The rest of Dunedin didn’t hold any huge surprises, but the whole city seemed very alive and happening. After Wanaka, this is where I’d live in NZ if I were to relocate.

We left Dunedin before noon and headed up to the nearby Otago Peninsula. We checked out a couple beaches, The Chasm, and Sandfly Bay. The Chasm is just what the name implies – a huge crack that you can stand on top of and peer hundreds of meters down a vertical rock wall to the ocean below. Impressive for sure, but another one of those things that was just so mammoth it was really difficult to grasp the scale. I preferred Sandfly Bay, where we walked a couple kilometers along the beach to another DOC penguin blind.

Fur seals and sea lions are said to be quite common at Sandfly Bay, and we saw plenty. A group of four claiming the whole beach initially captured our attention, and we had to do some careful tiptoeing around them to continue our walk. This was when we realized just how common seals are at Sandfly Bay. Anything that looked like a rock from a distance ended up being a seal, and several more came ashore for the night as we walked past. It’s pretty hilarious watching seals shift from their incredibly graceful selves in the water to lumbering piles of fat on land.

Immediately upon reaching the penguin blind Ashley spotted a meter long black blur in the surf, and a few moments later a yellow eyed penguin came crawling out onto the sand. Again, it was hilarious watching such a graceful animal at sea become so incompetent at moving around. Slow, measured hops slowly brought the penguin across the rocky shore, and when it had had enough it stopped to preen. It continued its preening for at least two hours, after which we left. In this time though we watched another penguin come ashore, and spotted a third already nested on shore. It was awesome to see penguins in the wild, and it really felt rewarding to have seen them without shelling out big bucks on a tour.

We cooked a mighty farmers market feast that night, and slept at my favourite of our NZ campsites. Away from the highway, shielded by trees, and metres from the river, I really didn’t want to leave in the morning. Oh, and the stars that night were sublime.

The drive to Invercargill, the southermost city on the mainland, was boring, and so was the city. Not bad, just nondescript. Home to a bakery that fed us some amazing pies though. We ended up at Queen’s Park, on the outskirts of Invercargill, and ended up finding a sprawling greenhouse and aviary complex in the middle. Walking the gardens, I was actually kind of disappointed at how many of the plants I recognized from working in landscaping. I didn’t want to see hostas and lilies, I wanted new and different Kiwi plants. Can’t always get what you want I guess. The aviary was also quite decent, and proved to be a great introduction to our chosen Stewart Island activity.

Stewart Island is a small, but still decently sized (the circumference track is 25 days long or something), island that lies a 2 hour ferry ride south of the south island. The separation from the rest of New Zealand has meant that many of its ecological communities are still intact, though ship-borne pests like rats have still found their way there. The ferry ride was choppy but otherwise uneventful except for an albatross sighting. I had forgotten just how huge the wings are on one of those things… We arrived rather late on May 6, checked into the hostel where we would be sleeping in a bed that night (it was a nice treat), and then headed to the one place that was open Wednesday night.

The South Sea Hotel is actually the only place open any night in the winter off-season, and was therefore predictably packed with locals as well as tourists. The menu made it clear we were in a fishing town, and I caved into the seafoody goodness. A bowl of chowder and fish and chips – I don’t know which of the two was better, but it was the best food I had in New Zealand. Ashley’s surf and turf pasta was also top notch, and the bill came to less than 30 bucks each for soup, main, and beer.

The main Stewart Island event was a birding trip to tiny Ulva Island, a five minute water taxi away. Our captain had sat next to us at the hotel the night before – Stewart Island is that kind of place. Not knowing much about local birds, we got a guide for the 4 hour excursion. It ended up being one of the best investments I have ever made. Our guide was both supremely knowledgeable and very passionate about the ecology of Ulva Island, and really passed his enthusiasm for birding on to me. He explained that 5 years ago Ulva Island wasn’t the rat- and possum-free bird “paradise” that it is today. It took two years of rigorous trapping and monitoring to remove the introduced egg predators, and afterwards the reintroduction of extirpated native birds began.

It was amazing to hear about the huge effort being put into recreating this tiny bit of what NZ used to be 100 or so years ago. Hundreds of rat traps – one every 5 meters in a grid covering the island – are still checked by volunteers (including our guide) weekly to ensure no new rats have invaded. (One or two a year generally are caught, stowaways on passing ships.) The walking paths are covered in gravel to prevent erosion, and every piece of it gets washed in a converted cement mixer to remove foreign seeds or insects before it is shipped to the island. The birds are also closely watched – most are banded to give some indication of the health of the various populations. The few species that are strong enough fliers to make it the couple hundred meters to Stewart Island proper (remember these birds evolved with no predators around – they are horrible fliers) are even taught as juveniles to avoid rats and possums using decoys and the warning calls of “educated” birds. Our guide recognized several birds on the walk that he had himself banded and taught in previous years.

The best part of the story is that the hard work is paying off. We saw many species of birds that are unheard of on the mainland. One particular species, the saddleback, had its numbers reduced to something like 40 birds on Stewart Island five years ago. Ulva Island is now home to around 300 of them, and a week ago there were 350 – 50 of them were caught and transferred to newly-created refuge on the mainland. I realize in hindsight how happy I am to pay to see protected wildlife. Hopefully the influx of tourists willing to pay to see protected wilderness will help convince locals that conservation can be profitable. I felt the same way after seeing the Irrawaddy dolphins in Laos – buying a beer and hiring a boat just gave a bunch of locals a vested interest in keeping the dolphins around. I wish I could think of a Canadian example…

By far the best known of the four sounds in Fiordland National Park is Milford Sound. As a result it’s also the most accessible and cheapest, so we hopped on the uber tourist trail and made our way there. The drive in was a snaking hundred kilometers through the mountains, taking us just over two hours and ending up being the best part of the day. Rainforests, waterfalls, mountains, lakes, Fiordland is like a Disney version of wilderness. It was also sunny as we drove in – Fiordland is the wettest place in NZ, each year receiving tens of meters of rain and experiencing maybe 15 sunny days.

It wasn’t sunny for long. The route in winds up mountain after mountain and our ascent brought us into the clouds where it inevitably was raining. Further ascent brought us to snow, a shock to everyone – the first snow around here typically falls a month later. Many drivers pulled over to put on chains and plows were out in full force to deal with the inch that was barely sticking to the road, so everyone was safe – what a relief The final leg of the drive goes through a tunnel several kilometers long that is burrowed right through the heart of a mountain. The Homer Tunnel must have cost many millions to build, and goes nowhere except Milford Sound. The population of locals there is under 200. THAT’S how heavily touristed the place is. There was no snow at the other end, but lots of rain.

The only way to see Milford Sound in less than a week (there’s a 7 day hiking track) is to go by chopper or boat. Not having hundreds of dollars to blow, we chose boat. The trip was quite disappointing – it poured the whole time, which wouldn’t have been so bad except for the intense winds, visibility was horrible, and compared to the rest of NZ, it wasn’t especially nice – beautiful for sure, but so’s the rest of the country. The best bit came when we pulled alongside an enormous slab of rock (enormous in this case means a full 1000 meters of solid rock, 800 straight up and another 200 under the water). Before the last ice age this rock had filled the fiord, and you could see more of it on the other side of the sound. NZ was covered in ice for many tens of thousands of years though, and a glacier bore its way the 1000 meters through the chunk of limestone. Huge scrape marks are still visible on the vertical face. I spent a while trying to understand the scale of what I was witnessing, but I still haven’t really come to grips with it.

Hilarious news greeted us when the boat returned to the wharf. The road on the other side of the tunnel had been shut down until the snow stopped and was plowed. It ended up only delaying us for a couple hours, though we both thought we could feel our braincells dying as we crawled through the tunnel on the way back – it took maybe an hour, and the smell of fumes was overwhelming.

We pulled off for a little walk at Gunn Lake near the entrance to Fiordland, and I really enjoyed this. Everything in the forest here was covered with moss. I found my inner child for a bit as I bounced on the incredibly thick and springy mats, but then lost my shoe as I punched through into quite the muddy quagmire below. I guess wet feet should be expected in Fiordland.

Finding a place to camp that night was actually really difficult. We drove for hours as kilometer after kilometer of narrow-shouldered highway rolled past, until we finally found a neatly manicured park on the outskirt of some small town. I hid the van in a grove of trees, and we woke up ticketless. Woo!

Wanaka was my favourite place in New Zealand. I’m pretty sure it was anyway, though a lot of other places are damn close. (I can make this pronouncement because I’ve now worked my way over to Australia. Hopefully my posts catch up soon.) There was no one thing about Wanaka that made it so great – no glowworms, no geysers, no gimmicks. Wanaka is a little town nestled in the mountains, on the shore of a brilliant, crystal clear lake – tourists haven’t really taken it over yet and it has a very friendly, small town vibe. We only stopped here because our guide at Fox told us we should really check it out. Our initial plan was to drop by for a coffee before heading to Queenstown for the afternoon. We stayed the whole day, and easily could have stayed for many more.

Stumbling upon a farmers’ market was the first sign we were onto something good, though there ended up being no food for sale, just arts and crafts. A latte and a pie at a local cafe got us warmed up though (well kinda – Ashley and I both bought sweaters here), and we thought we’d just wander along the beach for a little bit before heading on.

As an aside, I have it written in my notes that the bathroom in Wanaka is especially nice. That seems like a detail that should be edited out as I write this, but it provides a telling glimpse into what it’s like to live out of a van. Clearly the nice bathroom was an important enough find for me to scribble it down. Anyways…

A little bit of wandering became an entire afternoon by the lake. The beach curves away from the town into a regenerated forest area, and a few minutes outside town you really get the impression that you’re at the base of the mountains. Snow capped peaks, a mirror of a lake – I didn’t think it could get better. Then I realized that the stones littering the beach were perfect little disks. and I skipped them until my arm felt like rubber.

No day in NZ would be complete without some sort of strenuous activity, and the summit of the relatively small Mt Iron became our goal for sunset. Half the mountain is private land used for sheep farming, and the trail up the mountain followed the dividing barbed wire fence. This is only important because some local artist had spent untold hours attaching rosebuds (the mountain was covered in spent roses) to every single barb. The effect was pretty neat, but mostly I just admire the perserverence it would take to stick a rosebud every 6 inches for many kilometers. There was a nice panoramic view from the top that made me appreciate Wanaka that much more – snow capped peaks filled the entire 360 degrees.

The next day brought us to Queenstown, the one place in NZ that every Kiwi I met in SE Asia told me I had to go. After Wanaka, it was kind of a disappointment. I guess Queenstown is billed just as I described Wanaka above, and it truly was quite nice, but it is a bigger, pricey, less intimate and much more touristy version. The “things to do” in Queenstown involve bungee jumps, skydives, and jetboating. I preferred sitting in cafes and enjoying a quiet lake. Go ahead and call me lame.

I’ve also added a couple pictures of our “roadside” campsites. I wish I took photos of all of them, because these aren’t even the best. It was only near the end of the trip that I realized I should make some sort of record.

Our next big stop was to be Fox Glacier, but the road there from Abel Tasman is the legendary west coast highway, so we took a travel day to make sure we could experience the drive during daylight. It was a day well spent. This fabled section of highway is only three or four hundred kilometers long, but it is a twisty road and you are rarely able to travel faster than 50km/h. That being said, you really don’t want to drive this road faster than 20. We spent the whole drive admiring the ocean a few meters off to our right, steep cliffs and rainforest on the left, and the peaks of Fiordland (including Mt. Cook, NZ’s highest peak) stood ahead. Lookout points and trails abounded, and somehow we managed to stop for every single one. The highlight was probably the pancake rocks – odd formations with distinct horizontal bands every foot or so, maybe a couple hundred feet tall, jutting out into the Tasman Sea. The day wasn’t about a highlight though – the whole journey was amazing. We camped in the mountains that night, a waterfall maybe 20 meters away lulling us to sleep. Free camping is definitely the way to go.

Our tour to Fox Glacier left at 8 the next morning, and somehow we arrived early. Guided tours are the only way to see the glacier up close at the best of times, and we got pretty lucky with our timing. Huge storms during the previous weeks had battered the glacier, and we were in the first group of people to climb it in 12 days – awesome for us, as not a footprint was evident, but horrible for our guide, who had to pick out safe routes for us and carve many a step into steep ice faces. We crossed many “do not enter” barriers on the way in, but apparently this isn’t warning enough for some people – a few months earlier a couple of Australian guys had crossed the barriers unguided and approached the leading face of the glacier. They were crushed by tens of thousands of tonnes of ice. Beware.

The biggest danger on the way in was the risk of landslides. The intense rains had made much of the ground unstable, and the side of one mountain had given way, taking the access road with it. That meant a long, “dangerous” walk for us. I use the quotes because I’m pretty sure tourists wouldn’t be allowed in if there was a significant chance of danger, but the guiding company took safety pretty seriously nonetheless. For example, they had many of their guides stationed throughout the rockslide zone, “the gunbarrels”, watching the mountains with binoculars. As we passed through the section, our guide was in constant contact with them via walkie-talkie. He pointed out a bus-sized rock sitting next to the trail – last week it had been sitting at the top of the mountain, and a trail of crushed vegetation was visible snaking down the mountainside to where the rock now lay. After seeing that, we all understood why the lookouts were posted.

A brief session on how to use cramp-ons (metal spikes that attach to your boots), and we headed onto the ice. Walking with the things took a bit of getting used to, as your shoes were now about 3 inches taller and it was easy to snag a pantleg with a spike. The actual experience of walking on the glacier was amazing though. The thing was just so massive – 20km long, hundreds of meters wide, and also hundreds of meters thick. Our guide dutifully hacked steps on any steep sections, and spotted us when the path led us near some of the bigger holes and crevices – most of these act as drains and are continually expanded by rainfall; they run hundreds of meters down to the bottom of the glacier. Fall down one of these and no one will be able to get to your body until the glacier advances to the point where you got stuck, probably in a few centuries. Because of all these hazards the going was necessarily slow, which I found incredibly frustrating at first; once I learned to relax and just bask in the surroundings I had an amazing time though.

Because of the glacier’s situation in a mountain valley, direct sun was scarce. Our morning hike managed to bring us across the width of the glacier to a patch of sun on the far side. As we found boulders to sit on our guide pointed out a precarious pile of rocks above, sternly warning us to stay away. Halfway through lunch one of these boulders, about half the size of a car, spontaneously fell from the pile and slid part of the way down the hill towards us. The ever-changing nature of glacial environments makes them treacherous indeed.

After lunch we hiked straight up the glacier, onto the smooth blue ice that makes glacier so surreally beautiful. We actually ended up getting quite close to the serac field about 2km up the glacier, an achievement no one really expected when we set out that morning. Seracs are towers of ice, some 30 meters tall, that form when the glacier cracks as it goes around the bend in the valley. These also have a habit of toppling randomly, and we stayed well clear. Apparently on summer days it’s a common hobby to go up there and watch the seracs – they fall with astonishing frequency, and the roar they let off when they collapse is deafening.

This has been a rambling post already, but there’s one more kinda neat thing about the glacier that I want to point out, knowing that I’m probably crossing the line towards sounding too much like Lonely Planet. While global warming is causing the vast majority of the world’s glaciers to recede, Fox is growing. Pretty much, higher temperatures = increased evaporation off the Tasman Sea = increased snowfall over the mountains = increased glacier growth; glaciers grow from the top and are slide down the mountain – the leading edge is the oldest ice.

We stopped for dinner at the Hard Antler in the tiny town of Haast, and camped that night next to a river, 50m from a lake. We didn’t actually see the lake when we pulled in that evening, but found its shore to be an excellent spot for breakfast the next morning.

It was really nice to be moving again, especially because after Waitomo we were pretty much done with the north island. Virtually everyone, locals and tourists alike, seems to agree that the south island is the more picturesque of the two, and the place where we should spend most of our time. We therefore booted it down to Wellington, the southernmost city on the north island, where we got to spend a day hanging out and waiting for the ferry to take us across to Picton. The highlight was Te Papa, the national museum. Brand new and no doubt quite expensive, this was one of the most impressive museums I have ever experienced. The place was enormous – six expansive floors housed a brilliant natural history section featuring a colossal squid specimen (you may have seen a Discovery Channel documentary about this squid – I saw it a while back), an informative floor about Maori and Polynesian culture, bits about the colonization of New Zealand which read just like Canadian history, and even an impressive art gallery. We spent a good chunk of our day here and, despite the inevitable museum fatigue that struck by the end, really got a lot out of it.

The inter-island ferry the next morning was uneventful, just slow and expensive – almost 4 hours and $220 for the two of us and our van. Luckily enough we escaped an extreme storm warning in Wellington though, and Picton greeted us with sunny skies. The region at the top of the south island is Marlborough, big for its vineyards and quiet bays. We decided to spend a couple days up here before heading down the crazily hyped west coast. A five day tramping trail, the Queen Charlotte Track, loops around Marlborough and we figured we’d make a day hike of a ridge section in the middle. The drive to our trailhead was almost as eventful as our trip into Taumaruni.

The trail section that was recommended to us began about 30km north of the major highway, accessible through twisty but well paved mountain roads. I guess the best way to describe the twistyness 30km stretch is to say that about two-thirds of the way through we came across 100m or so of straight road and celebrated. Ashley felt sick the whole way, but luckily for her we had a few stops forced on us. The coolest was coming across a group of wild pigs wandering down the middle of the road, a sow and 5 or 6 piglets. They bolted as we turned the corner, and were actually hilariously bad at running – the piglets each fell a couple times and even the sow struggled to make it off the road into the rainforest. The road was also littered with roadkill, and each piece was attended to by a harrier – NZ’s biggest and most common raptor. They reminded me of eagles with hawks’ heads, and were always a pleasure to see. The tramp itself took us along the top of a steep-ish ridge with great ocean views off to either side. Pretty nice, but nothing like the Great Walk we wandered the next day.

After exploring Marlborough we set off towards Abel Tasman National Park, stopping in the small town of Havelock on the way. New Zealanders pride themselves on their green mussels, and Havelock is NZ’s mussel capital. We stopped at the Mussel Pot, a restaurant recommended to us by a pair of bikers we met while dealing with the buggered van, and ordered a sampler platter of mussels. I think I have boring tastes – I found the butter and garlic mussels far better than the sweet chili, blue cheese, or mushroom and cream ones, but they were all still absolutely delicious. We continued on until we were just outside Tasman Ntl Park, finding a quiet pulloff in the mountains where we made camp.

If you ever travel to New Zealand, put Abel Tasman near the top of the list of parks you must visit. Even though we only walked here for around 6 hours, this place stole my heart. The scenery is breathtaking, the tracks are well maintained without feeling like roads, the diversity of environments in astounding, and there is just such an obvious passion for the place – the Department of Conservation has many projects in the works to make this place even better. The most apparent of these is the “bring back the birdsong” campaign, which is basically attempting to restore birds to Abel Tasman (and to NZ generally).

A bit of background - It all comes back to the uniqueness of NZ’s geological history. Billions of years ago NZ split from the supercontinent Gondwanaland much earlier than the other continents, before many now-dominant groups of animals had even evolved. This left NZ with no reptiles and only two species of mammals, both bats which probably flew over later. There were plenty of birds however, and they evolved to fill the niches occupied by mammals in the rest of the world. Huge grazing beasts are common everywhere for example, typically as buffalo, deer, moose, elephants, etc – some kind of big mammal. In NZ, there were 9 or so species of moa, three meter tall birds that were the prominent grazers (the Maori feasted on them when they became the first humans to reach New Zealand 500 years ago, and within a hundred years or so they were extinct). Anyway, this means that NZ’s birds have been able to evolve without worrying about predators, especially ground-based ones. When Europeans introduced rats, weasels, possums, rabbits, and all those other little mammals to “improve” NZ, the effects on native birds was incredible. In many places birds are as rare as in SE Asia (where they eat all of them), or the only birds that are present are European species (pigeons and sparrows abound). There are now extensive trapping programs in place, and possum fur is considered to be the most environmentally friendly material around (the DOC sells the possums they catch to clothes people, funding part of their work).

Sorry about the aside. Abel Tasman was incredible. Go there.

Oh yeah, we saw this weird mushroom. I’d never seen anything like it, and I don’t think you have either:

Waitomo is famous for its caves - they are old, deep, huge, numerous, and most importantly, full of glowworms. I was first introduced to glowworms watching the BBC’s Planet Earth series, and I’m sure many of you know what I’m referring to. Waitomo is where all that glowing subterranean awesomeness was filmed.

We ended up visiting three caves, and completely by accident saw them in the perfect order (worst to best). Ruakuri, our first stop, is an enormous cavern over a hundred meters below the surface and 7 kilometers long – we got to walk 1.4km of it. This cave is pretty heavily developed – it boasts its wheelchair accessibility – and though the futuristic suspended walkways were kind of neat, they did detract from the overall experience. Highlights of this cave included the numerous underground rivers and waterfalls, the scale, and the chance to finally see a few glowworms.

Stop number two was the smaller Aranui Cave, and I was immediately hooked when just inside the entrance we were able to spot some cave weta. A weta is one of those New Zealand oddball animals – a gigantic grasshopper like insect but with a hugely enlarged abdomen and without wings; these are the world’s heaviest insects. Ugly, but neat. Guided tours of Aranui have been offered for over 100 years and it really felt like it inside, especially after Ruakuri. Haggard wooden staircases replaced concrete and steel ramps, and rusted chickenwire screens from the days of old were still in place to keep curious hands away from the stalactites. The stalactites in this cave were mindblowing – far and away more numerous and delicate than I ever thought could exist. Only a couple of hundred years old, babies in the geological sense, many of these formations are still thin “straws” hanging from the cave roof. Over the next millennia they will grow and thicken at the astonishing pace of one cubic centimeter of limestone per decade until they become the classical cone shaped stalactites we all know.

Considering that I completely lack the writing ability to describe the wonders of Ruakuri and Aranui, it seems hopeless to attempt a summary of the Glowworm Cave. This place is simply unreal, off-the-hook, magical, awesome, spiritual, whatever intensely positive adjective you can come up with. The non-glowworm parts of this cave were pretty neat – one huge chamber somehow has near-perfect acoustics and concerts featuring famous musicians have been held in there for hundreds of people. The glowworm part was crazy. Climbing down some stairs in the cave to a dock on the river flowing underneath, we boarded a little rowboat type thing and set off into the darkness. Looking up, we saw millions upon millions of twinkling green lights – think of the most stars you’ve ever seen at night, and multiply by a hundred. The way they illuminated the relief of the ceiling, with all the crevices and stalactites, just left me speechless. I wish I could describe just how awesome this was.

The boat continued down the river and out of the cave, we mumbled thanks to the guide as we made our way to the van still speechless, and off we headed for Wellington, the southern tip of the north island.

I know I have a bad habit of ending posts that way. Well, we didn’t make it to Wellington that evening. Around two hours outside of Waitomo, almost exactly between the two tiny towns of Te Kuiti and Taumaruni, 45 kilometers either way to cell reception or the nearest house, in the middle of a valley, we broke down. No real warning – an amber engine light came on, I resolved to stop at the first garage I saw (as per our contract), and no more than 30 seconds later the engine died. We sat in the middle of the road stupefied, but luckily it wasn’t too late yet and there was still traffic. Just like in Kentucky, the first person we saw had a pickup and offered to help. He pulled right over, got out a chain, and gave us a tow to the side of the road, as it was way too steep to push the van anywhere. After a cordial chat, he took all our information and offered to call AA (Automobile Assistance) as soon as he got into cellphone range. Oh yeah, did I mention that this was Anzac Day, a revered national holiday when no one likes to work?

Anyway, we broke down around 4 pm, and we thought AA was contacted not much later. When no one showed up by 10pm, we flagged another passing car. Same deal – they took our info and offered to call AA as soon as they got phone service while we stayed with the van. I stayed up for a few hours in the driver’s seat, waiting to honk at any passing vehicles while being driven nuts by the incessant clicking of the four-ways. Eventually I gave up, and we fell asleep in the back. Sometimes it’s really nice to have a camper.

In the morning I met my favourite Kiwi. We were broken down in a construction zone, and a road worker drove past early Sunday morning to change the batteries in a sign. I went over to talk to him, and he just gave me a big smile and asked how the night was – everyone here is just so used to backpackers sleeping on the sides of highways. When I explained our situation to him, he said that he’d finish his chores and then tow us the 45 km to Taumaruni. At 15 kilometers per hour, it was a long tow. Most of it was downhill, and I did my best to keep the tow rope taught as we weaved through the mountains. The dude towing us (I can’t remember his name, and feel terrible about it) didn’t seem to mind spending three hours towing a couple of tourists to town however. He kind of enjoyed it I think, stopping along the way to show us a face in the mountains. Finally reaching town, he wouldn’t even let me buy him breakfast. He left us at a gas station and went back to his work. I like that guy.

This time we called AA. They immediately knew who we were (“we got two calls about you last night, really detailed, and we sent out three cars looking for you… you got towed into town? We should be able to find you now…”). I can’t believe for a second that they sent anyone out – our van is a neon green monster, and the fourways were on all night. Anyway, we got towed for a third time, now to a trailer park outside town, and abandoned until Monday.

On Monday the mechanic came to assess the situation and see if we would need a new van. The verdict was quick – blown engine gasket, overheated, completely bugggered. “What does ‘completely buggered’ mean?” I ask. “Three week overhaul.” I was so happy with our decision to rent a van rather than buy one. A new van would be towed to us that afternoon. It arrived, and we were on the road again.

Tongariro National Park sits pretty much in the middle of the north island, and is home to three pretty impressive mountains. Mts. Tongariro and Ngauruhoe are classic jagged peaks, topped with the requisite snow, while Mt. Ruapehu is an almost perfect cone. You may recongize it as Mt. Doom from a certain mythical land of Mordor. One of the absolute “must-do” activities in New Zealand is the Tongariro Alpine Crossing, a one day, almost 20 kilometer trek around the side of Mt. Ngauruhoe and up across the saddle between Mt. Tongariro and Mt Ruapehu, bringing you within a hundred meters or so of each summit before a steep descent on the other side. Given good conditions it’s definitely possible to summit either of the mountains creating the saddle, even for amateurs like me. Good conditions were not to be had however…

The day started well enough – a big breakfast at 5ish, arrival at the bus stop at 6 (the track is not a loop), a blazing red sunrise, and arrival at the trailhead sometime around 7:30. The conditions were perfect – sunny, warm, and just a bit of cloud starting to come over the top of Mt. Tongariro. We started fast, and quickly covered the first few kilometers of trail meandering through alpine bush. The whole time the imposing cone of Mt. Doom loomed ahead, and I couldn’t wait to get up there and try for the summit. The clouds were starting to obscure the top of Mt Tongariro though, and I put my camera away sure that if I waited a few minutes for the clouds to pass I’d be able to snap all the shots I wanted.

By the time we reached the “Devil’s Staircase” it was clear that the 10% POP from the morning was now 100%. Additionally, everything was fogged out by cloud, and the wind was picking up. The busdriver/guide had told us rather sternly that no one should try for a summit that was covered by clouds, should it happen. By now the upper two-thirds of the mountains were hidden by the thickening blanket of cloud.

The gruelling hour or so steep climb was finished, but there was no view on top to make it all worthwhile. Visibility may have optimistically been 10m, and it had become soggy (we were walking through a cloud) and windy. We snapped a few pictures at our “summit” for the day, and though it wasn’t a real one, it didn’t really matter. As far as I could tell, all directions led down from where I was, despite the fact that the real cloud-obscured summits were less than 1000m away. The first kilometer of the trek down was treacherous scree, but it soon leveled out into this bizarre, barren landscape. Not really knowing what the moon looks like, the best adjective I can find to describe these volcanic plains is lunar. There was nothing alive up there, weird gray and black sands were piled into dunes and drifts running in all directions, and the surface was scattered with boulders and craters. A couple of kilometers into this moonscape and we were greeted by the glowing green of Emerald Lake, one of Tongariro’s volcanic craters. This was the suggested picnic spot for lunch, but after spending an eternity huddled behind a boulder out of the wind trying in vain to get my frozen fingers to open a granola bar we trekked on. Lunch would wait until the Crossing was complete.

Descending brought better weather, improved visibility, functioning digits, and eventually, life. Scattered patches of battered groundcover quickly turned to the grassy plains which dominate the upper habitable regions of the mountains. Some kilometers later and evidence of shrubs and flowering plants, and then the treeline. I had only ever seen pictures of treelines before, and while they seemed rather distinct they did nothing to prepare me for the real thing. Within a span of no more than 5 meters the terrain had shifted from scraggly shrubs to dense forest, complete with birds, insect swarms, and all the other elements of a thriving community. I never imagined such a sharp distinction between plant communities could exist. It was just so surreal…

The last few kilometers through the rainforest were classic New Zealand – gigantic tree ferns and dense underbrush lined the pathway as the enormous trees of the podocarp forest towered overhead. Several waterfalls over mossy boulders later and we emerged in the carpark at the other end of the trail. I still can hardly believe that weather and terrain can change so much in the span of 20 kilometers. Great day.

Sitting in the middle of a huge region of volcanic activity, geothermal hot springs, geysers, and bubbling mud pools, Rotorua was a great chance to relax and soak in the surroundings – literally. We arrived fairly late and immediately pulled into a campsite right next to a hotspring. At first I thought it was pretty crazy that a “natural wonder” or whatever could be privately owned, but I quickly came to realize the true extent of the geothermal activity in this part of New Zealand. Hotsprings are everywhere, and new ones keep popping up unexpectedly, many of them in inconvenient locations (roads, school fields, backyards, etc). Anyway, within minutes of arriving we were soaking in a 40C spring-fed hot tub, and it was awesome despite the mild stink of sulfur.

Downtown Rotorua boasts a huge, and more importantly free, geothermal park, and this is where we spent a good chunk of the next day. Crazily bubbling mud pits, boiling geysers shooting into the air, and big steaming craters were everywhere, and so was the rotten egg stench of the sulfur. Especially neat was the preponderance of South American flora – New Zealand and South America were joined some huge number of millions of years ago, and shared many species back in those days. After the continents separated and drifted apart, South America remained tropical while New Zealand shifted to the more temperate south. This led to the extinction of much of the tropical plants throughout most of New Zealand, but some remain in the geothermal areas. I actually don’t know if most people would find this interesting…

We spent the afternoon walking a gentle10km track through a redwood grove, admiring the gargantuan proportions of the trees. That night we drove up to a lookout between Blue Lake and Green Lake (the craters of two volcanoes, so named because the mineral compositions of each volcano impart a distinct colour to the water above), and decided to cook dinner while enjoying this view before finding a roadside campground (there were no camping signs at the lookout). Anyway, while we were cooking dinner another campervan pulled in - the evening ritual for most campervan tourists is to cruise the highways for a picnic area or enlarged shoulder on which to make camp. These guys saw us, decided that we must be camping there, and thought that if we were, they might as well do so as well. Though we had every intention of moving to a legal spot, once these strangers pulled in, we decided that if they were willing to take the risk, so were we. Some sociologist should do an experiment… We woke up without a ticket under the wiper, so it worked out fine.

The next couple days were spent doing more of the same, with the highlight definitely being the Waikite Valley boiling river. We got to an enormous hotspring, Te Manaroa, the largest single source of boiling water in New Zealand (a couple hundred litres per second), crossing over a big steaming canyon on the way. This canyon has been carved by a literal boiling river flowing from the continually spewing geyser – the water emerges at 98C, and 2 kilometers downstream the river is still 60C. Some of this water is also piped into a thermal resort next door, and they have an elaborate system of waterfalls, fountains, and pipes to bring the water down to a more tolerable 45 degrees before it is fed into their series of pools.

A night in a picnic area next to a popular trout stream, and we were off to Taupo and Tongariro National Park – home of some badass mountains including a certain “Mt. Doom”.