I lie somewhat with the title to this post. There is no road rage. There is, however, a lot of road. Glen and I have officially been on the road trip portion of the south island for close to a week now. It started with a night of camping near Oxford. We tried to find breakfast in Oxford, and the only place that was open was very pretty and had very good coffee and very, very expensive breakfasts. As we refused to pay $10 for toast and jam or $17 for bacon and eggs, we stuck to our coffees. The morning was rescued by the appearance of a tiny little micro-cat who would suck up to the diners and even share a table with them:
The restaurant also had the best bathrooms ever with a big pile of clean and very fluffy facecloths, so we made use of them and managed to clean and refresh ourselves pretty thoroughly before moving on.
It only took a couple hours of driving way under the speed limit and taking a lot of unnecessary detours to reach Methven, where we spent a couple of days at a very nice motel to celebrate our anniversary. A word about Methven: there is nothing there in the summer. The town exists almost entirely on the nearby Mt. Hutt ski fields and when there is no snow, there is no reason for anything else in Methven. The only restaurant that was open on our actual anniversary date was the local pub, so we made our own dinner and had wine in our motel room. After discovering that it is possible to tour the town in less than an hour, we did several day trips out to some of the surrounding lakes.
Unfortunately, the lakes aren’t that interesting either. To be honest, they were little more than icy puddles with rocky beds in an interior mountain landscape so depressingly brown that we found the road side rest stops on the main scenic highway to be preferable to the campsites by the lakes.
Not to say that we didn’t have a good time – it was just a little on the quiet side. We did go on one of the national walkways around Methven, which was quite pleasant. Despite it being close to sunset, it was very hot and the sun was blinding:
My eyes were watering with the effort of keeping them open.
A good portion of the walk occurred along a canal, which had curiously coloured water:
Methven is square in farmer country, and while I’m not too sure what crop these purple fields were producing, the effect was rather pretty:
Just to make sure you understand how quiet things were in Methven, here is a picture of the most exciting sign in the whole town:
YES! PATHOGEN TESTED POTATOES!
While in Methvin we decided that the driving distances are simply too short to try and drive directly to Dunedin. We would need to waste eight days on the road if we were to keep to the schedule of our free accommodation in Dunedin, and so decided to head to Queenstown first. We drove way below the speed limit to string things out longer. Hell, even the cows overtook us:
The next town we stopped at was Geraldine, which is definitely a good pit-stop area and had quite a few fun artisan food shops. Here we decided to head towards Mt Cook, as we would need to detour significantly to see it at one point or another anyway. There is only one road into Mt. Cook and one road out of it, so there was no reason not to take that road now. We breezed past Lake Tekapo – which is indeed very blue – and Lake Pukekai, and arrived at the Mt. Cook park area within plenty of time to bed down before the sun set. Behold, our mobile bed!
Glen slept fairly solidly, while I slept fairly fitfully. At one point I was startled by a great deal of chatter out side and the relentless BEEEP BEEEP BEEP of a large vehicle’s reverse signal. The light of a thousand suns then flooded into the car, damn well near blinding me. Where was this light and noise coming from? Why, the Sunrise of course! Namely the gigantic Sunrise bus that has parked smack beside our car with one of it’s multi-gigawatt headlights pointing squarely at our heads:
I’ve got no idea how they managed to wedge themselves in beside us like that, because their front fender was about three feet away from us while their bumper was three feet away from the big campsite info kiosk.
In the morning we went for a walk up the trail to the lake at the base of Mt. Cook. The place was swarming with other tourists, mostly large group of Asians although we did come across a large group of French as well. They obligingly took a picture of us:
The water in those glacial lakes is really, really muddy, giving just about everything there a slate-grey appearance. It’s very pretty, though. Again, food is very expensive. We again decided to forgo breakfast in the overpriced restaurants in Mt. Cook village, and after our walk headed onwards towards Queenstown.
The countryside north of Queenstown is just about as brown and depressing as those brown and depressing mountains by the Methven-area lakes. Happily, Queenstown itself is downright lovely. We’ve been in Queenstown for a few days now, and it is a very nice resort-type place. It reminds me a great deal of Banff, with 5.3 souvenir shops per capita and overpriced everything. Poking around in the various shops is great fun, and at one point we climbed up to the Skyline complex (we decided that we would rather walk up the mountain and see the forest than fork over $20 each for a five minute gondola ride to the same destination). At the top of the Skyline complex is a luge adventure, and we decided to give it a go. It was heaps of fun, despite the dorky-looking helmets:
The views from the complex were awesome – this is a shot of Queenstown from the Skyline complex's café where we had a post-luge coffee:
Today we are heading off from Queenstown and will make our way up to Te Anau and Milford Sound in the Fiordland area. We’ve booked ourselves in for a three hour nature cruise through the Milford Sound fjords, which by all reports is a spectacular activity. Stay tuned!
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