Day 2--Queenstown to Te Anau

New Zealand Travelogue

Day 2

Day 2 started early for me. I’m not sure what “jet lag” actually is, but for me it’s meant going to bed early and waking up at unreasonable times in the morning. My normal sleep schedule is, at the best of times, iffy. I routinely can’t fall asleep before 3:00 in the morning and can’t sleep beyond 9:00 in the morning, even when I have nothing to get up for. With the time adjustment, going to bed at 10:00 here is like staying up until 5:00 in the morning at home. As such, I’ve been feeling tired around 8:00 in the evening and getting to bed well before 10:00. However, I can’t sleep past 5:00 yet, and I am usually awake before 4:00 and spend a restless hour tossing and turning. The downside is that I’m spending a lot of my days nodding off as soon as we start driving somewhere, but the upside is that I’ve had some time to work on this travelogue before everyone else gets up in the morning.

Skyline Gondola-Restaurant-Luge

We decided to start our second full day of travel with a trip up to the highest point in Queenstown (at least it was the highest point that I could see, I suspect there are higher points, but, since our visit apparently wasn’t important enough for the city council to personally guide us and inform me otherwise, I will just have to stick with what I know first hand) via four-person gondolas. These gondolas offered little in the way of haunting serenades from stereotypically dressed, mustachioed men, but they did offer a great view of Queenstown.

Queenstown is one of those mysterious towns that people have to really want to live in. Almost the entire town is carved into the sides of mountains. The few open, non-hilly areas are filled too, of course, but the one that was the most obviously easy to build on, smack in the middle of town, was dedicated to, of all things, a golf course. Nearly every other construction required some impressive excavation, but that didn’t seem to deter many people from wanting to live there, and it lends itself to a very impressive view and an extraordinarily scenic townscape, which I was more than happy to enjoy.

I am looking at the brochure from Skyline as I sit here, and they claim that this gondola ride is “[r]eputed to be the steepest lift in the Southern Hemisphere.” Obviously, Skyline is as interested in verifying their facts and claims as much as I am. If they repute it to be the steepest (whatever qualification that is), then I guess I will just run with that and leave be. The activity center is located at the top of Bob’s Peak. I’m sure the “Bob” in reference was someone of note, but I’ll be jiggered if I saw any suggestion of this close at hand.

After the gondola ride up, visitors can spend their time with various activities. There is a café and, for more expensive tastes, a restaurant. There is a gift shop, of course, as well as a few other ways to spend one’s money with little to show for it in the long run. There was also a bungee jump along the side of the mountain, though we didn’t see anyone doing this, and an option to parasail over the city, which we saw several people doing. From what we’ve heard, fatalities while parasailing aren’t unheard of (problems with people being properly strapped in and such followed by a few horrible seconds of free fall ending in a loud crash as a then corpse smashes into a Toyota on the ground—because all long falls in cities, as we’ve learned from years of documented proof provided to us by Hollywood, end on the top of a car), but the general attitude here is to be prepared to die when you do anything. Liability is, from what I’ve seen, entirely up to the participant. If you don’t want to die, or at least take a chance that you might, then you probably ought to keep both feet firmly planted on the ground while in New Zealand.

There were, however, two activities that we enjoyed immensely and which I would recommend. The first was a little sight-seeing. From the viewing deck, it’s possible to see an impressive panoramic including The Remarkables mountain range, Coronet Peak, Lake Wakatipu as well as some other peaks that the brochure is bragging about. I only include the names in case anyone wants to, I don’t know, look them up and find out some history or something (something I should probably do personally, maybe I’ll get around to it later—but probably I won’t, so do it yourself, lazy). The Remarkables are one of the main ski ranges in the region and, though mighty impressive, their name might be a little over the top. I am, of course, remarking on them right now, so the name is at least literally true, but it still seems to lack a certain amount of subtlety and consideration. Anyway, take some pictures, burn some film, enjoy the view. It was, I think, one of the most spectacular that we enjoyed.

The second activity was the Luge. The word “luge,” for many (and for me) calls to mind the Olympic event where one or two people jump into stream-lined buckets and hurtle down an icy crack at break-neck speeds. The Skyline’s version of the luge, in theory, recreates that experience. Except, instead of having almost no controls (as I imagine Olympic luges have because I have never seen one first-hand and refuse to do any further research on the subject since it in no way will better my understanding of how the world works), these luges have a handlebar that must be delicately gauged between “go” and “brake” as the smallish cart (still vaguely bucket shaped but more closely resembling a narrow go-cart) “hurtles” down the carefully laid out course at around ten miles per hour (or fifteen-ish millihectares or whatever the rest of the world uses for speed measurements).

Everyone but Karen took part in the event and it was, despite its fairly tame nature, quite exhilarating. It took most of us only through the first turn to get the hang of it. If we, like many of the youth on the hill, had purchased multiple rides down the hill, I have no doubt that we would have been hugging the corners and nearly flying down the course. The first go everyone is required to take the “scenic” route to get used to the controls. There was also a “fast” and “expert” route available (or maybe these were the same thing, we entered our course fast enough that I didn’t have time to see what my other options really were) and many younger folks were riding down then racing back up to the top for another go. The exception to this was Molly, who finished the scenic trail nearly five minutes later than everyone else. She had the nervous posturing of a little old lady out for an afternoon run to the store for adult diapers and fiber. She was peering over the top of her handlebar and poking along somewhere just under sauntering speed when we saw her near the bottom (which was a fairly simple straightaway). Children of no older than five were screeching to a stop behind her and forming an impressive queue as she was unwilling to hug one rail or the other to allow them to pass. It was quite hilarious and the rest of us had many laughs at her expense.

After this, we took the gondola back down to the base (almost fatally thunking a sheep in the head as we skirted near the ground—yes, there were sheep and goats grazing on the side of the mountain, who they belonged to is quite beyond me, but there are sheep literally everywhere in this country) and moved on to our next event of the day.

Vineyard, Gibston Valley

From what we were told, Queenstown is quickly becoming one of the premier regions for wine in the world. Its latitude south closely mirrors the northern latitude of the major wine producing regions in France and Oregon, lending itself naturally to the production of some very nice wines. While we’ve been here, I’ve had my fair share, and, though I am hardly an expert (we tend to buy wine for quantity over quality at home since we can move through it at a rather alarming rate, so my tastes are unrefined at best), they have been quite nice, possibly even nice-plus. I’m not sure what grade goes above “nice,” but the wines from this region might also go that high. We were informed by our guide at the vineyard that Queenstown is now considered one of the three major pinot noir regions in the world, and we all felt very impressed by this fact and pleased to be a part of the experience.

At any rate, there are several dozen wineries around Queenstown. On our way into town the night before, I saw the one that I felt we must visit. It boasted The Essential Wine Adventure. How we could pass up something that was both “essential” and an “adventure” was quite beyond me. In fact, if it was “essential,” then we didn’t have a choice in the matter. Somehow, though, we were able to take a pass on that winery and, instead, went to Gibston Valley, which was considerably closer than the Adventure. The vineyard also included a Cheesery, a term I don’t think I had ever heard of before but which makes perfect sense to me now, and the cheeses there were also nice-plus or better. At least I think they were. Since my tastes in cheese also tend to hover around the quantity over quality measure, I can’t be entirely sure. Everything they set out before us to taste seemed quite, again, nice, except for the goat cheese, which always tastes like goats to me. And, while there is a certain musky quality about a goat that I can understand many would feel also belongs in a good cheese, I tend to prefer my cheeses to taste less gamy.

It was at this point in the trip that I started to discover the playful animosity between Australians and Kiwis. Our guide, because we had a group of people from Sydney in the group, poked fun at them a bit, referring to them as the “neighbors across the ditch.” This was, I would later find out, pretty mild by Australia-jibing standards. Fairly frequently, Australians are referred to as simpletons, dullards and, at best, boorish and bemused. For point of reference, think of how Americans often refer to people of the south. We also make fun of Canadians that way, but really I think most Americans do that because Canada is such an easy target and they are too nice to make a fuss. In many ways it is exactly how I’ve heard people referring to Americans pretty much everywhere in the world, except here, and in reference to the Australians, there is no real venom attached to it. It is more like the red-headed step-child passive-aggressively venting a little frustration at a more favored child. At any rate, I find it quite amusing, being somewhat passive-aggressive in nature myself.

The brief tour took us into what we were told was the largest wine cavern in New Zealand. It was man-made and pretty impressive, again considering that the mountains are made of pretty much solid rock. We tasted a few of the wines and then headed back. Karen informed us that, as a marketing ploy, the guides would ask us to carry our glasses with us back to the main sales counter “to help the staff out.” This brought all of us strategically back into the hub of economic activity where we could be further plied into buying some wine. This, in fact, was exactly what happened and, interestingly enough, we ended up buying something like twelve bottles of wine amongst the group of us. Hurray for smart marketing ploys, I guess.

Jet boating with Blair

Our next activity was, I think, the most exhausting one of the day—not because it was particularly strenuous physically or mentally, but because it was stressful in the white-knuckle sense.

We met up on the Shootover River with a friend of Karen and Darrell’s named Blair. Another activity that garners some popular tourist attention in Queenstown is jet boating. There are several professional organizations that cater specifically to the New Zealand tourist who has a need for speed. The professional boats are rather large, seating what looked to be ten or so people in them (we saw a few of them zip by, performing seemingly impossible 180s and 360s on the river, and that would be my best estimate to how many people were usually in the boats). They are sleek, powerful looking boats that sit up high on the water. All of the boats are made of aluminum (pronounced al-yoo-min-i-yum here for a reason that was explained to me at least twice while we were down there but which I have failed to commit to memory for its sheer preposterousness) and are surprisingly durable. From what I saw of how they were treated, they would have to be.

Blair was a jet boating enthusiast. He enjoyed doing it, I think, on a spiritual level, connecting with both his boat and the water in a way that non-enthusiasts would never understand. At least this is what I sincerely hoped as he streaked us through a narrow gorge, under a felled tree at speeds I had never experienced on the water before. If, in fact, he didn’t have that kind of link to the boat and the water, we were goners.

Blair’s boat, unlike the commercial ones, was small, seating only five people. It too was aluminum and he informed us that it had a V-8 car engine for a motor. This, I thought, seemed impressive. I understand the concept of a V-8 (besides knowing that I “should have had one”). It is a higher-performance engine when used in cars. It provides quicker starts and higher speeds and, when coupled with friction and gravity and such, makes vehicles go quickly to and from places. Without much of the friction or gravity, though, I could not fathom why such a powerful engine was needed for a boat. And I still can’t fathom why such a powerful engine is needed for a boat. Blair, however, seemed to be in heaven as he tooled us around the water.

Because he could only fit five in the boat, we split into two groups. Darrell, Molly and JF went in the first group, and Karen, Libby and I sat on the shore for twenty minutes or so to go on the second ride.

It didn’t take long for Blair to show off the power of his boat once we were aboard. He powered it up and we, well, zoomed across a smallish, open lake toward the river (there are many descriptive words for traveling at speed, but few of them seem to work here—“zoomed” really fits it perfectly because we moved very much at a speed and with the near complete disregard for the laws of physics that a young child might imagine when making exactly that sound).

Once in the river and shortly after we blasted under our first felled tree, Libby asked, “Is there a depth finder on this boat?”

Blair responded, smiling broadly, “No. When we stop moving, the water is too low.”

And this was true. If there was a shimmer of water over the river rock covered bottom, he skimmed over the top of it. He later informed us that enough speed could carry the boat over small patches of dry land in the right circumstances. I feel fairly certain that, if those circumstances had existed out there that day, we would have seen the proof first-hand. As it was, it was not an unusual feeling for the bottom of the boat to scrape unsettlingly against the rock on the bottom. And several times we smacked into dangerous looking tree branches. I have not spent a great deal of time aboard speedboats back home, but I have spent enough time to know that traditional fiberglass boats do not like to run into debris and other detritus that might poke out of the water. Having experienced the type of jaw-clenching terror that a puncture might occur when striking such a protrusion while aboard these types of speedboats, it was just that much more stressful for me every time we smacked into something just below the visible surface. Blair just turned to us with an ear-to-ear smile on his face every time it happened. This, however, was not very reassuring, since Blair had this smile on his face for the entire twenty-some minutes we were clinging for our lives aboard his boat.

After a few more arbitrary jolts one direction or the other, just to test the responsiveness of his boat and passengers, Blair asked me, “What do you do?”

“I teach English.”

“I would like to teach jet boating. That’s my dream job.”

Karen observes, “You’d be good at it.”

“The commercial organizations won’t have me.”

“Oh?” Libby asked.

“Ye. I’m too dodgy and I’m too hard on the equipment.” This he followed up with a few quick jabs in this direction and that.

As we neared the end of our trip, he admitted to us that this was his third boat. “What happened to the first two?” Libby asked.

“Wrote them off.” Blair answered. “See those black marks there?” He pointed to some black scuff marks on the dash, which was less than ten inches away from my chest at this point.

“Those are from my mate’s shoes. He fell out awhile back. There were three of us in the boat and it flipped. American bloke in the back seat.”

“Was anyone hurt?” Karen asked.

“My American friend had a gash on his forehead that bled everywhere.” He gave us that same broad-toothed smile, which I was beginning to suspect tapped directly into some deep, unsettling type of crazy. He might use this smile to describe the birth of his firstborn child or to explain how his best-mate died in a sheep stampede. After the trip I came to appreciate this not as unsettling craziness but just part and parcel for the type of people that inhabit this part of the world. Maybe they just enjoy life that much, or maybe they are all a little unbent by conventional, American standards. Either way, it certainly added an element of something to the experience.

And then, after an unseatingly abrupt 360 of his own (that nearly threw Karen from the boat because she didn’t hear Blair’s warning to “hold onto something”), we cruised into the dock and loaded up the boat. After some quick goodbyes and a refueling, we scooted on our merry way to our next destination, the city of Te Anau.

Traveling to Te Anau

The first hour or so of our trip, us four foreigners dozed fitfully. The combination of jet-lag and the excitement of what was already a full-day’s experience had tuckered us out. We eventually woke as we neared the small town of Mossburn, where Karen informed us we would be stopping for ice cream. While I do love ice cream and New Zealand’s winter is nowhere near harsh by my normal winter standards, something cold did not sound very good. “Eat what you want. You don’t have to eat ice cream, it’s just something you have to do when you go through Mossburn.” Why, exactly, it was something we had to do, I don’t know. But we stopped at a little roadside eatery and picked up a few things to eat.

Libby and I got two corndogs because they looked rather tasty. Instead of the traditional cornmeal cover that we were used to, these looked lightly battered, almost tempura-style.

Travel Tip: New Zealand, and we’re told Australian, corndogs should be avoided unless you have already acquired a taste for down under sausage. They have almost no concept of an American hotdog—and if you are going to get an “American hotdog” they will call it exactly that. In addition to this, Sausage here is not so much as we expect it in the States. It seems far greasier and, well, not right. It is difficult to put a finger on exactly what isn’t right, though. Like American sausage, theirs is essentially smooshed pig in a casing. There might be less seasoning, or maybe the casings are different. Whatever it is, though, their sausage is really not very good. I had one breakfast sausage that tasted like a breakfast sausage, but, otherwise, every sausage I have tried has been a let down. And they use these sausages in their corndogs. We were very disappointed to discover this and found our corndogs to be inedible. We passed them off to Darrell who will, as all good fathers do, eat anything that his children pass on.

Also while we were there, Molly pointed out a fat, stuffed sheep doll on the bottom shelf in their “tourist” display. Libby fell immediately in love with Fat Sheep and told me to buy it for her, which I did because it was very soft and we had no pillows for the car trips, and Fat Sheep looked like a prime candidate.

When I went to the counter to pay for it, the lady working behind the counter said, “That’s made of real sheep skin, you know.”

“It is?” I asked, somewhat doubtful because, though I haven’t been around a lot of sheep, I have enough experience to know that even the softest sheep doesn’t feel smoothly soft and vaguely synthetic like this sheep did.

“Naw. Just kiddin’,” she said, giving me that same suspect smile that Blair always sported.

From that point on, Fat Sheep became our mascot. We laughed at the way his one inch feet could barely touch the ground if you set him down in a traditional sheep-standing fashion because of his massive girth. We pondered how a sheep could possibly get himself into such a state (we decided that he was a Buddha-esque wiseman and that other sheep would travel many miles to visit him, and they would always bring an offering of deep-fried grass for his advice. This, we established, was Fat Sheep’s main dietary intake, deep-fried grass, which explained why he was so morbidly obese). And then Libby, in a cutely disturbing way, started “listening” to Fat Sheep and relaying messages of various sorts to our group. She cuddled and talked to him for the rest of the ride to Te Anau. It was very cute and if she’d been smiling from ear to ear I would have suspected that she’d contracted the New Zealand crazies.

Along the way we also decided that he needed a proper name, as Fat Sheep seemed a little insulting for a sage of his stature to the sheep community. After tossing around several options, we decided on Hogget, which is the term used for sheep meat that comes from a sheep between the age of one and two years old. Under one is lamb. One to two is hogget. Two and over is mutton. I had no idea, but as some Eskimo cultures had many necessary names for snow, it seems reasonable that New Zealand would have several names for sheep meat. There is, after all, a very, very lot of it. Or should that be very, very a lot of it? Whichever, sheep are plentiful in New Zealand.

Later that night, Libby ended up sleeping with Fat Sheep (despite our wishes to show proper respect, we have sort of forgotten about his official name and stuck with “Fat Sheep” as it is much more fun to say), curled up around him in our bed. It was awfully cute to see a thirty-one year old woman snuggling a toy like a child. It was reassuring in some small way.

Te Anau’s Glowworm Cave

Our last activity took place on Lake Te Anau. We boarded for this night and the next at a “villa” establishment that, I believe, was owned by Holiday Inn (they had some of their signage around the room anyway).

Travel Tip: Indoor heating seems to be a novel concept for just about everyone in New Zealand. It’s no surprise that, in a country so full of wood, fireplaces would be used to provide much indoor heat. However, this rule does not apply to hotel rooms as none of ours has had a fireplace at all. Heating, like electricity in general, seems to be an afterthought if anything to most establishments here. The rooms, while spacious, have usually only had one or two wall units to heat all of the space—and we will be lucky if there is one or two electrical outlets per room. These units usually don’t have temperature controls that are meant to be fiddled with and they do an excellent job of heating an area of about four feet around them as they have no blowers. Most of our beds have been equipped with heat pads (like an electric blanket, only under the bottom sheet instead of pulled over the body), but here we’ve gotten into problems with electricity supplies.

As I stated before, if one is lucky, a room in New Zealand will have one, maybe two, electrical outlets. These outlets, unlike American ones, have individual switches to turn them on and off and have only one outlet to plug into. Two is the perfect number of outlets for a room if you are plugging in a heat pad for one bed and an electric clock, as most rooms do, but forget about plugging anything else in (and we have had a few rooms that didn’t have enough for the heat pad and the alarm clock, so the alarm clock was left unplugged).

In other words, if you come in winter, be prepared to focus most of your activities to a four-foot diameter area of space in a room and if you need to recharge your batteries (besides needing a converter or transformer in the first place), be prepared to run a cord under a bed or behind a couch or to leave things sitting on a counter in the restroom.

In the evening, after we’d had a few hours to settle in a little, we hit lake Te Anau on a biggish passenger boat with the intent of visiting a cavern system inhabited by strange insects called glow worms. Along the way, the tour guides gave us a brief history of the area (I remember only something about someone named, possibly, Quinton MacKinnon who spent two years trying to find an overland route connecting Milford Sound—there was a reward of fifty shillings, which hardly seems like a good wage for two years’ work. Beyond this, I don’t recall anything of the educational nature of this area. Sorry. Maybe next time.)

The tour guide told us how the island is being overrun by opossums and about the development of the budding opossum fur industry. “But the opossums are usually not skinned in the traditional way,” he informed us. “They are usually plucked like a chicken. If done by hand, though, this can be a very time consuming task. So someone invented a machine to do the job. It’s a great Wallace and Gromit looking contraption with wheels and gears and lights and it sucks the opossum into a tube on one end and shoots a bit of fluff out one spot and a naked opossum out the other.”

We laughed at this. “It sounds like we have a few doubters among us, but they have also invented a portable version of the opossum plucker. It runs on petrol power. So it’s a petrol powered portable opossum plucker . . .patented.” Tour guides here are, so far at least, a riot.

Oh, wait, I do remember one other factoid. He also told us about a tribe of Maori who separated from the rest of the tribes and pressed into Fiordland to make a life for themselves. This tribe often resorted to guerilla tactics when attacking the settlers. “Because Australians taste like chicken, I’m told.” I remember this factoid not because I think it’s true (they probably taste like sheep also), but because it prompted us to actually consider the taste of people for a second time in a two day period. The first time had been in the van on the way to Queenstown and it had been JF and I who were discussing it. I can’t remember why we were discussing this topic, except that we discussed a very broad range of different topics over the few days we’d been together, because we have little else to do to pass the time.

Really this is a long way of getting around to the punch line, or what exists of one. When my personal flavor was discussed, for some reason it was decided that I would taste “cantankerous,” which sounds gamy and unpleasant. I suppose that is something in my favor should I ever be in a position to negotiate with cannibals.

Back to the tour and onto the tour guides themselves for a minute. Tour guides in this country are wonderful. We spent a fair amount of time in the company of guides through the first days of the trip, and, overall, I found them to be quite hilarious. I asked Karen if the park services here in New Zealand hired professional writers to script some of the better jokes they had, but I received no convincing answer one way or the other on the point. She informed me that, generally speaking, all of the tour guides she’d experienced were surprisingly witty—and their wit is very dry and sarcastic, which I have a particular fondness for.

As for The Glowworm Caves, they were quite fascinating. Situated north on the opposite side of Te Anau lake from the city of Te Anau lies an extraordinary cavern system. The caves are multi-layered (I’m sure there is an official terminology for this, but I have no idea what it would be) meaning that, as water levels lowered, new exits for the running water were created with each new level, creating caves at varying altitudes that opened onto the lake. Outside the caves, the park services have created an education building.

After the boat has docked, visitors are ushered inside, given something warm to drink and asked to sit down for a short video describing the nature of the cave and its inhabitants, and all of the various do’s and don’ts are explained. The video was obviously not written by the tour guides (or the Tour Guide Writers Guild, which I’m increasingly convinced exists even if no tour guide would ever admit to it) as it is hokey, boring and difficult to pay attention to. Corny images of people pop up, supposedly enjoying the amazing sites, then those images “fade” only to be replaced by the same person’s face in profile, showing a likewise unbelievable expression of wonder. Very cheesy.

Once inside, the tour begins. After a fairly brief walk into the heart of the glowworm’s habitat, the tour guide ushered us into a small row boat and turned off all the lights. By feel, the guide used a mounted chain to pull us deeper into the cave. After a time, it became possible to see a myriad of small pinpoints of light on the ceiling.

On some levels this is an extremely fascinating experience. These glowworms are carnivorous and, unlike glowworms the rest of the world over, they use their translucence to attract prey and not to mate. On an entirely other level for me, the fascination of staring five feet up into a mess of glowing bugs that I know are slithering around in their own slime grew somewhat boring after about twelve seconds. We sat there in complete silence so as not to disturb the insects for a few minutes, floating back and forth as the guide spun the boat and allowed everyone the chance to clearly and patiently stare at every single square inch of the probably twenty by twenty cave. The experience, while definitely worth having, was probably not what I would call a repeater, so I am certainly glad that Karen and Darrell were willing to sit through it all again so that we might share it.

After the caves, we took the boat home and, again, turned in early. The nights were still ending too quickly, to me at least, but eventually we had to get used to the time shift. The good news was, this was the last day of hectic running around that we would be doing. The next day we were scheduled for an all day cruise into Doubtful Sound, so we still had to get up in the morning, but at least we could come back to the hotel room we were already comfortable in and then sleep long into the next morning.