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New Zealand 2005 Travel Journal
Saturday Oct 22
NYC to LA
The flight from NYC to LA was an uneventful 5 hour journey
except for running into LL Cool J who was on my flight. He took pictures with a
bunch of people and was really nice about it.
I also have to say that man, he is one big dude. I am staying at the
| Based on the drunken advice of my new buddy Rob I met last
night watching the World Series I decided to explorer LA via its mass transit
system. I needed the exercise so I walked the 2 miles to the train station and
passed an interesting restaurant which had a collection of old Air Force planes
on its property. I took some pictures of the WW II vintage fighter planes, cool
stuff. |
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Now the LA metro system is interesting to say the least. It
runs on an honor system where you buy your ticket but you don’t put the ticket into
any machines to validate it. The LA County Sheriffs
patrol the trains and at any point they can stop you and ask to see your ticket.
If you don’t have a ticket they will issue you a summons for $250. Now,
being a New Yorker I find this comical, an honor system, ...hmm.
This would not work in NYC for so many reasons.
Anyway I digress, so I get to the
I went to Union Station in the center of the city and
walked over to an area called the
So after lunch I walked around a little more then decided to head back to the hotel and maybe chill by the pool. My impression of LA is that it’s a bigger place then it appears on a map. Also, it’s as dirty if not dirtier than NY city. (I also found out later that nobody uses mass transit in LA and there far better places to visit in LA county then the areas I was traveling through on the metro)
So I am now sitting in a bar at the airport waiting to get
on my flight while I write this. I
enquired about an upgrade for my seat but the counter person said that they can
not do upgrades at the counter (which I am calling bullshit on, b/c where would
you do an upgrade then) and she also said that it was ‘Very expensive”... so that was
that and I settled for an isle seat... a few more beers and a couple of
‘Ambiens’ will help me make it through the next 13 and half hours on a
plane. ....In the words of “Napoleon Dynamite” Gosh this is going to suck.
Monday Oct 24 30
thousand feet over the
Crossed the International Date Line and lost a day in my life. Not the first time that’s happened…
Tuesday Oct 25th
Let me start out by saying Ambien is GREAT! I got myself an isle seat in the middle 4 seats with a guy on the other isle seat. The middle 2 seats were empty. Score!! Drank 3 glasses of wine popped to Ambien (Thank you Pete) and slept a solid 9 hours. Woke up had a cup of coffee and watched the Fantastic 4 movie. (Movie was lame but Jessica Alba is hot) I did not feel fatigued or jet lagged at all the whole day.
Now going through customs was a rather interesting
experience.
Outside I met up with the other members of the NG group and quickly realized that I am going to be the youngest one on the trip. But that does not matter as I also quickly realize the collection of personalities is awesome. They each have such interesting stories and I have only managed to have quick conversations which each of them today. Now, to say our local guide Malcolm is a plethora of knowledge is an understatement. The man knows everything there is to know about his country and is more than happy to share it with you. Our driver John along with Marty the NG rep. are awesome as well.
The first thing we did was to hike through the foot hills over looking
Tomorrow itinerary starts out in the morning with a plane ride over
Wednesday Oct 26th
I woke up this morning around 6:30 and watched the sun rise
over the mountains and perform a magnificent display of colors across
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After lunch we moved on to Queenstown. It was a 3 hour ride
where we passed many vineyards along the way. We made a stop at a fruit stand
where they sold various forms of Manuka Honey.
Now, Malcolm told us about how this Manuka Honey is used by NZers to heal
various different ailments from the common cold to cuts and open wounds that
won’t heal. People were buying this stuff like it was gold. Not
sure how much I believe of the healing stories but I will definitely research
this further when I get home.
We pulled into Queenstown late in the afternoon. We are
spending the next 2 nights at the Rydges Hotel which is at the west end of town.
Queenstown is rather small town at the foot of
Roman who is our
National Geographic expert gave a talk this evening about his days of ice
climbing and glacier skiing in
We had a group dinner this evening at the Hotel restaurant
with a chicken dinner and a pumpkin soup. After dinner I met up with cool Aussie
girl named Sarah at the hotel bar who was a friend of John our bus driver. Sarah
is a tour guide for a tour company named Connections. She was leading a tour of
Americans and Aussies for the week through
Queenstown has a population of about 8000 but is by far a very cool place for young adrenalin crazed people and is one of the main destinations for skiers visiting NZ.
Thursday Oct 27th
Queenstown
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Now Jet boating can best be described as Jet skiing in a
very large Jet Ski. You cruise along the river at about 35mph dodging trees and
rocks. Our driver was really good.
He was racing past these massive rocks and sharp turns along the river with mere inches of
clearance. The boats have a draft of 4 inches when they are on plane so they
need to at full throttle most of the time. The river
was so narrow that sometimes you had no idea what was around the next bend. Jet
boating is pretty intense, especially racing past the massive rocks and then
pulling 360s in the water. Our tour operator has 2 boats on the river and they
would check in with each other at various points along the river via radio to
alert each where they are thus avoiding crashing into each other.
After the Jet boat ride we grabbed lunch to go and
jumped into a taxi back to Queenstown. We were heading to Queenstown Rafting
Company to do some Heli-Rafting on the
Friday Oct 28th
Queenstown to
We left Queenstown this morning for the drive to Milford Sound where we were to board the Milford Mariner for an overnight cruise. But first we had a little side trip this morning where we took a 20 minute ride on an old steam train called the Kingston Flyer. The train was a vintage from the early 1900’s. I rode on the outside platform on the back of the train during the trip.
The trip to Milford Sound was
along a very scenic road which took us over the
| The Milford Mariner is a 105 foot 3 deck boat with nice cabins. We had an option to take a zodiac boat trip or go kayaking. I was all suited up for the Kayak trip even though it was pouring rain but the wind picked up to at least 30+ mph. If we had left the boat there was no way we could paddle back and we would have been blown across the sound. The weather had been getting worse all day with heavy wind and rain at about an inch an hour. |
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We had appetizers before dinner
which consisted of smoked mussels, fresh salmon and shrimp. Our dinner was
buffet style with a nice mushroom soup. We had a nice NZ Pinot wine with dinner,
I think it was Stoneleigh . The food was really good on the Milford Mariner.
After dinner Roman gave a talk
along with a slide show on adventure racing. Once again he gave an awesome presentation with
great stories to go along with it. Around 9:30 everyone basically retired for the night except my
self and John the driver. We hung
out with the crew for an hour or so chatting them up. Once again they were a
very friendly crew of NZers. They work the boat for 7 days straight then have 7
days off. There was one guy who I chatted with about
Saturday Oct 29th
After arriving back a shore and
saying good bye to the friendly crew we boarded our coach again for a 5-6 hour ride
up the west coast of NZ to Wanaka. We had to back track our route from the day
before through 'Te Anu' and Queenstown as we headed to our next stop in Arrowtown.
In Arrowtown we joined Marty for some Pad Thai at a restaurant named Saffron which according
to Malcolm is supposed to be one of the top restaurants in NZ. The Pad Thai was
good. After lunch we headed to Wanaka over the Crown Range and past the Codrona
ski area than down into Wanaka. The
Codrana ski area looked to be steep and challenging, which is what I was told by
a snowboarder in the Queenstown rafting shop yesterday.
Our hotel for the night is the
Edge Water Resort where I had a stylish pad. It was a huge suit like apartment
on the ground floor looking out over
Sunday Oct 30th
Glen Deen Sheep Station to Franz Josef Glacier
This morning we stopped at the Glen Deen sheep station run by good friend's of Malcolm, Jerry & Leslie. Jerry demonstrated how the sheep dogs herd the Marino wool sheep on the farm. His 2 dogs were awesome, one was a collie/dingo mix and the other was a pure collie. Through his voice commands they moved the herd of sheep through out the farm. After the watching the dogs run the herd we had tea and scones at Jerry and Leslie’s house. The scones were very tasty! (Again more food) Before we left, Jerry showed us a pile of Marino wool that was recently sheared from one of his sheep. A sheep can produce 4 kilograms of wool. The wool’s texture is very fine, almost silk like.
We arrived in Fox Glacier this afternoon and had lunch before we did our Heli-Hike on the Glacier. It seems we do a lot of eating on our trip but let me tell you the food here was really tasty. I had a ham and cheese with tomato grilled sandwich along with a delicious pumpkin soup. After lunch we took a hike through the maritime rainforest to kill time before boarding a bus to the airfield. We geared up and were joined by 3 Brits on holiday for the flight up to the glacier. Once again our pilot gave us a little extra effort. I was in the helicopter with the 3 Brits and the pilot was showing off for the 2 girls. He flew up into the upper valley and was hugging the valley walls. Great ride! We landed on the glacier, geared up with our crampons and alpine sticks and headed off. The Alpine Stick is basically a broom handle with a nail at one end. As simple as it is, it serves its purpose of keeping your balance. We hiked through the crevasses and up into the glacier. There were a few ice tunnels that we crawled through. There was one tunnel that was an ice slide. You could crawl into it and slide down the tunnel about 15 feet and climb out of a hole at the bottom to come back up on to the ice. Very cool except I got myself stuck halfway down because I had my backpack on and there was not much head room. After a bit of scrambling I got my pack off and freed myself. Yep that was a bonehead maneuver!
Our hike was suppose to be an hour and half but
there was bad weather moving in so we stayed up there for only an hour and met the
helicopters back at the landing pad. The guides were concerned about staying up
on the ice if the weather continued to get worse. We were to far up to hike out
so, what they would do is hike down about 300 yards to a protected area where
they had gear stashed in large plastic barrels. They would set up camp and we
would ride the storm out until the morning. We were not really in that much
danger of having to stay the night but the pilots wanted to come up and get us
sooner rather than later while there was a break in the weather. Now the
landing pad is nothing more than a 10 by 10 foot semi flat piece of ice. So the
pilots don’t have much to work with but they put their birds down right on
target. We flew back with out incident and rode the 1968 school bus back in to
town.
Tonight a small group of us went
out to dinner in Franz Joseph at a place called Beeches.
I had a great Moroccan Lamb dinner along with some good NZ Pinot. After
dinner we stopped at the bar next to the hotel. Played some pool and had some
beers. Roman, Tom and my self tried some Absinthe. This is the drink that’s
banned in the
Monday Oct 31st Franz Josef Glacier to Punakaiki
This morning we were able to sleep
in a little and got on the road at 9:00AM. We drove up to the toe of the Franz
Josef Glacier and hiked to an observation area up on a hill for a little morning
exercise. As we drove out of Franz Josef we came upon an interesting observation.
As we were driving along we noticed that people have helicopters in the yards and garages. It turns out that there is one
of the highest ratios of helicopters to residents in this town. Very
interesting!
We made a quick stop at Lou Armstrong’s Maori carving shop in Whataroa. He is an interesting character. You expect to meet a traditional Maori man but instead you are greeted by a rather large balding man with a San Diego T-shirt on. To funny!
We arrived at Punakaiki in the early
afternoon and checked in to the Punakaiki Rocks hotel which is right on the beach.
We just dropped our bags and headed over the horse corral, where we met Neil and
his assistants Veronica and Mary. Neil
was the tour operator and he was very chatty about the
My horses name was Bear, he was a big horse. The only issue I had is that they set us up with English saddles instead of Western saddles. Now they tell you to just use your knees, well my knees are shot so that was not all that enjoyable. There is something to say about having a handle to hang onto when your horse takes off in a gallop. Bear was good, he only took off on me 3 or 4 times.
After the horse back ride we hiked
up the hill to
We had another group dinner
tonight at the hotel where we celebrated Malcolm’s 60th birthday
with a cake and some gag gifts. The group had their drink on tonight as there
was a bit of foolishness going around. I have to say for an ‘older’ group of
people they really know how to enjoy themselves.
Tuesday Nov 1st
This morning we drove to
So we headed into the cave with Ray in the lead. We had to be careful what we touched because we could destroy something that took thousands of years to form or we could alter future formations with the oils from our fingers. Ray took us through the maze of caverns and explained to us how the stalactites and stalagmites were formed. At one point we turned off all of our lights and we were in total darkness which is very wild experience. At the deepest we were 80 meters under ground. We finally came to the lower chamber where we hopped on our tubes and floated through large caverns with ‘Glow Worms’. Now, I have to say this is one of the coolest things I have seen in a very long time. The glow worms are actual insect larvae and through a natural chemical reaction the produce an iridescent glow which attracts insects that get caught in the gluey webs that hang down from their perch on the ceiling of the cave. We floated through caverns with thousands of these glow worms hanging form the roof. It was like looking up at the stars on a clear night. It was absolutely amazing. We floated on until we came out of the cave into a river where we then floated down through a few rapids. Ray was quick to warn us about keeping our bumms up so as not to get nicked by a rock in the water. We finally finished this adventure back were we had started.
We grabbed a quick lunch back at
the tour office and jumped on the coach for a 4 hour ride to Nelson. We arrived
at Nelson which is a sea side city of either 50,000 people according to the
Lonely Planet Book or 25,000 according to Malcolm. I was able to finally post
some pictures on my web site to show my friends back home. I know they are going
to be insanely jealous. A group of us had dinner at an Indian restaurant tonight
which
had great food. We once again had a bottle of the Stoneliegh Pinot Noir. On the
way back from dinner we passed a happening pub/bar so I had to check it out. No
one else was interested so I went solo. I grabbed a Monteiths Black which is a
local beer that is very similar to a Guinness but a little lighter. After about 5
minutes or so Tom came in. He had just had a massage and was looking to get
something to eat. He found himself some food and we sat there and drank some
beers for a while before heading back to the hotel.
Wednesday Nov 2nd Able
We arrived in Marahau and met up with our guides. We were geared up in a spray skirt, spray jacket and a life preserver. We then boarded the speed boat which was still on the trailer and were towed by a farm tractor to the water a ¼ mile away. Here they backed us into the water and we took off for a 20 minute ride deep inside the park. The only way to access the park is via water or helicopter. There are no roads into the park. Marahau is one of the main jump off points for water access for people coming from the Nelson area. We arrived at a beach where there was a small community of homes and lodges. The tour operator has their Kayaks stored at one of the lodges that they rent out. After stowing about 200 pounds of lunch provisions and a brief ‘how to’ demonstration we were ready to get into the water. Now, Roman and I were allowed to have single man Kayaks because we knew what we were doing and everyone else had double person kayaks. But they called me back in after 5 minutes because there was another tour group and they needed a single for the guide. So I had to go into a double. But it was not a big deal as I was paired up with Jenna one of the guides and she let me sit in the back and steer. Which she told me is something they would normally not do but they thought is was only fair b/c I was pulled out of a single. She also saw me paddling around and could see that I knew what I was doing.
We headed out into a protected bay
area as the wind was coming in at about 15 mph. We paddled to where a river met
the bay. We then got out and hiked about 400 meters up a trail to a place called
Afterwards, we hiked back to the kayaks and paddled back for lunch. They had a great lunch for us which they cooked right on the beach front. We had steamed Mussels, steak kabobs, an awesome cold slaw type salad, coffee, hot chocolate cookies and apples. It was a great spread.
Once we all returned we boarded the coach back to Nelson. Roman gave his final talk tonight on Pack Rafting and told some great stories about his good buddy Chuck. Afterward we had a group dinner at the Japanese restaurant in the hotel. We did Japanese BBQ which was OK but I did try something new. We had prawns with dinner and the chef took the heads he had cut off and cooked them up with spices and sauces. He gave us each one and I was not sure if I was going try one but I saw Malcolm eat one and Roman ate not one but 2. So I figured that if he ate a second one it can’t be that bad and it wasn’t. It was a bit crunchy but OK. You have to try everything once, right?
After dinner I went out to meet up with John the bus driver at the Vic Rose. I stayed for an hour listening to a live band play cover tunes. They were not that bad. On the way back to the hotel I ran into John and his friend so we went back to the Vic Rose for a few pints. Well, we met some interesting characters. One of the more interesting ones was a guy with long gray hair down to his butt and dressed in a black leather trench coat. He was a Kiwi who was lecturing me on the karma of life. Yep, that was interesting!
Today we stopped at the Wairau Rivers Vineyard for a wine tasting and
lunch in the Marlborough
wine country region.
After a bit more of wine tastings we headed off to Kaikoura. The drive to Kaikoura is a very scenic which follows the coast. We passed seals, dolphins and surfers. We arrived in Kaikoura and took our group photo out on the point of Kaikoura. We are staying at a place called the Waves on the Esplanade. They are a collection of high end apartments which are really nice and have great views of the Pacific Ocean and the mountains.
We had dinner at nice restaurant tonight and then went out
for drinks at a local pub on the beach. There was a guy playing guitar and a few
locals and backpackers hanging out
Friday Nov 4th Kaikoura Swimming with dolphins
We were up early this morning for breakfast and off to swim with the dolphins at 8:15. Now this was probably one of the coolest things I have done in NZ and I have done a lot of things here. We were geared up in wet suits again and grabbed flippers. I had my own mask and snorkel. We jumped on the boat and headed out in search of the dolphins. Now, this is not your normal ‘Swim with the Dolphins’ tour. The tour operators don’t feed or interact with the dolphins in any way other then boating by them. We cruise out to where the dolphins are and they will either find interest in us or they won’t. The tour company does not promise that you will be able to swim with them. These are wild dolphins and there were people with us on the boat who had come out the day before and did not see any dolphins.
After about 20 minutes of cruising we found a pod about 13 miles down the coast and about 4 miles off. We put on our masks and sat on the back of the boat. The boat comes to a stop and we slide off the back into freezing cold water. I looked down and flash! A Dusky Dolphin goes flying by me, then another and another. There are about hundred. It’s absolutely amazing I am swimming among the wild dolphins. They play with you by trying to get as close to you as possible with out actually hitting you. It’s a bit unnerving when there are 2 or 3 darting at you. Sometimes they sneak up behind you and cut you off. After about 3 minutes they blow the horn and we race back to the boat. As soon as every one is on we cruise at full speed to get a head of the pod. Mind you we are all sitting on the back of the boat barely hanging on. Once we are in front of them we slide off the back again as they swim by. We did this 4 times. Although the water as rather cold it was totally awesome.
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After getting out of our web suits, drying off and putting
on warm dry clothes we went to the bow of the boat. We had hot chocolate and
biscuits as we cruised slowly around a pod of dolphins. On the cruise back to
shore we spotted albatrosses and I was able to get a great shot of one as it
flew by the boat. These birds are like large seagulls and are known to travel up to 2000
kilometers a day. |
After dinner a group of us went out for drinks first at the hotel and then out in Christchurch
After the Antarctic Center
every one was brought back to the airport for their flights. Mine was not until
8:20 so I had 4 hours to kill. I hung out with our bus driver John. We dropped
the bus off at the depot then went to his house in
So as I sit here in the airport waiting to board my plane I am sad to go. It’s an amazing country from the land and the animals to the people. There is definitely a good karma here that I have not found anywhere else. I have been so relaxed and laid back that its going to be a challenge to adjust back to the NY vibe.
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