To the Lupins!

When Sue and I arrived in Christchurch on January 5, we were faced with the daunting task of planning out our travel for the next three weeks. When Sue and Ginessa had come to visit me in Denmark for a week, they needed things to do and decided to power tour Iceland, Norway and Sweden as well. But New Zealand is so rich in things to see and to do that only three weeks seemed to be far too little time. We had already opted to take the ferry to the North Island on the 20th and so that served as a constraint as to how much we would be able to see on the South Island. (I may be biased, but I think that there are more things to do and to see on the South Island than on the North Island.) We sat down with the guide books for several hours and spent a lot of time on the phone and the internet to make our bookings, but in the end, the plans we laid during those hectic hours worked out well. Or plan included extra days in places where we wanted to engage in weather dependant activities such as hikes. We had some trouble finding hostels with bed at the start due to the end of the Christmas holiday and wound up in shared rooms, but after the first few nights it was smooth sailing.

We started our trip in Christchurch where I spent most of my ttime at school setting my work back on track while Sue made side trips to Arthur’s Pass in the Alps and to Akaroa which lies south of Christchuch on the Banks Peninsula. The Banks Peninsula is made up of two massive, drowned volcanic craters the cones of which jut out from the otherwise flat Canterbury Plain. The surrounding hills are mostly bald due to over forestation by the early settlers and so today, the hills are only covered with long grass and tussoks. Captain Cook originally thought that the volcanoes were islands due to the salt lakes which extend from the ocean into the plain and he named the area Banks Island after his botanist Joseph Banks. Akaroa’s sheltered harbor is home to hector dolphins and it is possible to go out by boat to swim with the dolphins. Sue booked a tour and she saw several of the dolphins during her several hour long trip. The tour booking included a wetsuit which was needed because as Kiwis were saying, summer was arriving late in New Zealand. It had been warmer in Boston in the winter than in Christchurch in the summer.


Upon our departure from Christchurch, our first stop was to be Mt Cook which lies about four hours south-west. Mt Cook is part of the Southern Alps and is the tallest mountain in New Zealand. The drive took us through fields of Lupins which are tall, skinny plants that are principally blue, pink and violet with yellow, providing colorful vistas. On the way to the mountain, we passed through the Lake Takapo Village where we would spend the night. Lake Tekapo itself is 83 square kilometers and has an opaque, turquoise color due to the glacial meltwater. On the shore of the lake is the Church of the Good Shepherd, a stone church with a large, plate glass window behind the altar which offers sweeping views of the lake and the mountains beyond. The church is a favorite for photographs and apparently for weddings because we heard of one being performed there later in the day with people to stop the tourists from walking in front of the giant windows during the ceremony. The air in the area is supposed to be very clear and on the nearby hill called Mt John, Canterbury University has about a half dozen telescopes for star gazing. Unfortunately, when we arrived the air may have been clear, but it was full of clouds which blocked the sun.

Despite the bad weather, we decided to drive on for another half hour to see if we could see Mt Cook through the clouds. We stopped off at a lookout which offered panoramic views of the turquoise Lake Pukaki, but the mountains which surround the lake were hidden. We stopped off at the nearby information office to find out the weather situation and if there were any walks in the area. New Zealand is amazing in that it seems that most towns will have some sort of information office or kiosk which offer useful information and can make bookings. We were told that the weather did not look promising and the woman behind the desk suggested that we drive up to the Mt Cook village and walk to the Tasman glacier if the weather was still bad. Despite the needle on our gas gauge tilting a bit low, we opted to drive along the only road up to Mt Cook which took another forty-five minutes.

Mt Cook village developed purely to cater to the nineteenth century tourists who came to see the mountain. Today, the purpose of the town is still to cater to tourists and it is dominated by the Hermitage, a hotel which offers rooms with mountain views for $450 and up. Most of the small town caters to rich tourists which is why Sue and I based ourselves elsewhere. Since Mt Cook was clearly not going to be seen that day, Sue and I drove off along a dirt road to the terminal lake at the Tasman Glacier. We walked for about twenty minutes along a path that worked its way around piles of rocks formed by the glacier and through loose dirt till we climbed up a hill and saw icebergs floating on a lake of gray water. The icebergs were created when large pieces of ice broke off of the front of the glacier and were sent floating away in the lake. The lake itself was given a gray color by glacial flour which is a fine, gray dust created by the ice grinding rocks together as the glacier advances and recedes. On the other side of the lake, we could see the dirt covered Tasman Glacier as it ascended into the mists beyond.

Our walk to the glacier was our first exposure to the notorious New Zealand sandflies. These are small, black flies with a ferocious appetite. I have long heard stories of the flies and how they terrorize trampers who fail to wear insect repellant, but I had never seen the flies before. I had been warned that the flies were worse in the mountains than by the sea and this proved to be our experience as well. There was one point during our travels that we stopped to take photographs and upon returning to our car, we found several dozen flies had managed to get inside. It took a good hour before we had killed them all, but in the meantime, they would swarm all over us, especially on the driver who was helpless to swat them all before they bit.

We endured a stressful hour drive back to the main road where we finally purchased more petrol for our thirsty car in a nearby town. We then had to drive another half hour back to Lake Pukaki where we spent the night in a very new hostel. The hostel was nice, but very crowded because a tourist bus catering to university students had pulled in for the night. The next morning, we decided to hike up to the café in one of the observatories on Mt John. The glass walled café should have offered great views of the area, but the clouds were still with us. We therefore decided not to go back up to Mt Cook, but to start our long drive south.

We stopped for lunch in the nearby town of Twizle which was built in 1966 to staff people working on the Waitaki Hydroelectric Scheme. As a testament to this, there are several large earthmovers and a section of pipe at the turnoff from the highway into the town. Twizel was supposed to be bulldozed after the project was finished, but that never happened. Instead people stayed in the temporary buildings and accommodations and restaurants for tourists were added. It is nearby here that the largest battle in the Lord of the Rings movies was filmed. Posters offered tours to the field, but from what I understand, a backdrop from another part of New Zealand was added to the final film and therefore, the landscape around the field would be unrecognizable.

The Waitaki Hydroelectric Scheme for which Twizle was built includes twelve power stations built between 1925 and 1981. The stations currently provide 1/3 of the country’s power demands. We were too late to take a tour of one of the dams and power generation stations. But we saw floodgates to control the level of water flowing from the lakes and as we drove we would occasionally pass over canals transporting the turquoise water to one station or another. Otherwise, there wasn’t a smokestack or a cooling tower to be seen to betray the power being generated by the flowing water.

Our drive would take us through fields of Lupins as we headed south towards the town of Te Anu in the Fiordland National Park. There aren’t many roads that cross the Alps and as we passed near Queenstown, we were only 50 km from the park. But, we had to drive south then west then north to finally arrive at our destination, all the while passing the steady flow of tour busses returning from Milford Sound to Queenstown. The weather was still not agreeing with us and so we unfortunately couldn’t get the full impact of the beautiful scenery around us.

We arrived in Te Anu in the evening and after consulting with the friendly staff at the local gas station which had just had a petrol tanker catch on fire the night before, we found our hostel. We were staying in a room, one of many located on a deer and horse farm outside of town. This was to serve as our base for the next few days for exploring the fiordlands and Milford Sound.