Profile
Blog
Photos
Videos
Day 23.
We intended to spend the day swimming and walking around Rabbit Island, but as the weather looked ominous we scrapped plan A and decided to drive straight to Picton, stopping only for lunch and to buy more food.
Picton was much smaller than we had expected. There was not as much to see and do as Nelson but the Queen Charlotte Sound and other scenery went some way to making up for it. The north east of the south island is comprised of lots of different sounds and they actually have tourist trips that go out delivering peoples' post via boat to the most inaccessible places. This initially sounded like quite a cool thing to do to us until we found out the price. Nothing like paying a fortune to deliver someone's mail.
We popped into the i-site to book our ferry and ask about walking part of the Queen Charlotte track the following day. Not sure how to spend the rest of the afternoon, we stumbled across a Kiwi crazy golf course including NZ themed holes like Mount Cook, the Cook Straight etc. Matt managed a score of equal par whereas I thrashed him with a score of 70, 17 more points than him! That's how golf works, right?
When we got back to the car, we found a fifteen dollar parking fine stuck under the windscreen wiper. Annoyingly, we'd been parked in a 60 minute zone, not the 4 hour zone we thought we were in, and we'd been frolicking around at crazy golf less than 20m away.
That night, we stayed in a DOC site right on the water's edge with a fine view of where we'd be walking the next day just across the sound.
Day 24.
Today we did an EPIC walk. 26km from Akinawa to Misteltoe Bay and back. I know this doesn't sound like much to anyone who has perhaps ran a marathon or ever walked further than 26km, but there were a lot of hills in the way and I've got short legs.
The view of the lush houses, boats and, of course, natural scenery made us forget about our blistered feet and aching legs. A well deserved ice cream was a fine reward at the end.
Day 25.
We had a lie in before heading off to the library to pay our parking fine (grrr) and take full advantage our their free wifi. We still can't get over how expensive it is to use the Internet everywhere in NZ.
After kicking around town for a bit we boarded the 4 hour ferry to Wellington and found some nice window seats to take in the scenery of the sounds on our way out. Needless to say, Matt slept the whole way.
We realise this isn't the most exciting of blog posts so we thought we'd spend a little bit of this one telling you about the New Zealand accent. To the untrained ear it probably sounds a lot like the Aussie one, but an Aussie would definitely resent that. So, in case you ever travel to NZ, here is our guide to their accent:
It's actually very simple. Somewhere between Britain and NZ (probably the point where everything turned upside down), the sound of the vowels got jumbled up. A's became E's, E's and I's swapped and O's became U's. So, as you can imagine, it was pretty amusing to us when the ferry stewardess asked us "which deck are you parked on?" (figure out why for yourselves!)
We also find it pretty funny every time we come across someone called Ben. "Bin! Bin!"
The favourite phrase if a Kiwi is "sweet as bro", pronounced "swate es bru", which, loosely translated, means 'I confirm that what you are proposing is fine by me'.
Arrived in the north island.
Disembarking from the ferry was quite scary for us since we've become used to the non-existent traffic in the south island. Wellington may not be a huge city compared to the large cities in England but getting used to its traffic system was still quite difficult.
Getting out the city centre as soon as we could, we headed into the Hutt Valley to our DOC campsite. This one even had hot showers. Although the book and a lot of signs said that there may be Kiwis (the bird) at the site, we never saw any.
Day 26.
Trying to have a cheap day, we went to NZ's national museum, Te Papa. We spent well over three hours exploring the floors of exhibitions, all of which were fascinating. On one floor, there was the 31m long skeleton of a blue whale, which made our 18m sperm whale look a bit pathetic. They also had the preserved body of a colossal squid, even bigger than giant squid and a sperm whale's favourite meal.
Although scientists know that much larger colossal squids exist, none bigger than this one have ever been found. They even had a video of the moment it was caught by a fishing vessel.
A separate floor contained information about NZ's tectonic activity, where we were able to experience an earthquake (albeit very little) inside a simulator and learn about the many active volcanoes in NZ. It is called the 'shaky isles' because of the amount of earthquakes it is subjected to due to its position on two colliding plates.
The next floor contained the history of NZ's habitation from Maori to European settlers. It was interesting to see that Maoris came from the many different pacific islands.
Next up was a trip to the Tongariro National Park, home of Mount Doom from the LOTR trilogy. The park lays claim to having one of the world's best one day walks, which we were eager to tackle. This was the first time either of us had seen an active volcano.
- comments