Otago Jaunt

For a few months Michelle has been training for this year’s Queenstown marathon, which had been scheduled for November 20. We figured we’d make a vacation of it and booked a week’s trip. About a month ago the marathon was delayed due to COVID, but we went anyway.

It was a little hard to leave Gisborne. The winter here was kinda like a long, cool Vermont summer morning – so pretty great, floods notwithstanding. But spring is magical. Once more, shoes have become completely unnecessary. Surf lifesaving on Sunday mornings has taken the place of soccer, and we’ve fallen into a routine of meeting friends at the beach after school for a swim/surf. I just got my fishing license (you don’t need one for ocean fishing, but it’s necessary for freshwater fishing), and if all goes well we’ll start making our own whitefish salad to go with the bagels. I also just received permission from the Mrs. to buy an extra fridge in order to expand our production capacity so that we may share the bounty. Life is good in Gizzy. But! Off to rainy Queenstown 🙂

We got up well before dawn, checked our baggage (no line, no security) and took a one-hour flight in a prop plane to Wellington, then had another hour and a half or so in a jet to Queenstown. It was a lovely day on the North Island, so the views were great on the first leg, where at one point we could look down at Hawke’s Bay and see clear across the country to Mt. Taranaki.

We had received many great recommendations but made few plans, as our preferred activities were largely weather-dependent and the week’s forecast was bleak. We arrived in Queenstown under cloudy skies just in time for lunch, and went straight to the most promising Chinese restaurant we could find, which was quite good by any standards. Because New Zealand normally hosts pretty massive numbers of Chinese tourists, you can find really good Chinese food in all sorts of places. Over the course of the week, we enjoyed meals not just in Queenstown, but Te Anau (pop under 3k) and Glenorchy (pop about 300) as well. Of course, they’re currently undersubscribed, and it’s difficult to know what changes COVID may wreak in the long run. We did our best to prop up the industry.

Afterwards we drove twenty minutes to Arrowtown, explored the historic Chinese settlement there and walked a little on adjacent trails that extend scores of miles in all directions. Arrowtown itself has the feel of an upscale, heavily touristed cowboy town, and the landscape around Queenstown is generally reminiscent of the Rockies: jagged peaks surround Lake Wakatipu, and when you get up in there you find the mountains are lousy with lonelier lakes and crystal blue rivers. Town smells like Montana, for all the Douglas firs. Happily they haven’t spread too far into the native forests, but it is an issue, as they don’t make for a great habitat for native birds.

We went back to Arrowtown on Sunday morning for a great breakfast and then a hike through Sawpit Gully, the length of which I rather drastically underestimated. But it all worked out.

Monday’s weather was iffy as well, so we figured we’d start with the luge, which is accessed by a gondola up a rather steep mountain on the backside of town. It’s not like the luge from the Olympics, but more like mountain go-carts. They put the fear of God into me, but it was the kids’ favorite part of our short trip to Rotorua a couple months ago. In any event, our go-kart ambitions were thwarted this time around, as the gondola was closed for construction. But next door to the gondola is a native bird sanctuary that Emlen was keen to visit, so we did that and had a great time. We pretty much had the place to ourselves, and got to spend some time with kiwis, which was a very enjoyable first for all of us. We also saw kakas, keas, wekas, and a very friendly pukeko. Fun stuff.

As the weather was bad, we then made a rather rash decision to drive about two hours to Te Anau (pronounced “I know” with a South Carolina accent), a little town on the edge of Lake Te Anau. It’s the largest lake (by volume) on the South Island, and second only to Taupo in the whole country. The drive was beautiful – south along the east side of Lake Wakatipu in the shadow of the Remarkables, a dramatic mountain range rising like a jagged black wall 2000 meters above the lakeshore. Then west through big sheep, cattle and deer farms, until we reached Te Anau. We planned to jump on a tour of the glowworm caves there, but on arrival we discovered that the one remaining tour was all booked up, so we took a ride on a float plane instead. We flew up to the north end of the lake for a short hike through the greenest forest I’d ever seen to a pretty impressive waterfall, all the more so as the water’s safe to drink. Highly recommend the experience!

Tuesday the weather improved and we drove up to Glenorchy, on the north end of Lake Wakatipu, and took a couple lovely walks. On the second, the kids and I enjoyed making a game of spotting trout in the river. This area’s known for its great fly fishing, and the trout are massive by U.S. standards. Real monsters.

Wednesday we went to AA (the equivalent of the DMV and AAA and a few other things) to get our New Zealand drivers’ licenses, which felt like a big deal (and took a looooong time), and then had a shopping day in town. Queenstown has great outdoor stores and lots of restaurants, bars, adventure tourism businesses, spas, etc., and feels to me like a pretty typical ski/mountain biking resort town. A couple times I was pleasantly embarrassed when I asked for a case (with fancy sunglasses, or multi-tools) to be opened only to be informed that it wasn’t locked. New Zealand :). I also got a shave and haircut at a hipster barber. It turned out much better than my last Gizzy haircut, which was so awful I had to shave my head.

Later, at the fancy icecream joint in town, a good samaritan overheard Michelle and me discussing hike options for the next day and recommended that we do the first chunk of the Routeburn Track, one of New Zealand’s ten Great Walks (the Great Walks are basically the most popular multi-day hikes in the country). So that’s what we did!

The trailhead was just a couple km beyond where we’d hiked near Glenorchy on Tuesday, but that was fine. We once again enjoyed the drive up the lakeshore and through the sheep fields beyond (we had to stop a few times for wayward lambs to clear the road), and the kids composed songs in elvish in honor of the fact that we were driving through so many locations where they filmed Lord of the Rings (this was made all the more ridiculous by virtue of the fact that the kids haven’t seen the movies).

The track was pretty easy hiking and so lovely that it felt like we were cheating. Even the views from the parking lot were stunning. Most of the section we did followed the west branch of the Dart River, through deep canyons and past dramatic waterfalls. There were a few suspension bridges, which we all enjoyed, and a port-a-potty about 4 km up that was spotless and stocked with hand sanitizer, which seemed amazingly civilized. It was also rather clear that its tanks are exchanged by helicopter, which the other members of the family found far less exciting than I.

We’d hoped to make the second hut on the trail, which is next to a big waterfall, but the kids were pretty tired when we stopped for lunch at the first hut, so we turned around there. In all we were really impressed with the kids’ endurance, and super excited to do more with them, including some multi-day hikes.

Friday we’d planned to do a “funyak” trip on the Dart River out of Glenorchy, but it was canceled due to weather, so Michelle took the kids to the town pool and I booked a massage, which felt very indulgent and vacation-y. We grabbed a final bubble tea as the temperature fell to around 8 C (about 46 F), and we all started feeling pretty keen to get back to sunny Gisborne, where it’s been in the high-20s for a few weeks (i.e. perfect).

Saturday morning was cold and rainy. We had another lovely breakfast and headed to the airport, which has decent ramen. We left at one pm and were back home and in the heat by four, which was pretty amazing given how completely different Queenstown feels.

In all it was a lovely week. Most of all for the hikes, but more generally as it expanded our view a bit and primed us to explore more of the country. It also made us feel really quite fortunate to have wound up here in Gizzy, which suits us so well.