Month: February 2006

it is very poetic that i have had the joy of seeing the sunset over the alps, and that now i have had the joy of seeing the sunrise over the highest austrasian mountain – mt. cook, in maori known as aoraki.

the legend

here i’ll quote from the guidebook – i thought its a cool story.

“aoraki was a young boy in the canoe Ta Waka a Aoraki, which was stranded on a reef and tilted to one side. Aoraki and his brothers climbed to the high side and sat on the wreckage. the south wind froze them and turned them into stone, creating the Southern Alps/Ka Tiritiri o te Moana.”

the mountains themselves are very picturesque. snow covered sharp peaks, bright blue sky… however i’m getting ahead of myself.

the hike there

as the hike the day before absolutely annihilated us, we decided to take the 4 hour hike early in the day. like, really early. as the ben, the bike rider, recommended leaving at 4:30, we decided to wake up at 4:45 and leave by 5:15 (sunrise as predicred by him is at 5:30am). suprisingly enough, with our preparations of breakfast and prepacked bags of the night before, this went successfully. on an interesting note, before the sun rises it is quite chilly, so we both ended up wearing far warmer things than we expected (but still taking the light change of clothes with us).

departing our allergy-inducing motel room so early let us see as the peaks of the mountains slowly turned into a light blue, then light pink color, until the snow shone brightly. the hike was fun – long, but fun – and sunrise ended up happening only around 6:30 (which is about 20 minutes after we started the hike – the town is about 45 minutes away from the mountains).

in one of the happier moments of the hike we stumbled onto a stream that was flowing in a most photogenic way among big rocks and kinda under aoraki (not really under, but aoraki was definitely on the background). dream come true! of course, everyone who comes this way has this photo, but i got the photograph before the sun shone on the water, which is how everyone else will get it. i’m not sure which one looks better – i could probably sit by that stream for weeks before getting a perfect photograph.

the hike back

i’m not entirely sure what “there” is – a lake with mini glaciers in it, surrounded by mountains? i guess its as good of a there as any other there in new zealand. we arrived there expecting to be first – alas, a 65 year old australian dude was there 30 minutes before us, and claimed he caught the perfect reflections in the afore mentioned lake. argh! i was not deterred by this, and managed to still get a few pretty photographs taken, before a magnificent moment when the sun rose over the eastern mountain, and started warming us up. we quickly changed into “summer” clothing, and proceeded to bounce rocks over the still water (by we, i mean oleg – i shot a bunch of short clips of him doing that) until the next person came along – a girl, about 15 minutes after we finished eating (yes, we were smart and took some powerbars with us :) ). on the hike back we actually met a lot of people (including the taiwanese students who studied with ben-the-dude-from-yesterday) going the other way (as expected). overall, a grand feeling of accomplishment rewarded us.

the ride to all-day-bay

we drove back to the hostel that kindly held over our bags (for safety), had a quick lunch there, and headed onwards down to the east coast. to continue the trend of the remarkable things that happened today, we actually met a pair from israel (nurit and avi), just married, and looking to get out of israel asap. very interesting – and i brushed up my hebrew too! :)

upon departing the friendly hostel with the unfriendly llamas, we headed towards the first big attraction on the south island – mountains. BIG mountains.

unfortunately we weren’t able to book a BBH hostel in the area, as:

a. we have had generally little luck with booking hostels at this time (most of our ideal locations were full – i.e. that is why we ended up staying in geraldine, which is fairly close to the mountains but implied a huge drive the day before)
b. there were few (if any – i can’t remember) BBH hostels in the area
c. few hostels at all
d. and most places were fairly expensive :\

by the way, BBH is the backpacker network that generally ensures that the hostels have some similar kind of quality in terms of accommodation and services provided. for example kitchens with cooking equipment, clean beds, all described through this guide that gives it a rating in %-age – like the wellington hostel.

thus we ended up staying in this fairly grimy motel, which provoked oleg’s allergies to a terrible extent. i was not left alone either as my allergies acted up terribly when we went into the mountains. oleg spoke to a local pharmacist who said that the super dry air could be provoking it too (as well as the unknown ingridients in the local air). indeed, the weather IS super dry.

anyway, the motel was not so terrible, but generally speaking i like the hostels more – we have had general luck in booking them, and they are all more .. cute. homely. you feel more comfortable in them. on the bright side we got a whole 4 outlets, which hostels often skimp on – now, 10 days later, having 2 outlets in a room is a bright piece of news to me. we both have laptops, and we both have 2 cameras, and oleg’s drebel has like 3 batteries, which makes for a lot of charging happening. generally speaking we don’t need to charge nightly, and the car adaptor helps, but gosh, its so nice to have 2 outlets at least!

we came, we saw, we left our stuff, we left towards the mountains as the sun was high up, and weather seemed to be kind and warm.

of course it is the warmness that caused us all the problems. this area has a few hikes that take a few hours (all of them free, which is a pleasant thing), and we decided to take up this 2 hour hike.

mistake one.

its a 2 hour hike from the distant parking lot, and really it manes 2 hours of energetic walking. we -should- have driven to the closer parking lot which would make it a shorter hike.

mistake two.

we only had 750ml of water for 2 of us.

mistake three.

midday sun means for a lot of warm. too much warm – the entire hike was underneath the blazing sun and we quickly tired out. matter of fact, about 20 minutes before our arrival to the outlook spot for which the hike aims, i got lightheaded and had to sit down in the nearest shade – a big rock did the trick. at this point we had very little water left, so after taking it easily towards the view (which was not even that good), we started walking back.

i took both bags and stopped at the first, closer, parking lot, where as oleg went with no bags and only the rest of the water towards the car. he said it was a terrible experience, and i believe him – he definitely looked like hell afterwards. i’m so glad we had the ability to leave me and the stuff at the parking lot – i would not be able to make it back without going crazy or something.

when i entered a little shed in the parking lot, i breathlessly asked some middle aged couple and some guy if there is water around here. the couple were entirely useless in terms of information, where as the guy just offered me his bottle which i gladly accepted.

while waiting for oleg further the guy (who offered me water a few more times, provoking my undying thanks to him to this day – i was feeling like hell, and water was exactly what i needed – and he offered it unasked too!) and i started talking. turned out he was a phys. ed. teacher from taiwan, here with a group of his students, who are touring the south island on bikes. we actually passed them by on the drive to the mountains earlier in the day – very noticeable as there are 15-20 young people, all biking very “professionally”. his name is ben, and as we later found out, he is an american who travelled around the world and decided to teach in taiwan. he had some eye problems and needed a ride to tekapo, a local big town. we were only going about halfway, to twizel, however twizel is on a direct big road to tekapo, and he gladly accepted my offer for us to give him a ride to that intersection.

(p.s. oleg says he later saw him with his group in queenstown, about a week later, so i think it all worked out for him. yay!)

after arriving back to the hostel, we have bought a lot of water, some more ice cream, more sun screen, and esentially “chilled” as much as we could. a problem was that the motel room heated up insanely while we were gone, so a lot of the “chilling” was happening outside in the shade, on the stairs leading to the building.

we have decided to take up a big hike the next day, and prepared all our things in advance – i made sandwiches for the road, we packed our bags, and i have made the tough decision of only taking one lens with me to cut down the weight. we got seriously well prepared for the next morning – i believe the most organized preparation yet, as we even arranged to leave our bags and food in the motel until we return. (lonely planet speaks that carjacking is most common in the cars that are left in the start of the trails – makes sense!) the food we left this night, and the bags we moved in the morning.

going to bed entirely too late (10:45pm instead of the intended 9:30pm) and setting our alarms for 4:45am, we were ready to take on those mountains on a fair scale.

after crossing over to the south island, the next plan was to head towards the southern alps. unfortunately the south alps happen to be a fair bit away, thus we decided to stop over in a middle of nothing, aka a town called geraldine.

as we were leaving kaikoura we were adviced to go to the beach and watch some seals, as the tide was low and we could actually hang out at the beach. this little experience turned out to be more than expected as the seals just kinda lay around the rocks and people walked around them. there was a sign saying that people should stay at least 10 meters away from the seals, but of course a few people didn’t really listen. generally speaking the seals didn’t care at all if you were at least 5 meters away from them (and we’re talking about wild seals just hanging out at the beach in low tide here, not some trained animals or anything), but one dude in particular poked a seal with a snorkel, and i juts wanted to choke him on the spot. not only those seals are HUGE and STRONG and have VERY SHARP TEETH, they also don’t have to come to this beach – there are plenty of other places to hang out. people like that just spoil all the fun.

regardless of that incident that happened as we were already leaving, it was a very fun experience. low tide left a lot of shallow pools of water, over which i proceeded to jump cartier-bresson style over them and forced oleg to take photos of me. we have photographs of both of us jumping over those pools. (here is oleg’s photo)

the drive from kaikoura to geraldine passes through christchurch – biggest city on the south island (as far as i know anyway), and definitely the most major one, with a fairly big international airport. an executive decision was made to stop there and try to exchange the lancer to another car (hopefully an astra, same as we had on the north island – its just a reallly nice car, even if i’m not driving) in the avis city location there. surprisingly enough the transfer went as smooth as hot knife through butter, as not only we got another car with no questions asked and with a very apologetic “could you hang out for 30 minutes in town – you can get some coffee or something?”, we got a cute silver holden astra (yay!). i like silver color on cars.

hanging out in christchurch was fun, as the city looks very cool – a lot of small, not chain stores, people hanging out at the sun, very loungy and relaxing. and cheap sushi! i’m highly intending on getting some when we come here on our last day. other notables in this town are weird advertising and great ice cream which i partook in.

after getting the car, we headed straight to geraldine – which still remained a fair drive away. this would be the longest day of driving on the south island – and we still arrived before sun down. this is the nicer thing about heading this far away from the equator – the sunset is around 9-10pm – thus it gives us plenty of time to do some food shopping, cooking, staring down the snobby llamas across from the road, and relaxing, which is all we did.