John, Mary & Kathryn's Travel Page

March 16, 1997

New Zealand's South Island

We took the Wellington-Picton InterIslander ferry from the North Island to the South Island. Arriving without reservations, we joined the standby queue and were fortunate to get on the next ferry. Our campervan was stowed in the rail level, wedged in among massive train cars tied down with chains as thick as my wrist. By the time we had gotten ourselves and Kathryn organized and out of the van, everybody was gone and we wandered among the boxcars, stopping at every hatch, until we found the elevator up to the passenger levels.

The InterIslander.was the plushest ferry we had seen. It had a tourist office, a souvenir shop, telephones, a newsstand, a buffet-style restaurant and an outside snack bar, large windows lined with comfortable, brightly patterned seats, a large bar where patrons sat at small tables piled high with empty bottles, video game rooms, and more observation platforms than we had time to visit. Kathryn was delighted with the children's playroom. She crawled energetically on the carpet, squeaking happily, climbed over the soft vinyl blocks, stared at the bigger kids bouncing and jumping, and went tumbling down the little slide. Later she played under our seats by a portside window, emptying the diaper bag, tearing pages from Mary's first-edition copy of Little Women, eating smushed-up peas and potatoes from our plates, and foraging for bits of food dropped by previous passengers. Ahh, she seemed to say, life is good.

Campervan life in New Zealand was cozy and comfortable, but seldom gave Kathryn much opportunity to crawl and explore. The narrow campervan floor was an uninviting play area; it was not until later in the trip that we learned to keep the rear benches arranged as a berth to make a large padded platform for her. We tried let her crawl around the grassy campsites, but often the grass was too wet, or laced with too much dirt or gravel, for a little baby and Kathryn had to play inside. On many days she also spent several hours strapped in her car seat, listening to our limited repertoire of nursery rhymes. As our tour of New Zealand went on, we began to feel rather badly about this and whenever we found a safe, attractive place for her we would stop and let her crawl around.

The South Island is less populated than the North Island, having only about 900,000 inhabitants, half of whom are clustered in the area around Christchurch. It is also larger, more rugged, and wilder. We felt the change during our ferry ride, which left a busy port in the major city of the capital city of Wellington and arrived in remote Queen Charlotte Sound, threading through narrow inlets and forested islands toward the sunset.

In our campervan with our little baby, we were thoroughly land-bound, and so we drove the steep winding roads skirting Marlborough Sound, gazing longingly at the cool water and mysterious islands, wincing when we saw kayakers gliding on the smooth water, their bright boats and quiet wakes pointing like arrows to places we could not reach. Sometimes we parked and followed little footpaths down to the water where we waded in and stood there, unable to go any further. There are few roads through the sound. It is a place for sailboats and floatplanes, fish and birds and paddlers. With the sheltered water and warm summer weather, the sound would be a wonderful place for a family kayaking holiday. I resolved to build a triple kayak when we returned home, so that Mary, Kathryn and I would not again be standing on the shore watching others paddle beautiful clear water.

The road from Nelson to the West Coast passed through some of the loveliest country we were to see in New Zealand: steep ridges covered in rich green forest, deep rocky gorges along fast clear rivers, and broad meadows where grazing sheep clustered along slow spring creeks. The stretch along the Upper Buller River through Murchison west to the Buller Gorge was particularly lovely, and if we return to New Zealand someday I could easily spend a week there exploring the nearby rivers and lakes.

As we traveled south on the West Coast the terrain grew more rugged and the towns smaller and further apart. The hills were covered in thick tangled subtropical rainforest and the beaches were dramatic and rocky. Sometimes the sunsets were spectacular and we always had a view of the night sky and stars just outside our door. Most of the rivers that crossed the main road on their way to the ocean were wide even in late summer, and would be huge during the wet winters; spinfishing water perhaps, but no place for a flyrod. As we went even further south many rivers were milky gray and unfishable with glacier runoff.

There was a motor camp in every town, it seemed, so we never worried about finding a place to stay. The camps were all about the same: a small office, some powered campervan sites with electrical outlets, a few tent sites, a collection of little tourist cabins, and a central building with a common kitchen holding four or five sinks in a long stainless steel counter, a laundry room, shower stalls and bathrooms. The tourist cabins were cheap and grim: usually a tiny wooden structure with a flat roof and a single window, ten feet by eight at best, holding some bunk beds and a light bulb. From the outside they could have been mistaken for deluxe outhouses. Fancier ones had a peaked roof, small patios, a sink, and two windows, but were still far less inviting than our little campervan. Most of the people staying in the motor camps were from Germany, where "Neu Seeland" was a hugely popular vacation spot, and tourist brochures were usually in English, German, and Japanese.

In towns too small to have a motor camp, we simply pulled into a clearing or under a tree for the night. No-one ever bothered us. Hotel rooms were sometimes in short supply along the West Coast, and down by the glaciers the motels and even the tourist cabins were all booked out. But in our little self-contained rolling home, we did not care about such things.

The West Coast of the South Island was a very isolated spot. The area newspapers reported mostly local rugby and cricket. Even the larger New Zealand newspapers that we sometimes found in the bigger towns carried very little world news, although their international cricket coverage was uniformly excellent. Financial coverage meant the Australian and New Zealand stock markets and local commodities prices. Events in Australia and Japan received occasional attention, but outside of Asia nothing of less importance than a new war or the O.J. Simpson civil verdict got any print. The Wall Street Journal, Time Magazine, and other major newsources were not on the shelves.

We felt isolated ourselves. We had been traveling in New Zealand for nearly a month by now. Mary and I had each lost over ten pounds since leaving home. I had not shaved since leaving Melbourne and Mary had stopped using makeup. We had stopped trying to follow the U.S. stock market, had given up reading the tiny local newspapers. My former law practice already seemed a long time ago. I took my bar card out of my wallet and sent in my application to deactivate my law license. Every four or five days we set up our computer in a phonebooth and received a few messages from home. Sometimes I would have a message from our friend Max, who was watching over our affairs back in Los Angeles. He would go through our mail and summarize the car registration notices, bank statements, and bills that had arrived for us. They sounded unreal, as if I were looking in on someone else's life. It took days for me to do simple chores like balancing my checkbook or going through the tax papers I had brought from home. We were traveling in a little bubble, Kathryn, Mary, and I in our campervan, and outside of our bubble things were blurry and hard to grasp.

I fished a small stream outside of Harihari called the LaFontaine. It was raining hard. A farmhand in a dairy farm gave us permission to fish their stretch of river and park by the tractor shed. I was wearing long underwear and neoprene socks under waterproof pants tucked into fishing boots, and a GoreTex jacket fastened tightly at my wrists and neck. My hood was squeezed under my dripping bush hat and my polarized glasses fogged up under the visor. I felt like a spaceman, layered in my protective clothing and weighed down by my soggy vest, as I walked over the muddy farm paths. The water was opaque with rain so I fished the run blind, shuffling along the soft bank and casting upstream with a copper-wound nymph. Halfway up the run I caught a small brown trout, brought him to my feet and let him go in a few inches of water. He stayed near, hanging four inches from my right toe, but when I looked down I could barely see him, a slim streak of brown among the other streaks and clumps and shadows in the water. The rain ran into my collar and down my back. I retreated under some trees and wiped off my glasses. Water ran down my sleeves and pooled in my elbows. I lit a cigarette. Water poured off the brim of my hat and put it out.

The farmer and his hand herded their cows to milking with four wheel drive motorbikes and cattle dogs. About twenty cows came down the path. Seeing me, they stopped and lowed uncertainly. Some raised their tails and released streams of liquid yellow feces which splashed in wet puddles in the mud. Eventually the farmer arrived on a four-stroke Honda. He was an older man with twinkly eyes in a streaming green rain slicker and wet leather gloves. We stood in the rain and talked. I asked him about the deer farms we had seen along the West Coast. He had raised deer for a while, long ago. The velvet from their horns was valued as an aphrodisiac in Korea and there was a market for venison and deer sausages. They had hunted their deer out of the mountains in those early days, in a variety of ways. Originally they had used helicopters to chase the deer out of the bush into open terrain, and as the helicopter made a low close pass men would jump off the skids onto the running deer and bulldog them to the ground. The casualty rate for men and deer had been high, and they tried shooting the deer with tranquilizer darts instead. The darts made the deer run faster, and many darts and deer had been lost in the thick bush. Radio transmitters had been fitted to the darts, and then it became even more expensive to lose a deer, so a variety of radio receivers had been used to track the darts. One deer trapper had resorted to uplinking to a French satellite. Eventually, large half-acre traps set in the bush became the accepted method of capturing deer. The farmer had tied balloons to his traps, and every morning he would climb up on his roof and look for balloons waving in the hills. In good years they got $NZ2,000 for a deer, but deer farming had too many ups and downs, and in the end he had returned to dairy farming. The abundant rainfall of the West Coast allowed his cows to feed on rich green pasture grass, not expensive baled feed, and every $NZ3 of milk cost him less than a dollar to produce. He was getting ready to retire now, and none of his children were interested in taking over the farm. Farming had some pretty antisocial hours, was how he put it. I said goodbye to the farmer and headed back to the camper, peering through my foggy glasses. Rain ran off my hat and down my jacket as I sloshed through pools of yellow cow muck. Encased in my protective clothing and happy with the memory of my fish, I didn't feel a thing.

After leaving the La Fontaine we came to the most popular tourist attractions on the West Coast, the twin glaciers Franz Josef and Fox. Nowhere else, outside of extreme South America, do glaciers descend through rainforest to the ocean coast. Each glacier had a small town near its base and both towns were packed full of ways to experience the ice. You could fly over them, helicopter all around them, land on the glaciers, join a climbing party and explore the icefields and crevasses via crampons and ropes, drive on them in a six-wheel drive buggy, and, for the tired or thrifty, simply watch movies about them. We chose to simply walk up to Franz Josef Glacier and take a look. A short drive up a dirt road and a kilometer on foot over the rockfield took us to the glacier's end, or terminal. It looked like a large river of ice and snow which some giant had roughly hewed off with an axe just short of the assembled tourists, leaving abrupt blocks of ice stacked high in the air. A rope barrier and large signs warned visitors to stay at least fifty meters from the unstable terminal ice "which may collapse at any time". An older man had passed the rope barrier and was hovering near the ice. He wanted to touch it, but he also remembered the stern signs. Mary walked by him and poked an ice block with her finger. The man followed her and touched the ice. More people lifted the rope and went forward. We left quickly.

One day a guide and I helicoptered out from Fox into a remote stretch of river where, the guide assured me, large brown trout waited to swallow any dry fly as soon as the sunlight lit up the water. I folded myself into the rear seat of the tiny helicopter, ears drumming from the racket, and looked down through the Plexiglas door as we lifted off and headed south over the fields. It was a rough ride. The helicopter slewed sideways, bounced violently up and down, and rocked from side to side as we climbed over several ridges and dropped into the valleys. I learned later that the morning had been unusually windy and that the usual glacier flights had in fact been grounded. After the helicopter dropped us and left, we assembled our rods and began walking upstream. The river was beautiful, with long fast turbulent runs and huge deep pools through giant tumbled boulders. Rare blue ducks lived in the quiet stretches and keas, a sort of rotund, unafraid green parrot, watched us from the boulders. We moved from pool to pool, stopping when the guide spotted a trout. There were relatively few trout in the river, but they were very large; two feet was common and we saw two of at least thirty-six inches. However, they would not take any of the flies we tried. We could tempt them to circle up and inspect large dry flies, or to briefly follow a nymph on the retrieve, but nothing we had was quite interesting enough to take. I missed one strike early in the morning and that was all the action we got on the river.

I carried the effects of that morning with me for several days, though. The West Coast was plagued with mosquitos and stinging sandflies. We kept them out of our camper with a blessedly effective device (sold in grocery stores) that plugged into the campervan's electrical sockets and held a small bottle of liquid insect repellent, and when we were walking and moving around outside heavy use of insect repellent kept the bites to a minimum, but in the bush where the big trout lived the sandflies were everywhere. When I stood motionless on the bank, watching a drifting fly and holding my line in my fingers, ready to strike, twenty or thirty sandflies would land on the backs of my hands. Unable to brush them off for fear of missing a strike, I had to let them be, and by that evening my fingers, the backs of my hands and my wrists were so swollen that I had to remove my watch and would have taken off my ring too, if I had been able to.

After leaving the glaciers, the West Coast, and the sandflies, we drove east through tight.steep passes into the Otago area. Here New Zealand reminded us of Mary's hometown in Central Washington State. The mountains were stark and sharply defined, a thin growth of low trees and brush on the lower slopes and the upper slopes barren, and the plains were wide and flat, windswept and mostly empty. The big lakes in Otago were an unreal shade of blue, long and windy, surf crashing on the downwind shores. We went winetasting, inspected tractors and ostriches in an agricultural show, visited a museum of World War II fighter planes, were pummeled by some powerful windstorms on a day when we should have stayed in camp, got lost by nearly two hundred kilometers around Mount Cook, and finally arrived on the East Coast.

We were nearly out of time in New Zealand but we still had one remaining goal, which was to see the little blue penguins at Omaru. To leave the Southern Hemisphere without seeing any penguins was inconceivable, so at nine o'clock on a particularly cold Friday night we drove out to the colony on the southern edge of the bay. This penguin colony had a paved access road complete with "Penguin Crossing" signs, a large parking lot, a ticket booth, souvenir shop, bleacher seating and floodlights. A blackboard sign advised that the penguins were scheduled to appear tonight at 9:30 p.m. At twenty after nine, tour buses pulled up and crowds of bundled-up tourists streamed into the bleachers.

The little blue penguins in Omaru had always lived in this one spot between the cliffs and the rocky beach. Over the years their bit of land had been a railroad spur, a storage yard for construction debris, and then a rubbish dump, but the penguins kept swimming out to sea in the mornings and returning in the night. Finally the town had cleaned the area up, hauling off tons of trash and installing nesting boxes and a protective fence during the day while the penguins were out fishing. These penguins, and another control colony nearby without lights and bleachers, were studied closely, tagged and photographed and counted all year round, and the tourists who filled the parking lot and bleachers helped pay for it all. We bought our tickets and sat in the cold, damp wind waiting for the penguins to show. A guide with a wireless microphone gave a short lecture on penguin life. Little blue penguins were fairly plentiful in certain parts of New Zealand, he explained. The penguins here woke up at five in the morning, climbed through small holes in the fence, waddled over a wide gravel and dirt path, and headed down the rocks in the ocean. They might swim fifty miles out to sea in a day, dodging sharks and seals as they dived for fish. At nightfall they headed back to their home beach and climbed up the rocks to the gravel's edge where they looked for danger before heading to their nests. When the group felt the coast was clear, they would dash over the path, back through the fence, and into their burrows. The crowds and lights did not affect their behaviour at all, he said; these penguins lived and acted just like the control group up the coast.

As he finished his talk we saw the first group of penguins bellysliding out of the surf and poking their heads up over the rocks. There was an arrow painted on the top rock, so we knew where to look. Six or seven penguins gathered there, looking right and left and ducking down again. We saw them well, because they were in the floodlights about fifty feet from the bleachers. After five or ten minutes one penguin stood up and stepped into the path. The others followed, pushing and crowding. One penguin wavered, turned back, hesitated, and had to run to catch up with the others. They were small, about a foot tall, with the black and white tuxedo markings I had always envisioned. They looked like guests at a fancy dress party dashing across a busy street. Then they slipped through the fence and were out of the lights.

Sitting in the chilly, blowing night air at the penguin colony made me sick, and my last few days in New Zealand were spent in a dreary Christchurch motorcamp, wrapped in my sleeping bag, dazed with the flu. On the second afternoon I felt better. I shaved off my beard. We cleaned up the camper, discarded our unused food, sent our sleeping bags and camping gear home, and packed our bags. The bubble was over, and it was time to leave.

Traveling On a Budget

Powered campsites cost about $NZ16--20, depending on the motor camp's standard and location. Diesel fuel is around $NZ0.56/liter, and at 19 miles per gallon our camper cost about $NZ6 for every hundred kilometers. Put another way, we spent only about $NZ200 fueling the campervan throughout the North and South Islands. A gasoline-powered camper would cost twice as much to run, as petrol is nearly a dollar a liter.

Groceries are reasonably priced in New Zealand, which is fortunate since food in the modest sort of eateries we frequented is not particularly cheap ($NZ25 for a medium pizza, a beer, and a soda in Fox Glacier, for example) and, in our limited experience, not very interesting either. We ate much better from the campervan's little propane cooker and seldom found any reason to eat out.

Four-berth campervans are fairly expensive to hire (see New Zealand's North Island and travelers could probably rent a small car and stay in cheap motels for the same money, not counting meals. But we liked having a constant place to sleep and hang our clothes, and we especially liked never having to call ahead, fret over "no vacancy" signs, or hunt for motels late at night in little towns.

Staying Connected

The entire South Island had only one Compuserve node, in Christchurch, and a three minute call to Christchurch from a payphone on the West Coast would eat up most of a $NZ5 phone card, so we didn't log on too often and web browsing was out of the question.

Fishing Information For New Zealand

Back to the Travel Page Index.