October 31st – November 4th
Goodbye North Island. Hello South Island!
Monday, October 31st
Scott finished his semester of school on Monday afternoon. Nikki had finished packing up all our possessions into Bertie, and as soon as Scott was home, we said goodbye to Hamilton and started on our way to the South Island!
Nikki looking excited to leave Hamilton, Scott still recovering from the exam. Both of us coming to terms with the fact that we now live in a van.
We drove all the way to Palmerston North, where at about 10:30pm we decided to pull over to sleep.
Tuesday, November 1st
In the morning we drove the rest of the way to Wellington, making it there by about 10am.
We spent the day doing a walking tour of the city. We were lucky to have a calm day, as you may or may not know, Wellington is often referred to as ‘Windy Wellington’. Even though it was cloudy, it was warm and not a touch of wind.
Nikki in New Zealand’s Capital City, Wellington
We walked through the Te Papa Museum, which is supposed to be one of New Zealand’s best museums. We gave it a quick run through. It did have a lot of interesting exhibitions, but 6 floors of museum is a little too much. By the last 2 floors, we were exhausted and ran through it quickly.
Whale skeleton at Te Papa museum
Wellington City Hall
We walked through the main streets through downtown window shopping the many shops along the way. You could do a lot of damage to your bank account in this city. Luckily, Scott kept Nikki in line.
Then we caught the cable car up to the top of the hill.
Riding the Cable Car
View of Wellington from the top
Then we walked our way back down through Wellington’s Botanical Gardens
Along the way we had to cross over the main highway. There was a memorial at the end of the bridge that basically said they had to dig up over 400 graves in order to build the highway. You’d think there would be a more convenient place to build the highway.
Walking over dug up graves... EEEEKKK!
After about 5 hours of walking around the city, we made it back to Bertie. We left him in the “Motorhome Park” that Wellington had made especially for the Rugby World Cup. It was just a parking lot with toilets. We thought it was absurd that they’d charge $50/night. But that was until we realized how much it was going to cost us to park somewhere for the day in the middle of the city. So in the end, it worked out to be not so bad. Parking for the entire day, and a place to stay for the night.
After some dinner in the parking lot (not the nicest setting for even a campervan dinner) we headed out to a local dance show we heard about.
It was called RISE. The idea behind RISE is that the making and baking of bread, in different forms, is almost a world-wide cultural practice. Since everyone makes bread, the process of it must be some sort of universal human process. Therefore a performance based on this process would have universal appeal. That’s the idea.
We must say, they did QUITE well at making an interesting and entertaining dance show on this idea. It did get a bit ridiculous though.
There were 5 main dancers, all doing different things simultaneously on stage, each with a different element of the bread process. There was a woman dancing on the stage as flour (lots of it) dumped on her for about 30 min. There was a male and female dancer on the other side who had honey poured on them and they got slathered in it. There was a girl walking around putting clumps of yeast starter in her mouth and then spitting it out. Eventually, a spring of water stared spurting out of the stage, and mixed with the flour and everything else, and began to form dough. This was then kneaded by the dancers and then passed around the small audience for more kneading. All of this while they danced, sometimes wonderfully and professionally, sometimes it was just a big hoe-down. There was also a subplot where someone died but we’re not sure about that one.
At the end of the performance, loaves of freshly baked bread (not the stuff from the stage, we learned) were given out to audience and we all walked out into the Wellington night eating a handful of wonderfully fresh bread. Bizarre, funny, entertaining, and memorable evening.
Wednesday, November 2nd
The next morning we woke up early to catch the ferry to the south island. The ferry was something else....but we won’t go into that. Just the whole loading experience was interesting when you don’t have a front and back load ferry. Having all the cars have to do a u-turn once they drive on makes for a very time consuming loading process. Other than that it was an un-eventful ferry ride. It was raining almost the whole time, so we didn’t go out to the observation deck much.
Once we arrived in Picton and made it off the ferry, we headed straight to Nelson Lakes National Park, driving through the Nelson/Marlborough region.
Marlborough Wine Region (No Kidding)
We made it to St Arnaud, where we camped for the night. It thankfully had a cooking shelter as it was dumping rain. We met a guy from France and a guy from Israel and chatted with them in the shelter for the rest of the evening. At about 10:45pm, we realized we were all freezing so we all went to our vans and bundled up for the chilly night.
Thursday, November 3rd
It rained most of the night, and we had hoped for a clearing in the morning so we could attempt the hike of Mt Robert that we had planned. It was looking a little bit better in the morning, so we gave it a go.
All bundled up at the start of our hike. We’ve definitely noticed we’ve moved south.
View of Lake Rotoiti on our way up
Moving into a cloud
About an hour into hiking up steep switchbacks, we encountered the weather we were crossing our fingers would not make it our way.
SNOW!
It got so bad that this was the view of the lake from the same place as before.
We made it back to Bertie cold and wet. We cranked the heat and started making our way up to the city of Nelson. Along the way the blue sky and sun decided to show up.
After just a quick drive through Nelson and a visit to the i-site, we started making our way to Marahau, where we had to be by the next morning.
Along the way we drove through more of the Marlborough Wine region. There were endless vineyards and orchards in the area. We picked out Strafford Orchard as a pit stop along the way because they have samples of their locally grown and made olive oils and olives.
We also stopped in Upper Mouhere because we heard there was a great place to stop and try locally produced cheese and jams. Delicious!
We made it to Marahau by late afternoon, found a great spot in the sun to chill out for the evening. We had some packing and organizing to do for our next days adventure too.
Right next to where we were parked was a little cafe that had an Open Mic Night going on. So we spent the evening listening to the live music.
Friday, November 4th
The next morning we were up early and went over to meet up at Abel Tasman Kayaks. We were scheduled to do an overnight kayak trip to explore Abel Tasman National Park by sea. We arrived at the company’s headquarters at 8:30am, got our gear ready, packed up our kayak, and then the guide went through his long and slow briefing. There were 5 others in the group, including 3 other Canadians. It took forever to run through all the safety drills and such. Then we loaded the kayaks onto the trailers and were pulled down to the beach by a tractor.
Once we got down on the beach next to the water, where we were supposed to do our paddling test before being allowed out onto the open sea, the wind had picked up and was just absolutely gusting. We were all literally getting blown around. The guide assessed the situation as un-safe (and exhausting considering we’d have to paddle straight into the wind) so we all got back on the tractor and we headed back to their headquarters, thinking maybe we could wait out the storm for an hour or so. Unfortunately the storm did not die down, so we had to postpone the trip. Just seeing the weather that has moved in throughout the rest of this afternoon, we are very glad we did not get sent out on those kayaks today. It would have been miserable.
Stormy sea.
The weather forecast looks promising for tomorrow (keep your fingers crossed), so we decided we’d wait it out a night and try again in the morning.
Plus... a stormy day is the perfect time to get a little blogging in.
And, since we had to spend another night in Marahau, we didn't have any food for dinner, and it is such a small town, they don't even have a grocery store. But, someone recommended a burger joint called The Fat Tui, for what they say is 'the best burger in the universe.'
Of course we couldn't pass up the chance to try that.
I don't know if we were just really hungry, or what... but they were delicious!
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