Escaping reality...: Food, Kauri, Fiords

On leaving the boat (and the holding tank, phew), we invested some time in kiwi food, caves and finally trees. This did not include L&P lemon drink, pavlova or milk, but rather included lamb, duck, beef, venison, fish, kumara (sort of sweet potato) and green lipped mussels.

There are several very touristy caves in New Zealand, Waitomo and Te Anau, which are famous for their glow worms and you can watch a concert there, travel on a boat, black water raft etc. Near where we were staying, though, were the Abbey caves, where you follow a path, take a torch and scramble. This is exactly what we did and saw not only lots of very beautiful glow worms but also a big eel quite a long way in land in the cave. EUGH. Still, it was very scrambly and we were really quite heroic.

The trees were kauri trees, which are native to New Zealand particularly in the Northland. They grow incredibly straight and tall, have no knots in them as the branch pulls the knot out with it and therefore provide excellent timber. Thus, they are running out and you can no longer cut them down, even if they are damaging your house you still need permission from the local Iwi (Maori tribe) to do so. We explored these firstly through the Kauri Museum, which is run by very enthusiastic volunteers and therefore crammed full of ridiculous amounts of things. Displays full of chain saws, for example, cabinets of irons, a kauri bath (which was quite cool) and a lot of lighthouses made out of kauri gum. Secondly, and more enjoyably, we went for a walk in the Waipoua Forest and saw some kauri for ourselves.

Well fed and familiar with trees, my parents set off on their way back home and I headed quite far down the South Island to Queenstown. Before I arrived, they had had ten days of 30 degrees, I arrived and the visibility was appalling, it was less than ten degrees, very wet and the hills were getting a new dusting of snow, which is rare for summer. It all looked and felt a bit Scottish and the actually very beautiful lake was really quite unappealing.

My first day was spent travelling to Milford Sound. This did involve an enormous amount of time on a bus which I actually didn't mind. The landscape really did change a lot, from the hills and mountains around Queenstown, to Southland landscape which is greener, flatter and very much farm country, to Fiordland National Park, which is just spectacular. Milford Sound itself was very beautiful, I was very lucky with the weather and saw one lone dolphin and lots of seals. It is quite striking how steep the mountains around it are and how deep and clear the water is.

The Maori call it 'upstanding masculinity', perhaps a generously polite translation?

I was actually more impressed with the bus journey through Fiordland, though. We drove along several glacier made valleys with really remarkable views and heard lots of impressive avalanche stories. Even the road there is quite remarkable, completed with a tunnel in the thirties (a clearly not recently built tunnel...) and often closed in the winter. One valley had a very flat bottom where oxbow lakes had been formed (very exciting, only the second time I have seen one of those, despite learning about them in years 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9) which were so still that there were beautiful reflections of the mountains in them. There was also 'the chasm', where limestone had been worn away more than the granite and quartz and a normal looking river suddenly dropped into this chasm in the ground. I think I actually preferred the remarkably clear and icy bluey green rivers in the fiordland to the fiord itself. Which is not to say that the fiord wasn't spectacular, it was more impressive than any I'd seen in Norway but, unfortunately, it was still comparable to Norway. A really good day out though. I also saw a couple of kea, cocky and confident mountain parrots.