South Island Pong: Part II

B-3. B-3. Again, folks, in Milford Bingo, if you can't cover the number called, you must remove an article of clothing, and pay $100. Okay, here's come the next numb....wait a second...you two in the back! Yeah, you two, with the broken down station wagon! You still have your clothes on and all of your money! You knew the rules, now strip down and pay up! Get 'em! Hahahahaha!!!!

This is how the story would start if our evening at Milford Sound had taken an absurdly horrific turn for the worst. But we were pretty wiped out, and bingo didn't start for a while, so we decided to head back to our campsite (or very expensive piece of worn astro turf surrounded by 19 similar pieces of turf) and head to bed so we could make it up bright and early for a sunrise breakfast. Even in the Southern Hemisphere, the air gets cooler at night, and the merciless cold we felt moving in as we headed for our campsite had reached it's most bitter right as we were preparing our tea and regular morning feast of yogurt, stone fruit and muesli. Further, because the sound sits in a valley surrounded by high peaks, accessed by a tunnel that by most safety standards shouldn't exist, the warmth of the sun was a long ways off. Fortunately, our hands kept enough feeling for us to snap about eight hundred pictures as the first light hit Mitre Peak.

Eventually, the time was nigh to face our fears and tackle the uphill side of the tunnel (Smaug doesn't care for inclines). Despite some clanks, clunks, smells and rumbles, and car eating keas, we made the trip back to Te Anau without incident.

We were quickly smitten with the area and really wanted to spend some more time exploring. We learned in one of our handy guidebooks about a nice-sounding place to stay in Manapouri, a small community just a few minutes south of Te Anau. We gave them a ring and were thrilled to find out that they had a cabin with a private kitchen, pot-belly stove, deck, grill and views of Lake Manapouri and the Kepler Mountains, all for just a few dollars more than we paid for a 8 x 5 piece of rotten turf the night before (we're over it, we promise). So we picked up some steaks and veggies, headed to our new friend Jimmy's place, made a fire, watched another magnificent sunset from our deck, enjoyed our 1100th bottle of excellent New Zealand wine with a delicious meal and a few hours later, one of us turned 28!

Knowing how sad we would be to leave, and how much we'd rather stick around for a little longer, one of the property horses came to our window and woke us up just in time to track down Jimmy and see if we could stay put for another night. Although he had already booked the cabin, he moved his booking to a different cabin, and then gave us ours for a discount. Folks in New Zealand are inexplicably generous and kind.

Over the last few days, we'd been hatching schemes to check out some different hikes in the area. Fortunately for us, an unfettered sun had been shining on Southland for the last few days. Unfortunately, the Fiordlands receive more rainfall than any other region in New Zealand, and this trend was forecast to continue by the next day, so we had to act quick. We decided to head back up to the Eglinton Valley to knock out a portion of the Routeburn Track, one of New Zealand's Great Walks. We didn't get to do the whole thing, but the portion we covered was still notably Great.

We would have loved to spend a month in this area. Three of the nine great walks are in the Fiordlands, along with dozens of other trails that we could probably spend a year exploring, but the weather was about to turn against us. And not simply for the next few days. We'd been doing a fair amount of camping since we left Fox Glacier, and when you sleep outside regularly, you start to notice every degree of temperature change. This is especially true in New Zealand, where they measure temperature in Centigrade, which is nine-fifths colder than Fahrenheit! Also, few places exist in the world that are closer to Antarctica than southern New Zealand. Winter was moving in (and regrettably, still is) and we were, for maybe the second or third time since we arrived, feeling that some planning was in order.

The options south were pretty slim, so we decided the time may have come for us to make our great migration. We decided we'd start off by heading back to Oamaru, where a sure-to-be swinging jazz festival was heading to town for the weekend. Well, that part of the journey is embarrassingly boring, as due to our own exhaustion and laziness (and slightly due to the fact that the Victorian District isn't exactly the French Quarter), we managed to pass the whole weekend without making it to any of the groovy jams, with the exception of a young teenage busker belting out the Lord of the Rings score on tenor sax, who we were more than pleased to help out by making a donation to his New Saxophone Phund.

JAM - The original jam band

But we weren't quite ready to say farewell to the far south yet. A few more barren, remote locations remained unexplored and beckoning us to tempt the fate of our sickly vehicle. And the first of those destinations was that geographical formation which twice in the last two weeks had pushed Smaug to its breaking point...a peninsula. The Otago Peninsula!

South Island Pong: Part I

Hello out there! If there is still anyone out there. Generally, cliffhangers only work when the gratification of resolution is shortcoming, hence the popularity of soap operas and Netflix-on-Demand (you can actually watch about 33 episodes of "24" in one twenty-four hour period). However, putting out more than one blog post every two weeks is a tall task for a couple of nomads, so we apologize for the delay. We have at least taken the time to assure our mothers that we're still in one piece.

So, our faithful station wagon decided she needed another rest from all the long drives we've put her through, so she decided to take a nice three day nap outside of Dunedin. She did wake up long enough for us to get her into the city where she could get her starter motor tuned up, and she's been a trooper ever since.

Feeling a bit rattled by the string of recent breakdowns, we decided we'd better get to one of the most remote places on the South Island as quickly as our ailing steed would bear us there. So as soon as she was well again, we set out for the Milford Sound.

Even though Dunedin and Milford Sound sit on opposite coasts, we made the whole trip in a day, probably 6 hours or so of driving. The trip mostly spans rural mountainous terrain while passing through the moderate size towns of Balclutha, Clinton and Gore (where we found an oddly located homage to the United States Executive Branch). Along the way, we also spotted some of the most magnificent Rocky Mountain Elk either of us had ever seen.

With these two reminders of our homeland, we were beginning to think we'd driven through some sort of space portal, and any minute we were going to turn a corner and be in an Applebee's parking lot. Our worries were quickly assuaged, as we soon found out that a herd of American Wapiti had been given as a gift to New Zealand by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1909, and the Presidential Highway was thus named simply because the Kiwis found it amusing that two small neighboring towns shared names with the two leaders of the US.

We arrived in Te Anau, the central hub of the Fiordlands, a little after mid-day. As usual, we didn't have much of a plan, so after a short tour around the town, we quickly decided to head out to Milford Sound. The sound lies about 120 kilometers north of Te Anau, so we figured we could probably make the trip in just over an hour. About 3 hours later, after an indescribably beautiful drive around Lake Te Anau and through the Eglinton Valley, we were watching the sun set behind Mitre Peak. Rudyard Kipling dubbed the Milford Sound the Eighth Wonder of the World (had he lived to see the film adaptation of his Jungle Book, he may have reserved this title for King Louie's musical number). Neither of us possess the lexicon to aptly describe this corner of the world, so we'll let the pictures do the talking!

Because the last hour of the Milford Road is a horrifying nightmare, especially in a vehicle of questionable fortitude, we decided not to make the trip back to Te Anau in the dark, and instead opted to treat ourselves to the very limited and overpriced food and accommodation at the Sound. After a restroom pit-stop (during which a Department of Conversation employee threatened to lock one of us in the bathroom for taking too long to dry our hands), we headed into the only restaurant in the area for a little grub. The food was nothing inspiring, but the staff were a lively bunch. We noticed a posting on the chalkboard that there would be bingo at 9 o'clock. When we asked our French waitress to tell us about it and whether or not we should stick around for it, she had only one question for us: "Do you enjoy being naked?" What did this have to do with Bingo? What had these people, three hours from the nearest town, resorted to in order to entertain themselves? Would Smaug make it up the hill and out of this valley, or would we be trapped here, doomed to an eternity of playing naked Bingo with strangers? Why do Kea's crave the flesh of automobiles? The answers to these questions and many more to come....in Part II!