January 3, 2012
We woke up that
morning to roosters crowing and a beautifully calm lake - a nice contrast to
the night before.
With our stomachs
rumbling, we drove straight to Queenstown for some breakfast at
Fergburger. Ryan had the breakfast
burger (egg, bacon, beetroot, hashbrown, and everything else you can think of
for breakfast) and I had the Cockadoodle-oink burger. It was delicious, but possibly too much food
for 10:30am. We didn't stick around in
Queenstown, but instead proceeded on to another Lord of the Rings site: Pillar
of the Kings. The best place to see it
from was the top of a bridge being used for bungie jumping, so we had some
bonus entertainment.
When we originally
planned our entire trip we expected to go to the glaciers on the NW coast of
the South Island, but once we got driving we realized that wouldn't work out
very well. We instead decided to cut
that part out and slow down our last few days of travelling. On this particular day we didn't have a far
destination, so we made a few random stops along the way. The first was at one of the many cherry
stands on the side of the road. The
cherries were expensive, but they were sooooo good that we ate the first
container while parked in front of the stand and went back for another box. The lady was wondering why we hadn't left,
and was of course happy to sell us more cherries.
The second
spontaneous stop we made was to play mini-golf in Cromwell. It seems that recently Ryan and I have
developed a love for the game, and now we find interesting courses hard to
resist. The course was next to this
massive fruit sign and a "skate" park filled with kids on scooters.
The scenery was
beautiful, but the course was relatively uninteresting. It was really hot in the sun, and that was
only made worse by how bad we were playing.
I kicked butt as retaliation for losing so badly on our trip to Perth,
but both of our scores were appalling.
One perk was that we used the garden hose outside to fill up about 30
litres of water bottles. Ryan, the man
who is always prepared, kept freaking out that we would run out of water. We were planning a big hike in the next few
days and he thought we should fill up just in case. The attendant lady was very friendly about
it, and told us all about her son in Vancouver while we filled all of our jugs.
On we went to
another pit stop at a large Marino wool store, but only ended up buying ice
cream. The drive that day was beautiful,
and very different from the scenery we had seen in previous areas. One particularly nice feature was the
millions of purple lupins growing in the ditches on the side of the road.
I'm not sure what kind of flower this is. |
Eventually we
arrived in Omarama, where we had intended to camp for the night. And this is where my rant about camping in
New Zealand starts.
Really, the first
stop was our own fault. For some reason
I let Ryan lead us to the free campsite on the side of a river, and didn't
think anything of the fact that the description said it was under a bridge. Yeah...turns out it was camping under the
highway...like trolls. A little shanty
town of tents was already there, they had a scary looking dog, and they had
pretty much surrounded the outhouse. We
were in complete shock, since we hadn't seen anything like this anywhere
else. Of course we didn't stay.
Next we went a bit
further into town to a holiday park, which didn't go much better. And neither did the third place we
tried. It looked like this:
We really couldn't
believe it. We had just spent the past
week camping in beautiful spots, and then we had multiple failures in a
row. We drove by two other places, then
decided to just try the next town. We
figured it was impossible for every site to look like this. Of course we were wrong, or this wouldn't be
a good story!
We drove to Twizel
hungry and tired, vowing to stay at whatever park they had. The lady at the front desk, when asked if
there were any less populated areas of the campground, said "well, we have
over 40 acres, so if you can't find somewhere you like then there's something
wrong with you!" I think it's fair
to say it was the most ridiculous campground I have ever been to. It looked like people were living there
permanently; people had massive barbeques, dart boards on trees, and even
fences around their own little area.
I will admit I had a
lot to drink that night (wine: Stella, Sauvignon Blanc, Central Otago, 2009 -
not great), but I swear I'm not making this up - an ice cream truck drove by
our tent!
The next morning we
were leafing through a brochure that the mini-putt lady had given us and I
checked out the section on camping - to see if we were just missing
something. Nope! Turns out this was exactly the kind of
camping we should have expected! It's
hard to see, but turns out the family in the bottom picture has the exact same
striped campervan awning as our campsite neighbours. Boy, do I have a renewed love for camping in
Canada.