An Introduction to New Zealand's South Island

Well, we survived our first overseas trip since being in Australia!  It was harder than you might think, considering we had visas to worry about and a ton of camping gear to get through customs.  You know that question on the customs forms about freshwater streams and farms?  We actually had to declare that we were in those places!  But, like I said, us and all of our gear made it without too much trouble.

For this blog post I thought I would just give an overview of our New Zealand experience and talk about things that might not make it into later posts.  It also buys me some time to get our pictures organized.

This is the route we took.  We flew into Christchurch on Dec. 25, 2011, drove down through Dunedin to Stewart Island, up to the Fiordlands, over to Queenstown, then to Mt. Cook and back to Christchurch.  We flew home on Jan. 9, 2012 after driving over 2300 kilometers.  Originally we had planned to see Franz Josef Glacier, but we would have had to backtrack pretty far after Mt. Cook so we decided against it.  As you can see, in 2 weeks we only did about half of the South Island.

We slept in our amazing tent almost every night, and for the most part that was an excellent decision.  I would say we could have our campsite set up in about 5 minutes if we were both taking our time, and about 10 minutes if one person did it and couldn't find something in the car.   Our meals were quite basic, but I think I have Ryan eating couscous now!  It was a great food since you only have to add boiling water to cook it.  The campsites were unlike anything I have ever seen before, so I will elaborate on them in a later post.

Many of the roads were windy and steep or gravel so I'm glad we had a little car.  Unfortunately gas was about $2.06NZD/litre, so that ate up quite a bit of cash.  Many people say that the South Island is very similar to British Columbia in Canada, and we definitely noticed the similarities.  The weirdest part for Ryan was because it was so similar he was amazed that he didn't have to watch out for bears!  What kept throwing me off was the tropical plants and trees mixed in with the "Canadian" scenery.  Oh, and there really are as many sheep as you expect there to be!

While we were there the weather was unseasonably warm and dry.  We felt very lucky for that since we were camping in a tent without any chairs or a cooking shelter.  It would get up to about 27 degrees Celsius during the day and down to maybe 15 at night, so it was absolutely perfect compared to Australia.  I sunburned my face on the first day and it didn't really get better for the rest of the trip.  The sandflies (blackflies) were also pretty bad like we expected, but that certainly didn't bother us as much as it did others.

Before we left we went to the bank to figure out what we should do for money.  They recommended a reloadable money card that you use like a credit card, so that's what we did.  First off, things were a lot more expensive than we had anticipated so we quickly ran out of money on the card.  Some of the campsites had internet, but when we went to reload the card the bank required us to confirm the transaction via text message.  That would have been fine, except of course our cell phones didn't work in New Zealand.  Consequently, for the second half of the trip we had major money problems.  We had to keep finding bank machines and withdrawing from our Australian account, which of course incurred high fees.  By the last day we were actually counting the change in the car to see if we could buy a plate of potato wedges (we couldn't).

That's all you're gonna get about New Zealand for now!  Today is our only day off before work, so we've got lots of packing/unpacking to do.  I'm hoping to be able to post while I'm at work this time, so don't worry, pictures will be coming soon!