Milford Sound

The second leg of our South Island trip took us to Milford Sound. Considered a 'must-see' of New Zealand tourism, this sound (or more correctly, Fiord) is part of Fiordland, on the Southwest coast of the South Island. It's only 60km from Queenstown as the crow flies, but to reach the sound by road requires a good 4.5 hour drive. Therefore, we had to hit the road bright and early.

There are several nice hikes on the way into Milford sound, and we were determined to do one of them. Justin had decided on a hike called Gertrude Saddle, one that affords stunning views of Milford Sound from a pass between two nearby mountains. However, like most hikes in NZ, both the hike and the views are very weather dependant. We stopped at the Department of Conservation information site on our way into the sound (and out of civilization), and were told that, based on the day's weather forecast, doing the hike was not advised. Apparently, it had the potential to be very slippery, and the views probably wouldn't be great.

Of course, that just made us more determined to do it. 

Emma began to have second thoughts after the signs became more and more fearmonger-y. This one suggests turning back if you didn't bring ice crampons (we didn't).

 To be honest, it felt a bit like being in Mordor. Just a lot of grey gloom.

At this point, it looked like we were almost at the top of the saddle.

But in actuality, we were just at this lake. We decided against going for a dip.

Somebody had pitched a tent right beside the lake. We never came across the occupants, so we're not sure whether they enjoyed their stay in this cold, blustery desolation.

Conditions didn't really improve from there on out. We came upon some more challenging terrain, but luckily there were chains to help with the climb.

After a bit of a 'blind-leading-the-blind-through-fog' episode, we got to what we assumed was the Saddle. The view looked like this. 

We got a bit lucky, and the fog actually cleared decently while we were up there. Here's the 'after' view. The water in Milford sound is waaaay off in the distance.

By this time, we were soaked from all of the rain ad fog, and so we clambered back to the car as quickly as we safely could. Our running shoes were squelching with water by the time we got back. Fortunately, it was only an extra 20 minutes of driving to get to Milford Sound. The 'town' of Milford Sound consists of about 15 people (all in the ecotourism business) and one restaurant/pub. So, that's where we went for dinner that night. It felt so good to finally be warm and dry...and they were even playing both the Cricket World Cup and Champion's League games. Milford definitely knew how to keep us happy!

We wandered home from the pub as the sun was going down and managed to snap a couple of pictures without too much cloud cover.

The next morning, we were up bright and early for a cruise through the sound. Because it's actually created from glacial activity (rather than a river), we learned that the correct name for Milford Sound is actually Milford Fiord.

Justin and our boat.

The view looking into the sound from the Tasman sea.

We had another wildlife sighting while on the cruise. Believe it or not, there is a juvenile New Zealand fur seal on the top of the rock, and another one just to the right of the rock. We recognize that we probably need to invest in a camera with slightly more zoom if we want people to believe that we have actually seen animals.

From Milford Sound, we hopped in the car and began the 5 hour drive to Wanaka. Details of that leg of the trip to come soon.

Joining the throngs of tourists in Queenstown

Both of us had last week off work, so we took an escape to the South Island. First stop: Queenstown. Situated on the shore of lake Wakatipu, in the south-central part of the South Island, Queenstown is also known as 'Banff on Steroids'. Similar to Banff, Queenstown is a mountain resort with an active nightlife, and just as many (possibly more) multicultural tourists. It is also the unofficial (possibly even official) adventure capital of New Zealand, hence the 'steroids' reference. You really can't visit Queenstown without doing something extreme, or you will most likely be regarded as an extremely boring person. Extreme activities include skydiving (more on that later), bungee jumping, jumping into a canyon on a massive swing, and white water rafting. We decided to be somewhat unadventurous (Emma's influence) and settled on doing some hiking and white water rafting during our time there.

On day 1, we decided to climb Ben Lomond peak, a mountain that overlooks Queenstown and can be accessed easily from the central city. We started by taking a gondola up to the top of Queenstown hill (the South Island's answer to Vancouver's Grouse Mountain), the base of which was about a 10 minute walk from our hotel. We knew that it was lazy of us to take the gondola, but the hike takes almost 6 hours if you walk up the gondola, and we had decided that going for a leisurely brunch was far more important than allowing for adequate time to do the entire hike. The gondola trip shaved about 45 minutes off our hike time.

We attempted the hike on a fairly dreary day, but we were still able to get some nice views. The walk started out through a pine forest, which was very reminiscent of our prior hiking in Canada. The forest was even home to a plethora of massive toadstools. Emma thought that it seemed like an enchanted forest. Justin thought that it seemed like a normal forest, and that the toadstools should be referred to as mushrooms because they were unlikely to be large enough for toads to use as stools. For some perspective (this toadstool was lying in the middle of the trail, we didn't pick it): 

While we're on the topic of enchanted forests, one of Justin's favourite movies (but he pretends it's not), Willow, was actually filmed in Queenstown.

It took an hour or so to make it up on the ridge leading towards the summit of the Ben Lomond peak. Once on the ridge, we were treated to some great views of the NZ mountains.

From the other direction, we were able to get a good view of Queenstown and lake Wakatipu.

After a bit of scrambling we made it up to the summit just as the clouds cleared off a bit. Some friendly Aussies were nice enough to take our picture.

The highlight for Justin was getting to see some of the local wildlife up close and personal. Unfortunately, the goat was not particularly photogenic.

We made it back to central Queenstown in time to catch the sunset.

The next morning, we headed out for some white water rafting on the Shotover river. Emma had never been  rafting before, and was a little bit nervous about the brochure's promise of class 5 rapids. Her anxiety was not alleviated when the rafting guides started to give instructions about what to do if the raft were to capsize, and telling everyone to 'by no means try to stand up in the river if you fall out of the raft or you'll almost certainly drown'. It didn't help that, while this safety briefing was going on, they were driving us in a bus down the most dangerous road in New Zealand. This road, which transports you into part of the Shotover river valley called Skipper's Canyon, was initially used by gold miners to get access to the river. Now, because the road is so dangerous, public use is not permitted, and bits of the road are known to crumble off into the river from time to time. Pictures don't really do it justice, but as you can see, it's quite a narrow road.

Anyway, back to the rafting. We actually made it through the experience relatively unscathed (Emma hit Justin with her paddle once, accidentally of course), and the raft did not capsize. This was all despite the fact that half of the others in our raft didn't understand english and hence couldn't react properly to our guide's paddling commands. We don't have any photos of the rafting experience, so we figure that we'll have to go again sometime, and now Emma will be confident enough to try and bring her waterproof camera.

The Queenstown region (part of central Otago) is known for its pinot noir, so we decided we had better do at least a little bit of wine tasting during our time there. We headed out to the Gibbston Valley, which hosts a number of vineyards, and rented some bikes. 

We were able to get to three different wineries in an afternoon: Peregrine, Remarkables, and Gibbston Valley. The latter has New Zealand's largest wine cave, which offers tours as well as tastings. Justin started to get some ideas for his future wine-making endeavours. Looks like we're going to need a big property with a cave when we move back to Canada!

The next leg of our trip was spent in Milford Sound. More to come on that soon.

Cricket: Heaps more fun than watching paint dry

One thing that we've really noticed since moving to Auckland is how much Kiwis love cricket. Every family at the beach seems to bring a bat and a wicket, and it's pretty much the only sport on TV here (even though most matches go on for days). A couple of months ago, we found out that the 2015 cricket world cup would be held in New Zealand and Australia. This meant nothing to Emma, but Justin decided that his NZ cultural experience would not be complete unless he attended at least one game. After being put on the wait list, we found out in early February that we had gotten tickets to a NZ versus Australia round robin game on February 28th.

Late at night on February 27th, we decided that we should probably learn a bit about cricket, or at least ODIs (short for One Day Internationals...to differentiate this type of game from longer 3 and 5 day tests). I recommend looking up the rules on Wikipedia, rather than trying to make sense of Emma's description, below:

In a nutshell, these games consist of two innings, with each team getting one chance to bat. Each inning lasts for 50 'overs', or until 10 of the 11 batters on the batting team gets out. An 'over' consists of is 6 bowls (aka pitches), thrown by one bowler. Each team has several bowlers, who rotate bowling duties between overs. So, if a team doesn't get out while batting, then the inning will last for 300 bowls, which typically takes about 3.5-4 hours (the games are scheduled in 8 hour timeslots). However, the inning can be shortened if the bowling team is able to get 10 of the 11 players on the batting team out. Two batters are always on the field at once, each protecting a wicket from being hit by the bowler (which batter receives each bowl depends on a few different factors). Both batters must run from one wicket to the other in order to make a run, although if the ball is hit far enough, then they are automatically awarded runs (4 or 6 depending on the distance of the hit) without having to physically run. Anyway, there always has to be 2 batters on the field at a time, and the inning is over once 10 of the batting's team 11 players have gotten out, because at that point they only have 1 batter remaining.

 To get a batter out, the bowler needs to hit the wicket behind the batter with the ball, a fielder needs to catch the ball in the air after the batter hits it (like baseball), or the wicket-keeper needs to touch the ball to the wicket before one of the batters crosses the batting line after trying to make a run (again, like baseball). The best two batters on each team will start out batting, and each time a batter gets out (called 'a wicket', even if the out results from a ball getting caught), a new batter from lowing in the batting order takes their turn. So, at the time of the 9th wicket, the crappiest batter on the team will be coming on. Although, if the top batter on the team hasn't gotten out yet, he may still be batting. See, isn't it interesting??

Anyway, we ended up seeing pretty much the most exciting game in the history of cricket (probably not, but that's what it felt like). The Aussies batted first, and NZ got 10 wickets on them within about 2.5 hours, which is pretty much unheard of. They only had 152 runs, which is an exceptionally low total for an inning (so we're told). So everyone was feeling pretty good about NZ's chances going into the second inning. They just needed 153 runs and the game would be over. Batting was going as expected, with their captain (and #1 batter) Brendan McCullum racking up 50 runs in quick succession. Then, he got out, and things went down hill quickly. Suddenly, Australia had 9 wickets on us, and we needed another 6 runs to win the game. It probably doesn't sound exciting, but it was as good as a NHL playoff game (and 1000x better than NBA playoffs)! The stadium was silent and everyone was on the edge of their seats. Then the NZ batsman hit a 6-pointer and we won.  And it was all over in a tidy 5.5 hours (rather than the usual 8), which we also considered a win.

Needless to say, we're now pretty into the cricket world cup, and will certainly be trying to get to another game (the semi-finals will be in Auckland later this month).

Nice day for a game: