From The Catlins to Christchurch (June 30 – July 5)

Once we made the journey back across the Foveaux Strait and crossed Stewart Island off of our ‘Official List Of Things To Do In New Zealand’ checklist, we were off to the Catlins, as Alex and Marie were keen to visit the area. Becky thinks that probably has much to do with their appreciation of remote and untouristed areas. To wit, the guidebooks’ description of the Catlins largely consists of calling it “enigmatic" and leaving it at that.

Look at the smile on this man's face, he couldn't be happier to be in the Catlins. Maybe you should visit us, too.

Driving through the Catlins for a few days, our lucky streak for weather continued and we got some relatively balmy, sunny weather, which was fantastic considering that it was essentially the middle of winter, and it had snowed the week previous in the Catlins. The weather in the area this time around was actually much better than our previous WWOOFing stint in early April, when we stayed through nine days of nearly unceasingly cold, grey, rainy unpleasantness.

He's just sleeping, right?

In our experience, the Catlins really is best when you consider it to be a natural zoo area, where wildlife can be seen (pretty regularly) in its natural habitat. This jaunt through the area definitely had that in spades. We saw heaps of seals and sea lions and even managed to spot two yellow-eyed penguins making their exit from the sea at Nugget Point. With beautiful weather and only two days to spend there, even Andrew and I found ourselves enjoying the Catlins this trip through.

A pair of yellow-eyed penguins - unfortunately our camera battery died just before they started tap-dancing, truly an amazing thing to witness

Making our way further north, we stopped to see the Moeraki Boulders again, and took Alex and Marie, our inveterate nature-loving co-travelers, to see the blue penguins at Oamaru. Unfortunately, with breeding season set to begin very soon, the penguins weren’t very active outside of their nests, so they only saw one lone penguin as they walked home from the penguin center. We had hoped to at least catch the penguins that nested in the garage near our backpackers, but the lady at the desk told us that a few weeks ago a backpacker had accidentally run over one of the little penguins, squishing it. The rest of the penguins then left for safer nesting areas; a tragedy as well as a bummer.

Marie and Becky want to know what the big deal about Moeraki Boulders is

Our last major stop with Alex and Marie was to go to Akaroa on the Banks Peninsula near Christchurch. We tried to stop in Waimate for a wallaby pie, as recommended by Lonely Planet, but the guy at the counter seemed surprised that we were looking for one, as they only make them at a few special occasions throughout the year. Bad info: yet another reason to ditch your guidebooks as soon as you’re able to. We stayed in Akaroa for a few days, doing a little hiking and kayaking, and taking in the scenery once more. As a volcanic crater filled in by the sea, it’s unlike any other place I’ve ever been. The place really is magic and we were glad to get back there again.

An unseasonably warm and nice day on the Banks Peninsula

Leaving Akaroa, we made our way to Amberley on July 4, where Kieran and Belinda graciously put us all up for the night and even made us a turkey dinner. It was a delicious corruption of the typical American celebration that was certainly appropriate for the cold Canterbury winter night. We taxied Marie and Alex to the Chch airport the next day for their flight back home (they had about a full day of flying ahead before they got to Connecticut, then they were heading on another flight the very next day to Belgium!), and if you know Becky then you know she was a-blubberin’ as we dropped them off at the terminal. After ~2500 km of driving over to weeks, heaps of great experiences, and thousands (literally) of pictures taken, our whirlwind trip around the South Island came to a close. Whew, I think we need a couple days off now…

A Change of Planaka (May 31)

Howdy there! So if you've been reading our previous posts, you'll know we've spent the past few weeks in Wanaka, looking for housing and employment for the winter season. On most measures most people would say we were successful, as Becky got offered a ski resort job and we found a relatively cheap place to stay. However, under the surface it wasn't all peaches and cream in Wanaka, and we found ourselves questioning whether we really wanted to stay there for the season. As a result, we're coming to you from scenic Oamaru at the moment, en route to Christchurch and perhaps Blenheim in the top of the South Island for a few weeks. Why? I'll tell you why.

First off, our housing situation in Wanaka really wasn't that good. Though we were just sharing a house with a mother and her teenage daughter, they kept the place a fantastic mess. Dirty dishes, dirty clothes, cat food, and other debris littered all corners of the house, with little prospect of getting any better. Our erstwhile landlord kept promising to clean various things for the week we stayed there, but besides the heap of trash bags making it out of the kitchen nothing got better. Trust us on this one, it was bad, and our impartial friend Rachel marveled that we stayed there as long as we did. And I'm not a stickler for ridiculous levels of cleanliness; this was worse than my fraternity house in college. Becky had a pained look on her face so often in that week that I'm just glad her face didn't freeze like that.

As we mentioned before, housing's incredibly tight in Wanaka, with the rooms wanted to rooms available ads ratio running at about 4:1 in this week's edition of the local paper. In other words, we were extremely unlikely to find much else available, so we felt like it was either a dirty place or no place in Wanaka. We felt slightly bad bagging after only a week there, but our landlord was able to find new tenants within 4 hours of us leaving, as she let us know in an angry text she sent us this evening, charming.

Second, though Wanaka is a beautiful and charming town, there really isn't much to do there if you're not working or skiing. Having made the rounds and learned that the local businesses wouldn't be doing any hiring until late-June at the earliest, we were faced with the prospect of sitting out another 3-4 weeks in the dirty house until we could find gainful employment. There's only so many walks around the lake and trips to the small library that we could take before going nuts, and we were feeling dangerously close to that limit only a few weeks into our stay in Wanaka. Becky's actually lucky that Treble Cone offered a job as quickly as they did. In what can only be described as a terribly incompetent and callous maneuver on their part they kept one of our friends in employment limbo for nearly three weeks before texting her to let her know that they wouldn't be offering her a job. There really is no excuse for it; hiring people to take tickets at a ski resort isn't exactly rocket science.

Third and most important, Becky's sister Marie and her boyfriend Alex just let us know that they will indeed be visiting us here, and will be arriving on precisely the day that Becky was slated to start at TC. They were unable to come at any other time, as they'd been working on their doctorates until now.. With people coming to the other side of the world to visit us, we figured we'd rather tour around with them than say "Sorry, we have ticket-taker orientation today, enjoy the walks around the lake." So we woke up today and made the perhaps rash decision to bugger off from Wanaka and get some temporary work (maybe on the vineyards to fulfill our self-imposed fruitpicking commitment?) until they arrive in a few weeks. If nothing else though, it gets us out of the house!

Thus we're in Oamaru with Rachel, who was also ready to make her escape from Wanaka and was eager to go along with our quickly-conceived escape. We went to see the blue penguins tonight, which was actually really pretty cool. The penguins come out of the water each night to climb onto the beach and walk to their nests in the bushes in the cliffs right off the beach. It's a pretty comical sight to see a pack of little penguins waddling up the bank, honking and quacking all the while. They're cute little buggers (1 foot tall, 2-3 pounds), though they smell awfully like bad fish. Tonight was a full moon, which seems to put penguins in a particularly amorous mood, as the bushes erupted in a cacophony of honks and shrieks as we walked back. Funnily enough, a group of penguins also appears to live in a garage next to our hostel in downtown Oamaru, as we found when we walked past on our way home. Where else can you find penguins living in an alley but New Zealand, fantastic!