Top of the South

Well we're finally on the South Island. Comparisons to BC are starting to accumulate.

The roads are still very windy. Without winter road conditions, incentive to make a straight road seems to diminish. Amy got car sick for her first time ever:



It's been a very dry spring down here. When we get long dry periods, Canada, the U.S., and Australia worry about wildfires. In New Zealand, they worry about crops and pastures. A lot of drinking water in rural areas comes from roof catchments. Yet despite this season's trend and the top of the South Island's reputation as being the sunniest in the country, it's finally started to rain.  Good, we're happy for them.
Fiordland, down south, gets a lot of rain, but nobody lives there. Eight meters per year in a good year. Vancouver gets 1 meter. The rest of the country averages 0.5-1.5m. Beyond that, it's tough to compare, since the rest of BC gets snow much of the year.

So we're learning a bit more about water conservation. Sure its good to know, but conserving cold water in Canada seems totally unnecessary, if you ask me. Hot water and electricity, sure. But cold water, we've got lots of it. At least enough to do the dishes properly. Everyone here seems to go light on the soap so they can just skip the rinse stage. To each his own.

Anyways, we've stayed with a few more Couchsurfers and seem to be in the habit of weeding for accomodation. The whole CS network in NZ can get a lot of pressure. There's tiny towns whose ratio of hosts to potential surfers is probably 100 to 1. In Whitehorse, we got 50 requests all summer and probably hosted 15. Our host in the town we surfed in has had 8 guests in a night. People seem to get hammered with requests, so it's been a case of having something to offer or simply planning ahead.

WWOOFing farms seem to be in high demand as well. We're hearing of places that are booked solid of the next month. Booked? Since when did gardening catch fire? As with CS, the lure is probably free accomodation, so again we're trying to plan a bit further ahead. The trouble is that without a laptop, we need to seek out almost every library we come across, just to get hold of the next farm/couch. The farms we've stayed at have either had dial-up (slow) or satelite (low capacity, hella expensive) internet. And if accomodation looks unlikely in our days agead, scoping the satelite view for possible hammockable sites on the side of the road is becoming routine. Someone develop an app for iPhones to locate the nearest stand of trees. Then maybe I'll get an iPhone

This trip, more so than any other trips either of us have done, is more spontaneous. That translates to uncertainty more often than it does adventure. Is it romantic not knowing where you'll sleep at night? Well hopefully it will be soon, but it's also a bit stressful. Of course I wouldn't have traded places with the Polish girl who picked us up that was trying to see the whole country in 2 weeks, driving 400km a day in a rented car.

We're trying to be flexible. Take farm work where we can and lower our standards a bit for CS hosts. We're definitely more sympathetic with last-minute requests now.

We got a last-minute invite to a farm that just barely saved us from gale-force winds and rain. 5 acre properties with non-commerical gardening/farming are referred to as Lifestyle Blocks here and I think that's where a large number of WWOOFing takes place. People that want to live the self-sufficiency dream, but for whatever reason, need to keep working to support themselves. With little free time, they really on people like us to do their weeding. Endearing! This last family (7 kids!) was doing a reasonable job, though the kids seemed to do absolutely no work whatsoever. Via asking a million questions, I'm really starting to get a picture of gardening. We haven't seen anything that's really impressed us yet (although the vegans did have some big harvests I'd imagine), but we have been learning, nursing our budget, and keeping showered, laundered, and interneted. It's funny that the one grey area so far in exchanging labor for room/board has been doing the dishes. It's never laid out in advance, so we usually end up offering. Should we cook and shirk dishes? Since they cooked, do we do everyone's dishes? What about breakfast dishes? That and whether snacking between meals is frowned upon or not.

After a day's work, we went to check out Pu Pu Springs (I'll let you guess at pronounciation). The clearest freshwater in the world:


It's clarity is beaten only by the seawater under the Ross Ice Shelf in Antarctica.

We made it up to the extreme northeast tip of the South Island. Tidal flats and the point where the Tasman Sea meets the Cook Strait. A long spit extends way out there, which you can barely make out in the distance:

You can see how this area would get its fair share of beached whales.

We made our first excursion to the west coast and found the wildest beach yet:

Then we did a dayhike in Abel Tasman National Park, the country's busiest, although we were there just before high season kicks off. I'm no beach connoisseur, but golden beaches are alright with me. More tiny pebbles than sand:

Seals too. We counted 17 in on spot and later on, when I jumped a cliff, a seal swam around the corner and huffed at me as I was getting out of the water.

The hike was on a very well graded, wide path, mostly to appeal to the vineyard and wine-tasting tourism that the area is known for..

-Dan