Well, the West Coast was every bit as gorgeous as everyone says it is. The mountains were stunningly green and I couldn't get over how tropical the forests are. Made me feel right at home. Well, almost. If I ignored the fact that the temperature drops steadily throughout the day and is freeeeeeeeeeeeee-zing by nightfall.
Anyway...the drive along the West Coast south to Franz Josef (the town with the 12 km-long ice glacier) was anything but boring. New Zealand has some rather...interesting...state highways. Except for surrounding major cities, their highways have two lanes, one for each direction of traffic. To overtake, slower traffic (that's us in The Beast) have to pull over when you can find an appropriate spot, or chug along until there is a passing lane (which are too few). Apparently, the slowest vehicles on the road are campervans (trucks and other large vehicles whizz by at speeds comparable to sports-cars), and it's quite common to see a trail of vehicles flashing their lights impatiently at a campervan up ahead. It is also not uncommon to give slow campervans the middle finger. I was quite shocked when this first happened. I've never been flicked off in my life...but I soon got used to it after the fourth or fifth time. I was even considering putting up a complaint section on this site for those who feel like it (we have a sign on the back of our van saying www.nzwow.com ). But well, if people are going to get angry (and show it, too) at something like being set back on the road for fifteen minutes, especially when nobody's intentionally trying to make their lives harder (do you think we like having a million cars behind us? We push The Beast as much as we can. It isn't her fault she can't go very fast. Nor ours), I figured it wouldn't be a good idea to give them an avenue to rant and just get angrier :o).
All right, enough about road rage.
I wanted to show you a picture of this bridge we came across the other day. Most of the bridges here are single-lane ones, which makes for some seat-gripping sudden stops when you see a car on the other side since the roads are hilly and windy and you never know what's around the bend. But this bridge...this bridge was the mother of all bridges...not only was it single laned, the railway tracks used the same bridge too!
Not only did we have to watch out for oncoming traffic, we had to watch out for trains too :o), how exciting is that?
Here was another really interesting sight on the road. We turned around a corner and lo and behold! An aqueduct amidst the mountains...
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We did our first long hike two days ago. After over a month without regular exercise, we did an eight-hour hike from the Franz Josef town to the 12 km-long Franz Josef glacier. Our feet were aching by the end of the day, but boy, it did feel good to be physically active.
The hiking trail was quite challenging. Some parts of the path were overgrown, others were muddied from the previous day's rain, and the rest were gravel. Some parts of the trail had been taken out by the river, which meant we climb along the rocks of the riverbank. We had to crawl across a few 4 to 5 metre wide streams without getting too wet. All in all, it was quite an adventure with the glacier views at the end.
Here's a little plant I took a picture of when I managed to steal the camera away from Kyle.
And here's Kyle looking nervous on a bridge...
And here's a gorgeous picture of one of the streams we forged...
Nah, kidding. The stream's actually a teeny tiny one :o). So wee that I stepped over it. I look like Gulliver stepping over Liliput in this one.
The glacier views at the end of the hike were gorgeous. We didn't get to see as much of it as I had hoped, but saw enough to take a few photos, which I'm sure Kyle's put up. You can opt to take a helicopter ride over the glacier, or go walking around on the glacier as well, but both these activities cost a lot.
We decided to leave Glacier Country after realising that spending any more time than we did there would've cost us a small fortune. Everything from food to fuel costs were hiked up quite a lot in both Franz Josef and Fox Glacier (another town with a glacier) towns.
*****
So here we are in Queenstown, adventure capital of the world. I have never seen another country which takes tourism quite as seriously as New Zealand. Which is probably why tourists come here in droves. Tourism plays a pretty significant part in the country's economy. And Queenstown is a prime example. Everywhere you turn there's a sign for some money-making venture aimed at all the adrenaline seeking junkies who flock to Queenstown.
I know I sound a little disgusted. That's because I am. Everything costs an arm and a leg here and for no real purpose other than to make money. We were hoping to bungee jump in Queenstown but after discovering all options were over our budget, have decided to give it a miss and go somewhere else more reasonably priced. It would have been nice to bungee jump here since AJ Hackett is supposed to be The Original Bungy Operator but I suppose to pay that much for just the novelty is ridiculous.
So we decided to take advantage of the beautiful valley and lake setting that Queenstown has and only paraglide here. We caught the early bird morning special (only NZ$150 pp) and off we went for a flight from the Skyline Gondola on Bob's Peak.
The Skyline Gondola was actually what sparked my disgruntlement with Queenstown. Up 'til now I haven't said much about how expensive NZ is, until we got to the gondola place today and were told that they don't sell one-way trips, only return trips for NZ$21 pp.
That's pretty pricey for a 15-minute ride. And the fact that they don't sell one-way trips doesn't make much sense for those who paraglide/hang glide down.
So here's a tip for anyone out there...hike up. It's a 50-minute walk according to this guy we asked at one of the information counters and it'll save you some bucks. The discounts weren't very generous either. A gondola ride + luge combo only gave you NZ$1-2 off. Now that's just mean.
The only thing that made me feel better after having to pay for two trips when we only took one was we gave our tickets to this father and son duo when we got back to town. Take that, Skyline management!
*****
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