Wet and Wild on the West Coast

So we regrouped over the weekend (Renee worked & Dave did the laundry) and then packed the car again for a 5 night adventure down the west coast to Queenstown and Mildford Sound.  The weather was pretty much as we expected.  The forecast was so dodgy for a while we only confirmed our plans at 4pm and headed out.   And then stopped the next morning at The Warehouse in Greymouth to buy some new gumboots (AKA rainboots, wellies etc) for the boys. 

 

 
There are many rivers flowing out of the mountains and down to the sea on the west coast, and that means many bridges for both the highway and the railroad.  So very cool to drive by the spontaneous waterfalls on the side of the road though due to the rain.  
 

No hope of seeing the Frans Josef Glacier today.  Much too foggy.  But never fear, adventure is always near in NZ . . . and so are the sandflies (ugh!). 

We are daredevils.  There are no other words.  We willingly took our van (& our children!) on this road . . . because every guide book says Gillespie's beach is a hidden treasure.

 

Turns out the road looks like this.  If you've been following our blog, you'll know that this is A) par for the course in NZ and B) in very good shape and the warnings were dramatic and only put there to prevent overseas tourists with rental motorhomes.

  

Xavier kept asking if we were in the rainforest and we decided to agree with him because I haven't seen trees like this anywhere else, along with the dense bush and fern undergrowth.   It's not the amazon, but it's not half bad! LOL

 

Made it to the rocky beach (NOT recommended for swimming obviously) and Dave set to work on an inukshuk.  There was a posted 3 hour return hike to see a seal colony.  Not happening on a day like today considering how close we were to the seals less than 1 week earlier in Kaikoura.

Inukshuk completed.  Some cool rocks collected by the boys too.  Go Canada! 

Ha!  Can you spot the Fox Glacier below??  There are mountain peaks behind those clouds - promise.  Luckily we were staying the night in the local campground, waiting for the sunny weather the next day.

After dinner we headed up to check out a closer view of the glacier - beautiful blue water and ice mixed into the terminal river. 

 

We could only see the Fox Glacier from about 600m away as the track was blocked by flooded streams and we weren't willing to pay for a guided tour with the boys in tow.  Loved the danger signs all around.  (One day, when I run out of pretty photos to show you, I'll do a blog about all of the crazy signs we've seen, there's lots I haven't shown you!)

 

Watching chunks of ice float down the river was GREAT fun! 

  We ended the evening with a walk through a gloworm grotto . . . a short 20 minute riverside walk just off the main street in town through this cool, moss-covering-old-tree-trunk rainforest. 

 THEN we put the kids in their pj's at the camp and brought them back for a second walk at 10pm (after dark) to find all of the gloworms shining!  Dave didn't think the photos would turn out (little dots of light on a black background), so you'll have to fly to NZ and check them out yourself (or google it!).


We now interrupt the flow of scenic photos to bring you the hilarity of boys chasing chickens after breakfast at the campground.  (We were awakened rather early anyhow by the helicopters starting to take their passengers for scenic flights over the glaciers to Mount Cook and Mount Tasman from 7:30am  from right behind our tent, though, so by this point I just really needed my coffee.)

Ah, where were we?  Right, mountains!  We had about a 7 hour drive to Queenstown so we needed to start with a good workout and Lake Matheson is one of the most photographed spots in the country, I think, so we couldn't miss it.  The reflections of Mt. Cook and Mt. Tasman are stunning (even without the sun!)  We had the boys jog / run the track (meant to take 1.5 hours and we finished in only 1 hour), which actually didn't help Dave's back after the first half hour of jarring.

 

 

Back on the road again, we experienced the most DIVERSE scenic one-day drive of my life.   Mountains, coastal vistas, then crossing over the Southern Alps mountain range through the Haast Pass, driving alongside the southern lakes and into Queenstown was incredible.

This is one of my "keep your eyes on the road Dave" and you can look at the photos later shots (I'm also collecting these for a future post).

The weirdest change is going from rainforest and mountains to tussock grass!  Hills covered in pom-poms is what it looks like to me.  Very dry on the east side of the mountains because the majority of the rainfall is on the coast. 

 

It was past 7pm when we arrived at camp to join Kim & Luke (Dave's sister and bro-in-law) who were camping for the week with Luke's family.  Moke Lake is a rather remote DOC campground (no flush toilets) about 20 minutes outside of Queenstown in the hills.  The usual sheep pastures abound, but there were several horse paddocks around the campground and there's a trail riding business here.   Picture perfect rainbow to add to the evening! 

Wait - what's that rolling around in the grass???  Yep, the boys had a good ol' wrestling match to expend their energy after 7 hours in the car.  I'm pretty sure I had given them a soccer ball to play with, but this is what resulted:  squeals and screams and boy fun.  I let them be. 

(PS  Now I need to get this posted so my parents can read it before they leave for T.O. and their big airplane trip to join us - see you soon!!!)

Christchurch - Earthquake City

Well now, time for another blog from Dave!  Back by popular demand, or perhaps because this blog covers our visit to Christchurch, my home city for a decade.  Either way you'll get to see a little more of my and my mates in this one...  First up is my best friend Scotty all the way from when we went to high school together - he's the one playing the trombone in the picture below.  Some of you will remember him from being one of my two best men at my wedding (yep, two's better than one!).  One of the bands he plays with is Oval Office and they were up in Nelson performing at the annual Jazz Fest and were nothing short of awesome!

 

We arrived in Christchurch in the afternoon and after dinner with my best mate Merv (my other best man at my wedding) and his wife Noeline, Merv took us for a bit of a tour around the Red Zone.  This comprises the worst-hit areas from the earthquakes in Sept 2010 and Feb 2011 (see the website http://www.christchurchquakemap.co.nz for a chilling animation of the scale and number of shocks) which are uninhabitable now.  It was surreal to see the change to the landscape from what I had known...the pedestrian bridge below was twisted like licorice when both banks of the river were thrust closer together.

 

After so many earthquakes (over 20,000 since Sept 2010) remarkably few people have left the city of about 450,000 people and it has brought everyone much closer together, with an unusually strong sense of community.  People's creativity has come to light as they try to bring a little lightness to the devastation...below is a "library" consisting of an old fridge stuck on a now-empty corner lot in the city which is use as a book exchange, and it is always kept full.

Beside the "library", someone had made a recent addition of a mini golf hole using rubble (which is everywhere) and some Astroturf.  Perhaps someone had nicked off with the golf ball, because there was a golf ball-sized potato provided for use!  Needless to say, the boys thought this pretty cool, lol.

 In the centre of the city was the cathedral, and what remains can be seen below.  The rest collapsed during the first and second major quakes.  Nearly all of the centre city is fenced off as work crews continue the demolition of the city...entire blocks have already been completely removed.  Plans are still being finalized but essentially the city will be rebuilt from a relatively clean slate, something that normally only happens after a major war...so a lot of research is being undertaken into the most popular cities around the world and what makes them so great.

The CBD has been likened to Beirut in the 80's...and that is about right.  Obviously it was a complete mess at the time of the quakes but now there are so many empty, weed-filled lots where there were once landmarks...  Driving is a bit of a bugger because there was so much movement of the land that once-straight and flat roads are now very lumpy and bumpy.  Apparently the one benefit of this is all the boy-racers and petrol heads left the city LOL.  Everyone else has simply adjusted to driving a bit slower...one of the things you don't really think about when you think about what damage an earthquake does.  On the human side, child psychologists were in high demand as children's fears are hard to allay when the earthquakes and aftershocks just don't stop.

Anyone who knows Renee well, knows she isn't the world's biggest fan of dogs (ha!) so the boys were thrilled to find that my mate Merv had two fox terriers that were up for the challenge of playing with them!  I think the dogs were looking forward to a little rest when we left LOL.

Went out for a spot of mountain biking in the forest next to Merv's house (which has rather large cracks through it, sink holes in the back yard and a small lake out front whenever it rains due to the ground sinking!).  After a 12 year break from mountain biking my endurance turned out to be better than I had feared...thank goodness!  Brought back lots of great memories.

Sometimes when one builds near the edge of a cliff in order to get the best views, it doesn't work out so well.  The houses you see in the picture below are abandoned and the houses you don't see are the ones that fell to the bottom of the cliff to be buried under thousands of tons of rock...

At the beach in Christchurch, the same spot we took Jackson to when he was 18 months old...Xavier pictured here had been in the oven for 5 months at that stage LOL.  It was a popular day for surf lessons with dozens of people giving it a go, which was quite entertaining!  I can laugh because I've been there done that...

So how does one protect the roads around the base of the cliffs from further rock falls?  You take hundreds of shipping containers and make giant walls with them!  And then the local artists stretch giant canvasses across them and paint giant murals to brighten it up!  The new retail section in the Central Business District is also constructed from shipping containers that have been so massively decorated it is a tourist attraction in its own right (but we didn't make it there to shop - yet )...

After a couple of days it was time to drive back to Nelson, but stopped in to see my uncle and aunt (Arthur & Yvonne).  They live on a little hobby farm of 20 hectares and it had been ages since I had seen them so was great to catch up and for them to meet our boys!

Oops, back up a day...Merv had rounded up a few of our old buddies and put on a delicious bbq.  It was great to reminisce as well as find what people are up to more than a decade later!  

My "extended" family below with Merv & Noeline and Scotty, and of course the dogs Jack & Toby...how many pics have the boys with such big smiles!

Back on the road again to Nelson, this time via the inland route over the Southern Alps, through the scenic Lewis Pass.  Below is typical north Canterbury countryside...hills and dry grass.

As there had been a lot of rain the previous days, all the rivers were still in flood and had washed away sections of the highway...I think Renee was trying to snap one of them.  Happily for us, at least one lane was now open at all of the washouts.  Unhappily for my sister and family a few days previous, they were forced to backtrack and do a massive detour (there are not many main roads in NZ outside of the cities) due to the highway being closed.

Stopped at the start to the St. James Walkway...a really nice 4-5 day hike through the mountains that I had done with my family when I was much, much younger LOL.  We settled for a short walk around a little lake there.  Actually, the boys ran it...Jackson running it twice just because he loves running!  This type of area definitely feels like home to me with the mountains and beech forests :-)

Yep, this is the main highway through the mountains...lots and lots of green!

One of the billion or so waterfalls in NZ..only 5m (15ft) high but it is normally a much gentler sight with crystal clear water.  However a flood does make things much more dramatic with raging water, tree trunks and a big whirlpool reminiscent of Niagara...

This time Renee was able to capture a washout...with my side of the highway (left) being somewhere in the river now LOL.

Yep, more hills and mountains...Renee is loving the whole mountain-sea thing :-)

And always birdlife...in this case some more weka came to check us out when we stopped at a lookout spot.  They look a bit like chickens really. 

Time for another family self-portraitLOL

So if anyone knows Grandpa Al (Renee's Dad), they know that he likes the shoes at the door to be neat and will make sure they are always kept that way...turns out that maybe Xavier has the same gene!  After we had unloaded our gear from the van, Xavier disappeared for a few minutes and when I went to find him (it was a little too quiet...) he was very pleased with himself for having straightened up all the shoes lol.  Yeah, we don't have a closet at the front door, but who needs one when you have a Xavier?