The near-realtime view from our window in the Kaitaki Plus Lounge, as we depart Picton aboard the InterIslander Ferry - which has free broadband wi-fi! Slow but serviceable. It's raining, but we hope it clears enough for us to get good views of the Cook Strait on the three-hour crossing.
We're exploring our third new New World wine region, and what's most striking at this point is what isn't striking about them - they're a hell of a lot more alike than they are different. There was that weirdness of showing up five minutes too early for our appointment at a vineyard in Chile and being kept outside the gates of one vineyard by a guard with a semi-automatic weapon on his hip, but otherwise the similarities overwhelm the differences. There are always mountains nearby (although not always snow-capped). There are always deep blue skies (it hasn't rained on us yet in any of them). The barrels, the stainless steel fermentation tanks, and the bottles are all from the same modern production templates - (the only difference here in En Zed is that there are few if any corks at all - screw tops cover 90-95% of the production - and the steel tanks are all outdoors, not under a roof.) We find ourselves commenting more on how Marlborough is like Sonoma, or Mendoza is like Napa, than about anything unusual about the Southern Hemisphere vineyards vs. those in California.
New Zealand is more prepared than Chile or Argentina to accept drop-ins, even busloads of them, but all three still appear to spend the same amount of money on the front-of-the-house setup as any California winery. Maybe it's the Sideways influence. The well-versed saleswoman at the tasting room for the boutique estate "Bouldevines," across the street from our hotel, implied as much, when she mentioned the movie and how much she loathed it when she first saw it - but how she came to appreciate it after repeat viewings. I think her appreciation was more for the marketing lessons she drew from it than anything else, because you could drop the "Bouldevines" room she was managing onto the grounds any Santa Barbara pinot producer, and Paul Giamatti would look perfectly at home.
There are small differences, of course: in South America we were seeing the vineyards in late summer, and the crush was just beginning by the time we hit Mendoza. Here we're already well into fall, and the harvest is done. The tourist volume has the same "cree-sus" feel, however: we're not the only folks staying out our small hotel, but it's not more than a quarter occupied, and we once again had a dining room to ourselves for dinner last night. Being here midweek when most people are at work or in school also makes a difference at this time of year.
Another small difference: the staff at two of the three places we stopped yesterday - Bouldevines and Alan Scott - were incredibly knowledgeable. Thanks to the general lack of customers, they were also willing to engage us in extended conversation, so we learned a lot more about the region and the wines than we might have at a different time of year. One revelation: oaked sauvignon blanc (or as they say here, "savvy") - something we never see in the States, either from En Zed or anywhere else. Also, we've finally tasted some pinot noirs we like - a varietal from here that we rarely see in the U.S., and one that we've never been big fans of at home, when it comes to California and Oregon producers, at least. Even the Central Otago pinots we've tasted here didn't appeal, but the Marlboroughs we've had in the last couple of days have been much different - more subtle, more balanced.
My first thought was that a touring company of Little Shop of Horrors was playing the local theatre, and the props department was using our hotel lobby for storage. But no, it turned out during our first swing through Christchurch that the Millenium Hotel had a thing for public art - and as the sign below indicates, the outfit you see here, as well the others in the Christchurch album to the right, were part of a display crafted by "Jenny Gillies, Costume and Fabric Artist." And obvious Little Shop of Horrors fan. (LSoH may not have been here, but no worries - Starlight Express is coming soon for a limited run at Christchurch Town Hall - get your tickets now!)
Rental vans and campers are very big here - we've seen them all over the place the past couple weeks, especially on the West Coast and in Fiordland - and we can tell you who all the big brands are because they promote themselves so heavily on the sides of their vehicles (like CruiseAmerica, which you see everywhere in the States). Maui and Britz appear to dominate the bigger camper market, while Jucy and Wicked rely on wilder graphic screening on the vehicles to compete for the younger demographic. Jucy has opted for a lifesize 40s retro cocktail waitress as their symbol, with day-glo green dominating their lettering, while Wicked has gone for the faux graffiti look, complete with oh-so-racy quotes like the one you see above. Unfortunately, the graffiti's just a little too clean and the catchphrases all end up being not quite as clever as the authors clearly think they are. The whole thing is way too affected. Plus I've never understand why somebody wants to drive a smaller vehicle that advertises they're on vacation (the bigger campers are "I'm vacationing" advertisements unto themselves). It only make you a bigger target for the parking lot thieves, doesn't it?
You can't go more than three sentences in any New Zealand travel guide before reading the trope that the Kiwis are "more British than the British." (Of course, you can read the same trope over the years about people and places all over the former Empire, including here and here and here. Even beyond the former Empire.)
In "En Zed," however, I think they beat out all the others for the title, starting with the "Zed" thing, and continuing on through driving on the left side of the road. Then there's the "God Save the Queen" on ANZAC Day. And the way the woman at the cash register in a pharmacy or a supermarket adds a weirdly formal if clipped and staccato bit of politeness to every part of the transaction: when she gives you the total ("Thirty dollars and sixty cents thank you"); when when she repeats back at you the total you've handed her ("Forty dollars, thank you"), and finally when she tells you how much change she's handing back ("Nine forty, thank you."). And the ubiquity of free tea (and coffee), such that every tour boat we've been on has proudly and repeatedly notified us that it's on offer, to the point that you feel guilty if you don't go have a cup, and there's such a slavish devotion to the belief in tea time itself in every hotel and motel that the handover of a free bottle of milk for the guest's tea is a standard part of the registration process ("Do you prefer whole or skim?") Then there's the fact that New Zealand took 16 years to even ratify the Statute of Westminster which granted their Parliament equality with the UK's (One MP in the 30s - from the New Zealand National Party, no less - said he'd rather be a "British subject" than a "national of the British Commonwealth.")
But the real clincher in the "more British than the British" competition for me is the stoats.
(from Wikipedia)
No other former colony trying to hold their upper lip stiffer than the Queen's on Coronation Day can claim to have a stoat and weasel and ferret infestation, one that rivals that of Toad Hall, like the Kiwis can. Drive around the national parks a little bit and you'd think you'd stepped straight into the pages of The Wind in the Willows: there are stoat warning signs everywhere. And why are they here? Because all those colonists trying to make the place more like home had imported British rabbits. Which created a rabbit problem, which the colonists decided required the importation of British rabbit predators. Thus, stoats. Unfortunately, the stoats did not do such a bang up job on the rabbits, but developed an enormous appetite for the eggs and hatchlings of the native flightless birds, including the kiwi itself, which had had no mammalian predators before the Europeans arrived. Now multiple species of kiwis are in danger of extinction thanks to status envy.
Campbell's by the Lake, Te Anau, where we've been three different times in the past week. This morning it's trees, water, clouds, and in the distance, snow-capped peaks:
Q: When is a fiord called a sound?
A: When an Englishman names it.
- apocryphal New Zealand riddle
Two days in and around Fiordland National Park quickly turned into three, then four, then five for us, as we decided that exploring Milford Sound wasn't enough, that we also had to see Doubtful Sound. And that Doubtful Sound couldn't be seen in a day, that it would be better to book a trip on the overnight boat that had the vast fiord to itself in the late afternoon and early morning hours. We finished it all off today with a visit to the glow worms cave on Lake Te Anau. (This is the point of not being on any real schedule - we can do these things when we want to.)
Even the potted natural histories of the region we heard repeated ad infinitum by the only vaguely qualified commercial "naturalists" we encountered didn't deter us from booking the extra night or three. Fiordland is a world unto itself - a lightly populated rainforest with similarities to the coast redwood forests of the Pacific Northwest, which cooperated with our trip by dusting its peaks with the powdered sugar of early season snowfall,
while simultaneously holding off the precipitation for most of the time we were on the fiords.
We alternated nights between Te Anau, the gateway town to the park, and locations next to or on the water - which is part of why you haven't seen much in the way of posting here the last several days. The Milford Lodge on Milford Sound, where we stayed Sunday before grabbing an early tour boat on Monday, didn't have Internet access, and of course neither did the Navigator, the boat we slept aboard Tuesday night on Doubtful Sound. So the Campbell Lodge, where we arrived Saturday and returned to Monday and again tonight in between our trips to Milford and Doubtful has been a lifesaver with its free wifi. (What hasn't been a lifesaver is the iPhoto 8.0.2 on my new MacBook Pro which is a buggy disaster that has terminally slowed my photo uploads and backups with its crashes.)
What you see above are two views of Doubtful Sound: the first is your initial introduction to the fiord, when the shuttle bus you have to ride to reach it clears the pass; the second is just your typical view down one of its arms when you're on the water. I haven't even touched on the waterfalls,
or the red beeches that are actually evergreens and the chief reminder in these forests of the redwoods,
or the dolphins, or the amazing blue of the freshwater streams here
or the tourist-tortured keas
More when I finish my photo backups.
A confession: I don't think the Lord of the Rings films are all that great. But if Peter Jackson does one thing well, it's choose locations.
Lord of the Rings touring has become all the rage here since the trilogy hit big, and Queenstown, our current stop, is ground zero for those tours. It's the perfect movie industry town, actually - small resort location loaded with bars and restaurants targeted at the under-30 set, home to an annual film festival, and within close driving and flying range of dozens upon dozens of staggeringly beautiful areas for exterior location shooting. Like the one above, which looks down on the valley between Arrowtown and Queenstown.
All of them seem to fit perfectly with the the physical descriptions of the landscape in the books, or as my handy Lord of the Rings Location Guidebook (yes, I broke down and bought it) quotes Sean "Samwise" Astin saying, "It was like Tolkien had walked across New Zealand."
The one above is the Kawarau River Gorge, which is a stand-in for the River Anduin in the films; the rest of these aren't tied to any particular scene but all seem to evoke the movie sets for me. It's both like and unlike landscapes we're familiar with in other parts of the world - parts of it feel a lot like California or Italy to me, perhaps because all of these spots share similar volcanic and seismic activity - but it's completely unique in its own right, and more exotic to a traveller as a result:
"Cats and dogs" is a drizzle compared to the lions and tigers and bears downpours we saw the past couple of days while visiting NZ glacier country. "I haven't seen it rain like this in 20 years!," a bartender in Franz Josef said apologetically while he pulled a pint of the local Speight's Ale for us when we stopped in for lunch. This in a town which gets more than 16 feet of rain per year. Our cheerful hotel manager in the village informed us shortly after we arrived on Monday that flooding had close the highway just a few miles to the south - our intended route. And the next day, when we tried to walk up to one of the lookouts over Franz Josef Glacier, we were pelted by a cloudburst so heavy that despite a lack of strong wind you could barely keep an umbrella upright in it, and the glacier itself was nearly invisible through the mist.
But when we returned to the carpark after this first attempt, I saw a patch of blue sky opening over the mountains just to the east. "Let's give it a few minutes," I said, and within 15 we lucked out and the skies opened up. It never got truly clear, but the fog lifted and the clouds burned off enough that we were able to walk back up the path and get the view you see posted up top. What's most impressive about these NZ glaciers is that you don't have to climb up into a high mountain valley or pack on the thermal underwear to see them: we were at sea level here, or close enough, in a temperate zone where we only needed a long-sleeve shirt and a rain shell to be comfortable. It gets cold here later in the winter, but never truly arctic (or should I say, antarctic), at least not in town.
The riverbed below the glacier is littered with ice chunks:
Some of which looked like they might have once been banquet table ice sculpture centerpieces:
As you can see from the long view shots of a couple of them dropping down onto the glacier itself, the Southern Alps in glacier country are dominated as much by waterfalls as by the ice, and the falls were all in full flow thanks to the rain. The surrounding rain forest reminded me a lot of the Pacific Northwest, although with a greater mix of hardwoods than pines, and no redwoods of course. Also, these incredible prehistoric tree ferns (and when I say prehistoric, I mean prehistoric: I think thanks to Google that this species is from the Dicksoniaceae genera, which dates back to the early Jurassic period):
The clouds also stayed away long enough for us to learn when we got back to our hotel that we even had a view of the glacier over the treetops from our room:
Some of the trails here remained closed due to flood concerns, and the hikes and helicopter tours that get you to points where you can actually walk on the ice were cancelled, so we missed out on that opportunity. Just south of Franz Josef yesterday we also stopped at the Fox Glacier, where unlike at Franz Josef you can usually drive up and park very close to the face of it, but that road was also closed due to flooding, so we only got a long-distance look at it on a similary misty if not quite so rainy morning.
The road beyond had been re-opened, so we were able to drive down the coast and then over the mountains to Queenstown last night. We finally have some decent Internet access, so I'm hoping in the next couple of days to get caught up on my posting and my photo uploads from the past week.
It was the pre-dawn darkness, and a military band was playing below our hotel window. That was how we woke up Saturday to ANZAC Day, the most solemn of holidays in both Australia and New Zealand. Our hotel, the Millennium, overlooks Cathedral Square in Christchurch, and the band was leading 100s of marching veterans and units of the New Zealand armed services into the square for a ceremony that began promptly at dawn. Throughout the day Friday many if not most of the people we saw walking about town had had red paper poppies pinned to their shirts and jackets, and now they were also in the square - 10,000 of them, according to the local Sunday paper.
ANZAC Day started as a way to remember those who died in World War I at Gallipoli, and it still serves that purpose, but it now also honors the sacrifices of veterans from every conflict the two countries have been involved in since. It's a bit like Memorial Day in the States but more somber: there were no clowns or Little League teams or fire engines in the parade. Instead there was a choir singing hymns, prayers, and a trumpeter playing a dirge-like solo (not "Taps," but in the same vein), and numerous wreaths laid at the war memorial next to the Anglican cathedral. The many veterans who were there in civilian dress had their campaign ribbons and medals pinned to their chests.
It wasn't only the veterans, either - many people in the crowd were obviously wearing honors originally earned by a father, grandfather, great-, or even great-great-grandfather going back to the Great War.
There's also a deeper meaning to the day for the citizens of both Australia and New Zealand that makes it somewhat like our Independence Day, since the disaster of Gallipoli and the fallout from it became a turning point for both nations, when they "grew up" and began to recognize that they had identities apart from Britain (even as the ANZAC services still conclude with "God Save the Queen"). Even the TV anchors wear poppies while reading the news, and one of the local papers had a big feature about how Gallipoli has become a kind of Mecca for folks from Down Under, as thousands trek to Turkey each year so they can be at the infamous battle site itself at dawn on ANZAC Day.
I'll post more pictures when I have a better Net connection. Right now we're in Greymouth on the South Island west coast, where our motel connection is slow but we're "only" paying an hourly rate. Fortunately, it doesn't also have additional data charges on top of that.
