Retrospective

The long-intended blog, now set up. We've been traveling about 7 weeks already. To start from the beginning or just get going with the present? Maybe I'll do both in parallel...

I'm sitting in our room in Queenstown, waiting to fold laundry and then go get some dinner. We flew in this morning from Christchurch. Christchurch was interesting. Our first couple hours back there (after a week in the north of the South Island - more on that later) were spent hunting down a place to stay. We learned that most of the hotel capacity of the city was destroyed in the earthquakes last year or subsequently demolished to be rebuilt with insurance money. What capacity is left has been strained by locals who have finally got insurance approval to level and rebuild their homes and are living in motels in the meantime. In addition, we happened to pick the weekend of a major agricultural show to visit the city. So after three failed attempts on the NW side of town, we headed to a B&B south of downtown to catch the second to last room available for under $200.

The "red zone", which consists of a number of blocks in the center of Christchruch, is still closed although they started running bus tours through last week - a reportedly sobering excursion which we might check out on our return to the city. Our GPS, which has been a great tool since we picked it up in Brisbane, tried desperately to get us to crash through the barriers but we didn't take the drive-through-an-urban-demolition-site-insurance when we picked up the rental car so instead made our way around the edges. We've since learned that much of the splendour and interesting stuff to do has not yet recovered and probably won't for some time.

Queenstown is a former gold-rush centre tucked in between the beautiful Lake Wakatipu and the surrounding mountains. It has a reputation for being the adrenaline capital of the country (world?), being the birthplace of bungy jumping and a favoured venue for skydiving, jetboating and mountain bike downhill among other junky sports. It's surprisingly nice, especially considering what we expected.

Today was a planning day. We're now set for a two day hike on the Routeburn Track with a night at a backcountry hut. The Routeburn is one of the Great Walks of NZ, usually taking 3-4 days. Because of snow and avalanche danger on day 2 (recall that it's mid-spring here), a short helicopter trip is required if you want to do the whole thing (helicopter? really?) so we're only going in to the first hut and then back out the same way (probably what we would have done anyway given out time constraints). After that, we're headed to Lake Te Anau and Milford Sound for more hiking and a possible sea kayak trip around the Sound if the weather is ok.