We’re wrapping up our month-plus in New Zealand by spending our last full day here online (two computers at once!) at a computer lab in Christchurch. This is all well and good, except for the fact that outside these dreary lab walls, Christchurch is experiencing its sunniest, warmest day of the summer. If we weren’t subject to the NO COMPLAINING EVER rule, I might whine a little about this, but instead I will go about blogging and emailing with a smile on my face. :) (—-> See, that’s me smiling!)
Because we’re really trying to get the blog up to date before we leave NZ, we’ll probably keep the next few entries short and sweet and let the photos we’ve taken (or at least, the small proportion of them that we upload) do most of the talking. Check out our photos from Makarora and Queenstown.
;)
Ricky on our last night in QueenstownAfter leaving Abel Tasman, we rejoined the Stray bus and met our new driver, Ricky. We didn’t know it then, but we would end up riding around the entire south island with Ricky for almost two weeks. Ricky’s style is very different from Mambo’s: whereas Mambo is all about hippie chilling and groovy group fun, Ricky is a smart-ass who, after driving a Stray bus for 3 years, isn’t particularly interested in becoming best friends with every one of his passengers. He is, however, really good about keeping us on schedule… I can’t count the number of times the bus started rolling away from a toilet stop or hostel pick-up, with Ricky casually asking, “Are we all here?” as he continued to drive away while a panicked Stray rider chased down the bus, flailing her arms and pleading for him to stop. I don’t think we ever actually left anyone behind, but Ricky’s method of practicing what he preached — (“The bus rolls at 9am, and if you don’t care to be on it then, feel free to join the bus driven by my lovely colleague tomorrow”) — meant that we actually got to most places EARLY. Given the ubiquitous hangovers and general youthful stupidity of our fellow Stray passengers (sorry, Amanda! :), these early arrivals struck us as miracles on par with Bernadette’s vision at Lourdes (sorry, Sarah! :). In the end, we ended up really liking Ricky for a lot of reasons — once we realized his occasionally brusque exterior was not to be taken personally and we started talking to him more, he turned out be a really good guy.
We worked our way down the mountainous west coast with Ricky, stopping for a very surreal night in Barrytown (or “Baz Vegas” as its come to be known among the Stray crowd.) That was our first (and thankfully, last) night in a tiny 6-bed bunk dorm. Ma and Pops Lustin hit the hay early that night, but our roommates opted to enjoy Baz Vegas’s more exciting night culture, which culminated with at least two of them barfing in the bushes outside of our room. (International travel underbelly, I think we’ve found you!)
After Barrytown, we continued driving along the coast for a bit before heading inland into the stunning Mt. Aspiriring Nat’l Park, where we spent a night at a wilderness lodge in a little town called Makarora. In serious need of a break from our Stray companions, Dustin and I opted out of the group jet-boating excursion that afternoon and did a lovely, if insanely steep, mountain walk in the woods. The next day we were off to Queenstown, just in time for Dustin to come down with a cold. It ended up being a pretty mild one, and fortunately it hit while we were in one place for a couple of nights free of hostel craziness and bus shenanigans. Our amazing luck with the weather continued in Queenstown (the last time I was there in February, it SNOWED!), and we really enjoyed chilling out there for a few days before heading out on our tour of the “deep south.” More on that to come…
;)
The TSS Earnslaw heads out on Lake Wakitipu in Queenstown