A Road Trip; Over the Alps to Queenstown

February 6, 2009

One advantage of planning your trip in little pieces and delaying the booking of bus transportation as long as possible is that sometimes someone will offer you a ride somewhere. Getting a ride and going on a road trip is almost always more fun than a tedious bus trip. Today I was fortunate to get a ride all the way to my next intended destination: Queenstown. Our route would take us 330 km over the Southern Alps of New Zealand. This was going to be great!

My companions for my road trip today were Kevin (age 30 from West Virginia, USA), Kristin and Jen (ages 20 from NYC and San Francisco, USA). We squished all of our stuff into the trunk of Kevin’s rented Mazda Familia Sedan and roared off down New Zealand State Highway 6 south. I’ve been on this particular highway a lot in the past few days. It doesn’t carry a lot of traffic. In fact, most of the highway bridges along the West Coast were one-lane wide. There wasn’t enough traffic to justify bridges a full two lanes wide! There was one place that the one-lane highway bridge also carried a railroad across the river! If there was a train coming then cars had to way at either end of the bridge. Some of the longer bridges had tiny sections partway across. So silly.

As an added inspiration to silliness, I decided to celebrate Waitangi Day along our road trip. Waitangi Day is the anniversary of the day in 1840 when the British signed a treaty with the native Māori people. This document is considered the founding document of the state of New Zealand. I wished many people that day a “Happy Waitangi Day”, but many of them didn’t know what I was talking about. Maybe they didn’t understand me with my crazy Canadian accent.

The scenery was stunning. As we turned away from the coast and ascended into the mountains at the gates of Haast, the mountains got more rugged and the road got more twisty. We briefly stopped here to take some pictures and admire the scenery. I assembled this lovely panoramic photo here (click to enlarge):

Here’s a question I pose to my photographic buddies: this photo probably spans about 200º of view and has these crazy curved distortions (check out the highway bridge). Does that look good or bad?

Anyways, once we were over the mountains, we stopped for a wee picnic lunch in a very windy picnic area. I noshed on an improvised Marmite and cheese sandwich and polished off the last of my Monteith’s Celtic beer. Here’s a photo of my road trip buddies during our picnic that day:

We continued down past beautiful Lakes Wanaka and Hawea before pulling into the town of Wanaka for a break. The town is located at the far southern end of Lake Wanaka. The weather was still windy and chilly and I was astonished to see people attempting to swim in the choppy lake waters. Crazy. Meanwhile, I thought it would be more fun to climb a tree.

As we departed Wanaka I rolled down the car window and continued to shout “HAPPY WAITANGI DAY!” to random people. Most continued to look confused, but one lady actually shouted greetings back. The girls in the back seat of our car said that my random drive-by-shoutings and the perpetually confused locals were probably the highlight of their day. Excellent.

From here the highway ascended high up in the desolate Crown Range of mountains along the highest sealed road in the whole country. After cresting the range it was all downhill to Queenstown, which was, as far as I was concerned, the center of tourism on the South Island of New Zealand. Set along gorgeous Lake Wakatipu with The Remarkables forming a heavenly backdrop, this was a party city and mecca for adventure tourism. The types of crazy bungy jumping you could attempt here were just insane. I wasn’t here for bungy jumping, though!

After agreeing to meet up again later, Kevin dropped us off at our respective backpackers hostels. Mine was at The Hippo, perched on a hill looking out over the town. I quickly sorted through my stuff and repacked it. I was starting another tramp tomorrow morning!

I climbed back down the hill and to the legendary FERGBURGER (the web site is actually rather funny). This is the burger joint that everyone who goes to New Zealand talks about. I had to see what it was all about. I met up with my crew and ordered a fantastic meal. After living off of cheese, bread, Marmite, apples, bananas, cans of soup, and really weak sausage for days, I needed a meal fit for a king. I went a bit crazy and got a “Little Lamby” lamb burger with mint jelly, thick cut fries, wasabi mayo, and a luscious ginger beer. The spread was a bit pricey at NZ$19.50 (CA$13), but SO EXTREMELY GOOD. You have no idea. Even now, I drool when I think of this meal.

After a walk along the waterfront and we stopped for some hokey pokey flavoured ice cream. This crazy flavour is just vanilla ice cream embedded with little frozen bits of honey. I saw a newspaper article describing this flavour as the national ice cream flavour of New Zealand and the most appropriate flavour to choose on the country’s national day. Yummy!

Queenstown was definitely a party city and was filled with bars and night clubs. We headed over to the Buffalo Bar for drinks, shots, and pool. Kevin, Jen, and Kristin decided to go on a crazy pub crawl called “Big Night Out”. I stayed with them until they left the Buffalo Bar, but, sadly, I could not continue with them. It would have been EXTREMELY FUN to continue to drink with them, but there’s no way I could justify it. Tramping was my primary activity in New Zealand. I could go drinking and partying anywhere, but going on these tramps was something I could only do here. Alas, I had to say goodbye to my road trip buddies so I could return to my hostel and sleep.

As you will read next time, this tramp was absolutely amazing. I feel I made the right decision here. Wait until you see the pictures!!

–
Rob Szumlakowski
Toronto, Ontario, Canada