Our last weekend in New Zealand was amazing. We left Wellington on Thursday (February 11) afternoon and flew into Christchurch, a town on the south island. The plane ride was great, and lasted all of half an hour. We leveled out for maybe two minutes before beginning out descent into Christchurch. Crazy!
Our primary mode of transportation for the weekend was a van, but since we had 13 people we also booked a car so that everyone would have a little bit of breathing room, and room for bags. Our poor van was interesting. We weren’t entirely sure if it would survive the weekend, but the van, and all of its passengers, including the moss growing in the windows, made it safely back to Christchurch on Monday, so it worked out nicely. That’s right, we didn’t bother going back to Wellington until Monday, because we get one free absence per class and it seemed like the perfect time to get some extra travel time in before leaving the country. Our hostel that night was huge, and we were in a room with 38 people, sectioned off into groups of 4. My room (which was 3 walls and a curtain) had 3 of the girls from our group and one random guy who we never met because he came in after we went to sleep and wasn’t awake when we left the next morning. It’s fun meeting random people in hostels. We ran into a guy from Alabama in the hostel. He recognized the GA Tech clothes most of us were wearing and introduced himself. Small world :)
We spent Friday morning exploring Christchurch, which turned out to be a beautiful city. We walked along the river, where we saw people in gondolas. I wanted to ride, but we were on a tight schedule. We ended up at the Botanical Gardens, which were beautiful. I took lots of pictures of bees on flowers. Biology has ruined me. Anyway, we left Christchurch early that afternoon and headed towards the glaciers, stopping along the way to admire the beauty of New Zealand one last time. We stopped at Arthur’s Pass, where we met some very friendly keas. Keas are parrots, and they’re notorious for getting into everything and tearing up the rubber around car windows. These keas were definitely used to people being around and feeding them. They would pose for a picture, then approach you expecting some food. It was kind of sad, since they are learning to depend on humans for food, but it made for some great photo ops. We made sure to close our car doors and windows before chasing them around with cameras.
Kea on the car. The doors were shut soon after.
Kea on the van :)
At some point during the day, we climbed a really pretty waterfall. I managed to hit my knee on a rock, and I still have a little bit of a bruise 3.5 weeks later. It was awesome though.
Some of our group took the car to a place called Pancake Rocks, which was apparently beautiful. The rest of us were already tired and were not willing to take an extra few hours to get to the hostel, so we opted to take the van and continue towards Franz Josef, a town near the glaciers. We stopped at a few lookouts along the way and took some amazing pictures.
The hostel was nice, although I can’t remember too many details about it. The next day was foggy and rainy, and our glacier walk was canceled. This was especially discouraging because some of our group had opted to do ice climbing (much more dangerous, I would say) at a different glacier very close by and their tour had not been canceled. So we decided to crash their party and go see the glaciers from as close as we could get. Turns out, you don’t really need to be on a tour to get a really good view of the glaciers, and when it’s that cold, you don’t mind not standing on the actual ice. After seeing the glaciers, we headed towards our next hostel, stopping at several points along the way for more pictures. We stopped in Queenstown for dinner at a place called Fergburger, which is listed in every guidebook we have and is relatively cheap. It was amazingly delicious, and we actually ended up going back on our return trip a few days later. I honestly can’t remember too many of the details from the rest of that day, but I remember it being a lot of fun.
Once again, we crashed fairly soon after arriving at the hostel. Sunday started much earlier than we had anticipated, with a bus showing up to take us to another bus to take us to Milford Sound. Crazy morning. The bus to Milford Sound was great. Our driver told us things about New Zealand along the way, and although we had heard most of the things in biology class (for the last 5 weeks) it was nice to see some of the things firsthand, and to hear a Kiwi’s take on everything. It rained most of the day, and it was cold, but we couldn’t have cared less. We took a cruise, and on the way out we had dolphins following along beside the boat. We even saw a baby dolphin! Through the mist we could see cliffs and waterfalls and caves and seals, all of which were beautiful despite the low visibility. We went really close to one waterfall and wound up in the mist, where some of our group got completely soaked. I stood behind a wall so that only my face and my rain jacket would get wet. It was effective, and fun.
After our cruise and the bus ride back to the hostel, we headed back towards Christchurch. We were staying in a hostel about halfway between our last hostel and Christchurch so that we could get to the airport without having to drive for hours on end the next morning. We got to the hostel fairly late, but we ended up staying up for hours anyway. The hostel was a collection of buildings in a field in the middle of nowhere, and we filled the entire thing. It was very cold, but the clouds had cleared so we decided to do a little star-gazing before bed. We took our comforters out into the field so we wouldn’t freeze, and we watched shooting stars until well after midnight. It was the perfect ending to the perfect weekend on the south island.
Monday morning came way too quickly. We left the hostel before daylight, since some of our group had to catch an earlier flight to make it to the class they had missed on Thursday. We got to Christchurch around noon, returned the car, and began exploring some more. We went to an art gallery for a little while, had lunch, and began preparing for our flight back to Wellington. We were very sad to see the weekend, and this half of the program, end, but we definitely made the most of our short time in NZ.
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