Goodbye Trip
Trip Start
Jun 03, 2010
1
63
129
Trip End
Feb 04, 2012
Christchurch, South Island, New Zealand
Sunday, June 12, 2011
"More eventful" is maybe not the right description, but I certainly covered a good number of kilometers, around 1800 actually (rough guess), plus the trip down to Wanaka.
Mark, Jenny, and I had decided to rent a campervan to make our way up to Auckland to see Jenny off. When I found out I got my new job, it turned into a goodbye trip for us all. At some point, I remembered the campervan relocation idea, and we found one for just $5 per day plus petrol. The only catch was that we'd have to pick up in Christchurch several hours away. After extensive calculations and weighing of pros and cons, we decided to go for it.
So our trip started off with Jenny and I heading out on our bikes in the dark at 6:24 am to get out to the main road to hitchhike to Christchurch. The chances of anyone seeing us in the dark was slim, so I pulled out my headlamp and set it to red light. We pulled out our homemade date scones with quince jam, but were picked up before we got more than a dew bites in. We always seem to get picked up as soon as we are engaged in some activity, leaving us running to cars with handfulls of sunscreen, half-eaten snacks, and shed clothing dragging behind us. We were lucky to be picked up by the second car to pass after waiting only five minutes, and the driver, Peter, said my light definitely helped.
Peter could take us as far as Kaikoura, where he was headed to talk to the local Maoris about fish conservation. He was some sort of ecologist or something, and it was really interesting to listen to everything he knew about New Zealand's ecology. We even learned how to save a beached whale. It goes something like this:
First, separate the whales, since they often end up laying on top of each other. You also have to orient them upright, then cover them with a sheet so that they don't get sunburned. Gather some of the local children, and have them dig around the whales' flippers, and then fill the holes with water, since the flippers are how whales regulate their temperature. Once the tide comes in, get four people per whale to push the whales back into the sea. Once the whales are in the water, you have to rock them back and forth to reestablish their equilibrium (similar to how people who have been on boats for a while get back on land and feel like they're still moving). When the whales are in deep enough water, boats come in behind them and herd them out to sea. 10 km off shore is usually a sufficient distance to keep them from coming back and getting beached again. It is also important that all the whales get put back to sea at the same time, because if even one is left behind, the others will come back to help and get beaches again. A whale can only survive so many beachings. With sometimes nearly 300 whales beached at once, you can imagine the magnitude of this task.
That whale story will probably be longer than the story for the whole rest of my trip, but it made an impression on me, so I'm sharing.
We stopped to pick up one of Peter's colleagues and noticed that the mountains that were bare a few days ago when we'd been through now had snow on them. We were dropped off at the same spot in Kaikoura where we'd hitched just a few days earlier. After not too long, we crammed into a smallish truck with three largish guys and made it the rest of the way to Christchurch. They were nice enough to drive us right to the campervan rental office.
It took about an hour to get through paperwork and into our four-berth Ford Explorer campervan. It had a shower, toilet, stove, sink, two double beds, and much more space for our luggage than the two adult/one child van we'd been planning on renting would have had. We grabbed a quick fish n chips lunch (couldn't compare to my Milton St), then drove the five and a half hours home over the Lewis pass. Jenny was fine driving, but it took me a while to get comfortable, especially winding through the mountains when it started raining. The joke of the trip became "we're not insured for that," since our insurance didn't cover any of the things that were actually likely to happen, like windscreen or undercarriage damage, or rolling the vehicle on tight turns, or any damage from driving on unsealed roads (fairly common on NZ).
We spent the night at home in Nelson, then packed the van with everything we owned, picked up Mark (who had cooked us sausages and bacon for breakfast), then drove the two hours to Picton to catch the ferry to the North Island. Our trip had officially begun!
