Sheep!

I LOVE New Zealand. Two ports and the Fjordlands down, and I am more than ready to leave everything and move here. To say I like New Zealand more than Australia would be unfair since I have only seen the big cities of Australia, but what I’ve seen of New Zealand is far closer to my taste. The towns are quaint, the scenery is quite lovely, and everything is so much simpler. Each town is working hard to increase it’s tourism and bring more people in, and I’m pretty sure they’re not using MBAs in order to accomplish that. Or working as hard as possible to get a plethora of business experience in order to get to the top. I digress.

The Fiordlands were a unique experience. I learned a lot about New Zealand’s history while we sailed through the Fiordlands since that’s the first thing that Captain Cook saw and documented when he discovered New Zealand in the 1770’s. It finally clicked for me that Australia and New Zealand are far younger countries than even the USA. This was surprising since I have grown accustomed to being one of the youngest countries in the world, and for some reason I had it in my head that Australia had been discovered long before America had. I was of course wrong. The Fiordlands are water straits that have been cut by glaciers, and they are all over the north-western side of the south island. We had a local forest ranger on board that told us their history as we sailed through many of them. It was quite lovely. Captain Cook had a bit of fun naming the hundreds of islands along the waterway… I’m pretty sure he ran out of names quickly and just started naming them whatever word came to mind first.

Dunedin (pronounced Dune-eedin) was the first port we’ve stopped at. We booked a tour with a local company apart from the cruise line since the cruise is overpriced for anything additional once you’re aboard, and there are always local tours at a fraction of the cost, which are easy to find now that the internet has made the world so much smaller. We choose a wildlife tour so that we would be able to see most of the New Zealand-specific animals. We were chosen to go through customs (2% of the passengers, and somehow we were chosen!), which worked out nicely because we ended up being one of the first off the ship. We found our tour guide and discovered we were the only two booked for the tour- a private tour! Apparently they had 27 people the day before, so we lucked out that no one else had booked with them from our cruise. I thank all the old people on the ship who could not handle the walking. Although there wasn’t a whole lot of walking for the tour, New Zealand does appear to be made up purely of hills, so if you are walking, it’s either at a 45 degree angle up or down at all times, which wears on you quickly. Dunedin has the steepest road in the world according to Guinness World Records; however, I’m pretty sure almost every road we traveled on was just as steep as the steepest. Beat that San Francisco.

We traveled around the countryside, taking in the thousands of sheep in all of the pastures surrounding the town, and went to Tiger Peninsula, where the only Royal Albatross colony is located in New Zealand (the only other place in the world is a tiny island a thousand miles off the coast). They have a wingspan of 3 meters (I love you, metric system!), and we were fortunate enough to be there right after some of the hatchlings had been born, which we got to see. We also had the opportunity to go to a private beach owned by the owner of the tour company, which had a view of a fur seal breeding ground where we saw pups running around playing with their moms, as well as massive sea lions that we stood 5 feet from since they don’t have any fear of humans, yellow-eyed penguins and their young, blue penguins (the smallest penguin in the world), and more sheep. We went four-wheeling through the pastures in a small van, and all I could keep thinking was that if those brakes went out, we were at a 45 degree angle right down to the cliffs over the water. During the off-roading adventure, my dad and our tour guide discovered they both shared an interest in beer snobbery. Our guide brews his own beer, and he knew all of the microbreweries in town, so upon completing our tour early since it was just the three of us, we went over to one of the microbreweries, tried all of their beers, got the t-shirt, and then went on to a local pub. I’m pretty sure this has been the highlight to my dad’s trip thus far.

Today we went to Christchurch/Lyttelton. We had no tours scheduled for the day, so we took the shuttle into town and walked around. There were no sheep there. New Zealand has heavy European influences all through it, so it looks and feels like many of the small towns you’d find in Europe. We found another microbrewery to make my dad’s day, then walked through the botanic gardens, through a couple local markets, and watched as people punted through the park (similar to taking a gondola along the river flowing through the city). Lyttelton was a tiny town along the water that is trying very hard to bring tourists to it… however, it was scarcer than even Midland or Golden’s downtowns, so our walkthrough there did not last long to say the least. They did however, have a time ball- it’s a tower on a building with a ball similar to the ball setup for new years in Times Square… at 1 o clock every day, the ball is dropped. It was how in the old days people could set their clocks based on Greenwich time to ensure they were all set to the correct time. That would be about all that you can find in Lyttelton.

Food. Oh the food. Let me tell you about some of my meals. Today was an international dinner, so I had a Mediterranean salad with a duck appetizer followed by lamb with mint jelly and a chocolate passion fruit genache for dessert. I have found a new love in passion fruit… I’m not sure if I’ve ever had it before, but it’s a new favorite fruit. I’ve had passion fruit yogurt for breakfast every morning, yum! And kiwis, fresh kiwis! New Zealanders call themselves kiwis because of the native kiwi fruit grown here, as well as the kiwi bird, a national symbol of New Zealand. Yesterday was the Thai dinner, satay and panang curry. I had a rabbit appetizer a couple of days ago; rabbit is dry, I don’t recommend it. Lamb is amazing. Yesterday for lunch they brought us a takeaway. Here, fast food is called takeaways. We had a turkey/brie/cranberry sandwich with an apricot/poppy seed muffin and fresh New Zealand cherries. Drool. I just got back from dinner and am so stuffed I’m going to explode, and I’m still drooling.

Tomorrow, we will be in Wellington, where we have a city and Middle Earth tour. For now, I’m going to take my book and sit out on our balcony and watch the moon dancing on the waves. And dream of never having to go back to any other commitments. Cheers!