I know this post is incredibly late in coming. It’s been almost 2 months since I left New Zealand and I am just now getting around to writing about it. I apologize again that my writing hasn’t been as prolific this year as last year. I will try to remedy that in my last 3.5 months in China.
Traveling with my coworker and fellow HU alumnus, Hillary Pulse, we met my parents in New Zealand for a two week vacation down under. At the bottom of the world can still be found a piece of this Earth left in the original splendor of creation. Barely touched by the hand of man. It’s a land fit for the gods. It’s fairyland. It’s Middle Earth. It’s like nothing else on this planet. It’s a slice of heaven. There are less than 5 million people living in New Zealand and most of them live near Auckland. The South Island has vast stretches of empty ground. We drove by beautiful clear blue lakes surrounded by mountains with not one lake house, not one trailer, not even so much as a dock for your boat. The sky is the deepest, purest blue, you just want to fall into it. The wide and narrow valleys are bordered by sky scraping mountains and the winding rivers hug the feet of the mountains. Every moment is a new picturesque scene that belongs on a postcard. The longer I spent there the more I understood why LOTR was filmed there. We didn’t have enough time in that wonderful land. We were merely brushing our fingertips along the country and not really taking it in.
The culture although definitely Western is very different from American culture. Nothing opens before 8 or 9 am and everything closes at 6 which is when everyone goes out for a drink after work. The people are super casual. We didn’t even have our IDs checked when we boarded a domestic flight from one city to another, let alone go through any sort of security screening. The people we passed on the street reminded me of hippies and hipsters. They are very environmentally minded and very outdoor oriented. It was so refreshing to see so many people reading books. No one reads in China.
I can’t write about every day. This post would become incredibly long and tedious. However, I will give you some of the highlights.
1. Transportation. Shout out to Dad who did an excellent job driving on the left side of the road! Thanks to his deft driving skills, we were able to rent cars and travel New Zealand at our leisure. But we didn’t leave all the transportation in his hands. We took every form of transportation possible while in the country. I have already mentioned domestic flights of which we took 2. We also travelled by ferry boat to cross between the two islands, took a coach bus on a tour, took several shuttles, and took a local bus as well to get us to an airport. I think the only type of transportation we didn’t take was taxis but some of our shuttles were similar to taxis. The best part about the airports was that they were so tiny! We boarded and exited the plane, outside and walked on the runway back to the airport. I loved that! I’ve always wanted to do that because you see it in the movies all the time.
2. Lord of the Rings. Part of my reason for going to New Zealand was to see the land where the famous trilogy was made. Although we did very few actual LOTR related things in New Zealand. Our two big LOTR days was one day in Wellington and our tour of the Hobbition movie set. Wellington is the capital city of New Zealand and it is also Peter Jackson’s headquarters so many parts of LOTR were filmed in the area. We booked a tour with a guide who showed us different locations around town. We saw the rock quarry where they made the sets of Helm’s Deep and Minas Tirith. We saw the forest where they filmed parts of Rivendell. We also walked through the woods outside the shire and saw locations for several different shots in that sequence. We also got to see the park where they film Sauraman’s tower. In Hobbition we got to walk all over the set which is in the middle of a huge sheep farm. Hobbiton is the only set from LOTR that is still standing, every other set had to be taken down and the location returned to it’s original state. The Hobbition set was amazing! But it was also a huge tourist trap. Everyone and their mother was visiting and the crowds took away the magic of Middle Earth but it was still a lot of fun to take pictures with hobbit holes, see Bag End, enjoy a drink at the Green Dragon and just immerse yourself in all the details of that set. We saw parts of the set that didn’t even make it into the movies.
3. The Southern Alps. I think all four of us would agree that seeing the mountains of the Southern Alps was probably the best part of the whole trip. We were continually amazed by the landscapes in this part of the country. It wasn’t just the mountains that were jaw dropping and breathtaking it was the sheer lack of civilization. The land was primal, left alone since the dawn of time. We all loved the clear blue lakes where no lake house, dock, or boat had touched. However, my favorite part of the Alps was seeing the yellow grass valleys. Yellow grass is very typical in the South Island and I loved how it contrasted with the mountains. I wish we had been able to come in New Zealand’s fall because then more of the mountains would have been capped with snow. One day we took a coach bus out to Milford Sound which was an area of valley’s scooped out by glaciers and now filled with water. It looked like a lake with banks of mountains. On another day, we hiked a trail up to a receding glacier. We were unable to actually touch it because that part of the valley was too dangerous. On another day, we took a train whose track twisted through the mountains. On our first day in New Zealand, we chilled in Queenstown, where we were staying and just took in the beauty of this small tourist village which nestled against a lake surround by mountains. I think all of us were quite sad to leave the South Island and I know I wish I had scheduled a few more days to wander around the Southern Alps.
4. Whale Watching. After being cheated out of my chance to see a whale in New England in the summer of 2014, I was rewarded by our day with the Kaikoura whale watching company. We saw two sperm whales while on our tour. The second one was apparently a very famous sperm what who has been in many documentaries. We caught him the moment he surfaced and he stayed floating at the top of the water for at least 10 minutes! Plenty of time to take a thousand pictures and just enjoy the sight of him. We weren’t able to see his body underneath the water, we were only able to see the tip of his head and then his tail when he dived. After we saw the two sperm whales we found two pods of dolphins which swam around our boat for a long time. These dolphins swam close enough to us that we could see them through the water beneath us. The last bit of marine wildlife we saw was a small group of very rare dolphins called Hector’s dolphins that are small mammals in the ocean. They did not swim close to the boat, and they did not like to float near the surface either, but we did see him occasionally as they swam around in the swallow water. This was a bucket list day for me. I had always wanted to see a whale (not just a killer whale at Sea World) and I finally got my chance.
5. Maori culture. We didn’t spend a lot of time diving into the native culture of New Zealand but we did visit a museum which included a lot of their history and we visited a geothermal park owned and run by a Maori tribe. The Maori people are Polynesian and they immigrated to New Zealand in the last 2,000 years if I remember correctly. Before that, there were no people living in New Zealand. Like many other colonial stories, the native people were betrayed, oppressed, and reduced by their white invaders. But unlike many other countries, such as the United States, the Maori people are seeing a revival and renaissance of their population and culture. Their numbers are growing, their language is being taught and spoken and the white majority have come to respect and appreciate the Maori as a fundamental part of the national heritage and contemporary culture. Evidence of this was all over New Zealand. As an American coming from a culture who has totally and with very little apology repressed the indigenous people of our continent and who continues to ignore them was humbled by this cultural revival of the Maori people. Now granted there are a lot of different factors. It’s not a simple 1:1 scenario but we could still stand to learn something from their example.
Obviously, there is so much more that I could write about, but you should probably just look through my photos on Facebook, that would be much easier. These 5 items I have listed above are the 5 things that are really going to stick with me about our vacation in New Zealand.
The Undiscovered Country 