the sky resembles a backlit canapé

As you head towards Lake Tekapo you pass a sign that proclaims it to be a "Scientific Reserve".  Or maybe it was "Scenic Reserve"?  That would probably make more sense.  In any case, it summoned up images in my mind of bespectacled men in white coats roaming the planes, solving complex differential equations and growing ears on the backs of small mammals.

Turns out that it just means they have a big field and an observatory.  We've seen fields before, so we went to check out the observatory and watch the skis.  The night sky was obligingly clear, allowing us to see clouds of stars instead of actual clouds; as well as Jupiter and four of its moons and some other twinkly crap.

The next day we stopped in to visit one of the chaps from work.  He and his family own a wee holiday home in Twizel, and they were kind enough to fill us with lunch and then take us out for a blat around Lake Ruataniwha on their boat.  I'm not much of an expert on these things, but I reckon their approach is pretty much spot on; get a small boat because it's cheap, and then slap the biggest engine possible on the back off it.  I can't be sure of how fast it went because none of the dials worked, but it was fast enough to give a chap a whole different kind of haircut and purge my brain of everything but the theme tune to Magnum PI.

After that we headed up the road to Mt Cook.  I had thought that Mt Cook played the part of the angry mountain (Caradhras) in The Fellowship; but apparently that was Mt Earnslaw.  However Mt Cook and the rest of the surrounding Southern Alps did star as The Misty Mountains, and so in theory is still home to Balrogs.  The Southern Alps did a bit of a turn in the lighting-of-the-beacons bit too.  And it also turns out that the Battle of the Pelennor Fields was filmed in the vast rolling brownlands around Twizel, though I don't recall seeing much in the way of rotting Mumakil carcasses.  Perhaps stoats have devoured them.

Stoats are, by the way, New Zealand's deadliest predator.  Fact.  Before humans started stumbling all over it, New Zealand had only three species of native mammal; and they were all types of bat.  Mostly New Zealand was home to insects and a bazillion kinds of retarded bird, until Europeans brought over stuff to eat, shoot and wear.  Stoats were introduced in an attempt to control the rampant rabbit population... this failed horribly for a number of reasons.  First off, stoats are raging psychopaths; secondly, rabbits are wise to their stoaty ways and will peg it at the first sign of any stoaty trouble; and third New Zealand's birds are, as previously stated, retarded.  For example, the Kakapo.

The kakapo is a flightless parrot whose natural defence is to stand very still and pretend to be a bush.  The stoats fucked those chumps up.

Anyway, we rounded the day off by going for a bimble along Hooker Valley, on the west side of Mt Wakefield.  Hooker Valley wasn't entirely what I was expecting, but it still offered some good views and only mildly terrifying swing bridges over raging boulder-strewn rivers.

And at the end of it all, just past a big freezing lake and a lot of signs promising near certain avalanchey death to any traveller foolhardy enough to venture any further, the ominous mass of Hooker Glacier was just visible through the mists.

The next day we went up the other side of Mt Wakefield to bimble along Tasman Valley.  The first thing we found were the Blue Lakes.

The Blue Lakes were less like lakes and more like ponds to my eyes, but for the absence of frogspawn and a half-submerged shopping trolley.  Also not very blue.  If I understand correctly, these are sink holes left behind in the wake of the retreating glacier; and are pretty much the same size as Lake Tasman would have been twenty or so years ago.  Lake Tasman is pretty big nowadays.

We carried on bimbling along the valley track, the lake concealed behind a large and mostly treacherous looking ridge of rocks and boulders.  After a few hours of walking we found a slightly more stable looking pile of rocks and clambered over them to discover that we had gone past the end of the lake and were now alongside Tasman Glacier.

I sort of expected the glacier to either be a huge groaning cliff face of glistening ice or a big mint with a polar bear standing on it.  It is of course neither of these things.  The glacier is a big chunk of ice several hundred metres deep, but is almost entirely concealed beneath a couple of metres of rocks - the remains of the surrounding landscape that has been ground out by the glacier, left behind as the glacier melts away.  The result is a desolate, alien landscape that's kind of cool but not very pretty.

Whilst sat on our teetering pile of avalanche fodder, I experienced the questionable delights of the Mighty Perky Nana.

It is a chocolate covered banana chew thing - basically the same as Pineapple Lumps, except that it tastes of banana.  Apart from the first mouthful, which tasted kind of like cheese.  And the rest of it, which tasted like horror.  Die in a fire, Mighty Perky Nana.

servings

Okay, so this is about a week late.  I literally do not care.

Two weekends ago DeathCar2000 went to Kaikoura, about 180km north of Christchurch.  Here, the mountainous landscape drops away sharply into the sea to a depth of over 80m, and then plummets to around 800m... the deep waters and merging of cool and warm currents results in all kinds of very edible sea life splashing about quite close to the shore.  Sea food features heavily on just about every menu in town, with most places noisily advertising crayfish meals.  Crayfish meal = facehugger & chips.

Not all of the sea life is there for the express purpose of being eaten; these lazy bastard seals were hanging out at the peninsula on the first day that we got to Kaikoura.  They apparently do this quite a lot, as there were signs all about warning that if you get too close they'll eat your face to pieces.

Most of Kaikoura's history is tied up with whales.  The oldest (and pinkest) surviving building in Kaikoura is Fyffe house, built in 1842 by Scottish whaler Robert Fyfe.

Whales were apparently in far greater supply than building materials in the 1840s, as the house is built on foundations of whale vertebrae.  After many successful years of hunting whales Robert Fyfe started to go a bit mad, and wound up dead after bimbling off into the sea.  The house was passed on to a relative whose name I forget; and she in turn sold it on for a huge sum of money to another relative, George Fyffe, who had long wanted to get on this lucrative whaling malarkey.  Unfortunately for him the arse had fallen out of the whaling market a few years previously, and he was left completely bankrupted.  Meanwhile the rest of the population of Kaikoura, being a bunch hard-drinkin', shit-kickin', whale-huntin' badasses, found themselves with no whale-huntin' to do; and so stuck to the hard-drinkin' and shit-kickin' instead.  Kaikoura descended into wild lawlessness, until the arrival of Joseph Goodall who in 1867 bought Fyffe House, took up the post of district constable and restored law and order with little more than a pistol and a pair of handcuffs.  What a hero.

Whales are still an important part of the local economy in Kaikoura; although these days it's less about rendering blubber and more about whale-watching.  There are many different ways to see whales in Kaikoura; you can get in a light aircraft, board a ship, go for a helicopter ride, hire a sea kayak... the whale-watching option we took was to cane a six-pack in the hostel, and then spot a whale just 100m or so out from the shore as we stumbled off in search of a pub.  Huzzah!  This called for many celebratory drinkums.

The next day we stepped out blinking and bleary-eyed into hideous, glorious sunshine.  With the whale-watching box ticked (sort of), the only thing left to do in Kaikoura was to find a mountain and climb it.  It's not difficult to find mountains, since the only thing big enough for them to hide behind is other mountains; and our task was made easier by the fact that Mt Fyffe was clearly visible from the front door of the shitbox hostel.

Mt Fyffe, you're going down.  Or we're going up.  Either way, a relative translation of position is going to occur.

The walking route up Mt Fyffe isn't especially difficult to follow, as it's a 4x4 track - not that we saw anyone driving on it.  It was a pretty steep gradient, and my legs were more than a little hurty the following day... I experienced a good few pangs of vertigo here and there too, particularly on the bits where the track was on the very spine of the hill and the world just dropped away to either side.  Eek.

We kept going until we reached the hut, 1100m up; I figured that was probably far enough.  We'd ascended high enough that we were into the clouds (the same ones obscuring the top of the mountain in that photo of the harbour), and there was snow everywhere; and although it would have only taken another hour and a half to reach the summit (another 500m up), it would have made for an even longer walk back; and it's not like we'd have got a view of anything other clouds from up there anyway.

The next day we were back in Christchurch, and in the evening took the short trip to New Brighton beach to watch stuff explode in celebration of the capture and torture of either a fierce revolutionary, or a dastardly terrorist (depending on how many Che Guevara t-shirts you own/how catholic you are).  It was free; which is good because it means it didn't cost us anything.  It's almost as though the organisers have realised the folly of charging people to see something that is happening in the sky and is visible for miles around.  Despite being free, it was a very fine display indeed; the fireworks were set of along the length of the pier, which is like an actual pier as opposed to the amusement-arcade-suspended-over-water that we're more used to.  On the whole it was well worth dealing with crowds of people and getting pocketses filled with sand for.

Sinister foreign confectionery this week was a Cherry Ripe.

It's kind of cheating, since I've had them before; so although it was still quite foreign, it wasn't too sinister.  I quite like Cherry Ripes, but I'm not convinced that I'd ever bother with them if they were generally available; finding bits of coconut stuck in my teeth half a day later is too irritating for there to be any chance of Cherry Ripe finding it's way into my top three.

hitler skelter

My temporary housemate and I decided last weekend that it might be nice to do something that didn't involve a 1000+ km round trip; so we went on a little jaunt over to Akaroa in the Banks Peninsula.

Lying around 50km to the south east of the city, the peninsula is essentially a massive crater that was created as the result of a couple of volcanic eruptions many, many years ago.  If I'm learning nothing else out here, it's that the two things New Zealand do really well are big fucking hills and badass natural disasters.

We stopped off for lunch in the Hilltop Pub.  Because I am a stupid, I only took a photo of the boring buildingy bit and neglected to capture for posterity the view from the garden, which consisted of 1) the distant shimmery wet bit of the Banks Peninsula surrounded by big craggy hills, 2) a sheep munching away at the grass just the other side of the fence, and 3) a splendid jerk chicken burger and a jug of beer to wash it down with.  There was also a surprising number of vintage motorcycles parked outside; I completely failed to capture these too.

And then on to Akaroa.  160 years ago Akaroa was a French settlement, and a lot of the people living there now are direct descendants - there were more than a few tricolores fluttering in the breeze, and lots of the streets are called Rue De something or other.  It was all terribly quaint, and with all the surrounding hills it felt like we were in the middle of a huge crater.  Because we literally were.

  

The main road around the peninsula is called Summit Road, and runs pretty much along the crest of the hills.  The best views from Summit Road were of the road itself as we drove along it; but what with the sheer drops and the lack of barriers and the fucked front shocks lending DeathCar2000's steering the kind of vagueness that really focuses a chaps mind, I thought it best not to try to take any photos en route.  I think you can Street View most of it anyway.  Meanwhile, there were plenty of other spots along the way to stop and waste more cameraphone battery, including Le Bons Bay; a nice little spot which, as far as I can tell, has absolutely nothing to do with the frontman of Duran Duran.

The following day I would have gone to a classic motorsport shenanigan at the local raceway, but it turns out that I'm too stupid to use a calendar.  So instead we stayed at home and didn't go anywhere; which actually made for quite a pleasant change.  I used the time to finish off painting some toys...

A mob of five lootaz.  Mobz of five are great because you can fit the whole unit under a single blast template, and when they all die in one go it saves a lot of going back and forth between the table and the figure case.

Units of five; efficient.

Sinister foreign candy this week took the form of Pascall's Pineapple Lumps.

The packet proudly proclaims the contents to be "artificial flavoured" - and I can confirm this to be the case.  It was like eating dense slabs of vaguely pineappley yellow rubber.  Not the worst thing I've eaten since I got here, but that's mainly because I've eaten a Pinky and a Reel Rainbow Big Fish.

this week i didn't drown or send deathcar2000 plunging off a mountainside or get keelhauled by pirates or nibbled to death by fiordland crested penguins or anything

It was decided that this weekend a cruise in Fiordland National Park would be had.  There were two choices; Doubtful Sound or Milford Sound.  Doubtful won over Milford partly because it has a cooler name, but mainly because it's easier to get to.  Not least because the only road to Milford got blocked by an avalanche on Friday night, and work was still going on to clear some of the 500 tonne boulders out of the way.  Apparently the rocks are too hench to break apart by regular means, so they're drilling holes into them and blasting them apart with explosives.  Kaboom!  I suspect that it's little more than a weak excuse to blow stuff up - good for them.

We drove down to Queenstown Friday night, checking into our shitbox hostel just after 11.  The next morning we left early to get to Manapouri, where the cruise kicked off.  We got on a boat that took us across Lake Manapouri, dropping us off at the other end next to what is apparently the Manapouri power station; but it looked more like some villainous lair to me.

From there it was a six mile coach journey along the moderately precarious Wilmot's pass to the end of Doubtful sound and the start of our cruise aboard the Fiordland Navigator.

The weather was cold and wet, which meant that by and large, we were cold and wet; but the upside was that the lakes hidden from view way up in the hills and mountains were overflowing and there were waterfalls everywhere.  The landscape has been sculpted by glaciers over millions of years, lending the whole place a lovely baroque feel that Slatibartfast would surely approve of.  Great jagged chunks of granite rise almost vertically out of the waters; moss clings to the rock and creates an environment in which seeds can begin to grow and eventually forests form on the rock, all the roots locked together to form a huge arboreal toupée.  It's absurdly pretty, completely wild and raw, and mostly made me think of Jurassic Park.

The ship took us out all the way to where the Sound meets the sea for a bit of seal spotting, then headed back in to seek calmer waters so we could engage in various activities.  Eventually we made anchor in Precipice Cove, and I got to do a spot of kayaking in the rain.  There's probably some sort of knack to kayaking where you don't use the paddle to scoop up quantities of freezing cold water and tip it down your sleeves, but I don't have it.  Then dinner, then bar, then sleep...  The ship set off early the next morning to make the most of the morning sun.  A few dolphins were swimming alongside us briefly, a handful of penguins could be spotted huddling under the trees on a few rocks, and with the sun out the place got even more ludicrously pretty.  There was a bit more pootling about, and then the return journey - much the same as the outward trip, but in reverse and with a lot less rain.

We got back to Manapouri about midday on Sunday.  From there we drove up to Te Anau and suckered ourselves into doing some glow worm cave tour thing - it was kind of expensive for what it was, but very cool nonetheless.  No photos, because flash photography freaks out the glow worms; they feed off the light and swell to immense proportions, consuming people and boats in single mighty gulps (possibly).  

Back to the hostel in Queenstown to eat some crap dinner, and then we went off in search of a pub.  Queenstown has many of these, but we settled for the one that provided entertainment courtesy of Taxi, a jazz funk trio.  There were six of them.  I'd like to think that a jazz funk trio is one of those special numbers; much like a baker's dozen is equal to 13, a jazz funk trio is equal to any number you can think of (albeit governed by complex algebra based on floor space, critical funk mass and the division of beer money).  They were awesome and unexpected, and seemed to be taking it in turns to try to derail each song by freaking out and playing some insane solo.  The drummer was most successful in this respect; everyone else had to stop playing while he smashed the crap out of his drumkit for a solid two minutes... you could see their brows furrow in concentration as they struggled to pick up a beat to get back in with... damn, they were funky.

The following day was mostly spent driving back from Queenstown.  We took a slightly different (longer) route, winding through some steep and twisty Crown Range mountain roads to get to another pretty lakeside town, Wanaka; and then the rest of the long drive back home.

There was the delicate whiff of burning clutch in the air by the time we got to the top of Crown Range; but apart from this DeathCar2000 took it all in its stride and is exceeding expectations, in so far as it is still running and showing no signs whatsoever of ever stopping ever.  It has turned up more surprises in the last week or so; underneath the passenger seat I discovered a pair of socks (urgh), the case for Now32 (thankfully empty - phew) and a Black Eyed Peas CD case which contained no Black Eyed Peas, but two Ministry of Sound Dubstep compilations.  Dubsteb is infinitely better than the Black Eyed Peas; but only one of the front speakers works in DeathCar2000, and the rear speakers don't seem to cope well with low frequencies; so anything to loud and/or bassy comes out as a painful, repetitive crackling sound.  The sound of speakers dying.  The sound of butchered music.

Still better than the Black Eyed Peas.

Despite these minor indiscretions, DeathCar2000 easily ranks somewhere in the top three of cars that I currently own.

In recognition of my various nautical antics, this week's sinister foreign confectionery was the "Reel Rainbow Big Fish".  

It was supplied by the vending machine at work in exchange for the princely sum of $1.50.  I have never seen one for sale anywhere else ever, which could mean that the company that produces them does so exclusively for the benefit of the employees at my workplace; or it could mean that they stopped making and selling these things years ago, and the old stock is just sitting in the vending machine waiting for suckers to buy it.  Probably that one.  The Reel Rainbow Big Fish is a lump of dense sugary pink marshmallow covered in brown chocosubstance, and nothing more.  It's like a teacake; but without the biscuity layer, fluffy marshmallow and actual chocolate coating.  Also it is bigger, and almost shaped like some kind of hideous malformed fish.  I did not care for it.  If I saw a Reel Rainbow Big Fish in the street, I would fight it.

boldly going where thousands of people have been going for thousands of years

This weekend my workmate/flatmate and I did some intrepid exploring, and drove up to Arthur’s Pass for a bit of a bimble.  The weather in Christchurch was pretty naff, all windy and rainy.  I’d been assured by The Wise Old Bloke at work that if it was grotty down here, it would be nice up there.

The Wise Old Bloke was wrong.  At the edge of the hills we were stopped and told that after that point it was 4wd or snow chains only... so we turned around, drove back down the road to the last village we’d passed through (Springfield), bought snow chains, and drove back to find that the road had been temporarily closed while they dragged back someone that had got stuck.  No worries, it gave us time to wrestle with the bizarre tangle of chains.

Turns out the trick is to just keep swearing at the things until they go on.  As you can see, at this point the weather was still mostly just a bit wet and chilly; but we didn’t have to go very much further up the road to discover why the chains were a compulsory requirement.

DeathCar2000, with its spiffy new shoes, gave not a single fuck.  And then a few kms later, the weather cleared (ish) and the chains came off.

We made a stop on the way up to check out the Cave Stream Scenic Reserve.  There’s a 594m long cave stream that runs through the hill there; when the river is less raging and deadly, it’s possible to follow it through the cave.  We had to follow it overland, but there were still some nice sights to be seen.

Wet and cold, we ventured onwards.  Arthur’s Pass is, believe it or not, a pass named after a guy called Arthur.  Arthur Dobson was the first European to discover the pass in 1864; a coach path was constructed the following year to meet the demand for a route from the west coast to Christchurch during the gold rush.  Arthur’s Pass village itself is New Zealand’s highest altitude settlement (793m), and boasts a population of 54.  We arrived at around 1730, and everything was still a bit blizzardy and misty and bleak.

We found the pub,had dinner and some drinks and turned in for the night.

The following day was astonishing.  All the snow remained, but the sun was out; it was bright and clear and crisp and warm and glorious.  DeathCar2000 had made a new friend too.

This guy is a Kea, a kind of Alpine parrot.  The underside of his wings is bright orange, and looks pretty spectacular when in flight.  Not that they do a lot of flying; mostly they scuttle about sideways in a drunken fashion and try to remove all of the metal trim from around your car door.

We planned to spend the day doing a few walks and seeing the sights.  First up; Devil’s Punchbowl Falls.

At the start of the twentieth century the growing coal trade required a rail line through the mountains, and one was duly constructed.  These were the concrete foundations for the dynamos and whatnots of the old power station that provided electricity for the Otira rail tunnel, which goes straight through over five miles of mountain.

Lake Misery.  I don’t know why it’s called that, but it’s a cool name.

Bealey Chasm.  We saw this from a few different places; there were several different tracks to follow.

On the way back we took a few photos of where we’d been; the weather was so crappy the day before that we hadn’t been able to see what were driving towards...