All’s Well That Ends In Wellington

From Motueka to Nelson

After completing the Abel Tasman Coast Track, we were eager to repeat the Great Walk tradition we had started in our post-Rakiura fish & chips ecstasy. So we headed back into Motueka where we had AirBnBed prior to starting the track and found a restaurant to replenish our salt and grease supply. Unfortunately, when we gushed about the fish & chips on Stewart Island being the most delicious ones in all of New Zealand, we weren’t kidding; a hot meal was still nice, but they were nothing next to the ones we had had farther south. To be honest, however, maybe we just weren’t as wet and exhausted after the relatively leisurely stroll that the Abel Tasman track had been in comparison. Whatever the situation, Stefan’s elbow expressed its discontent by accidentally knocking over his drink almost immediately after the waitress brought it out and making a giant mess. Solidifying the reputation of elegant Americans everywhere!

After finishing our meal, we drove on to Nelson, the biggest city on the northern side of the South Island where we planned to unwind for a couple of days before heading across the Cook Strait to leave the South Island behind.

And unwind we did! Our AirBnB had a cute little dog which Dagmar loved to shower with cuddles…it in turn would shower everything in a 2 foot radius with pee. We took various strolls around the city and even did a little bit of trash cleanup around a school. With New Zealand down to Level 1 after a month or two without a single case of community transmission, we weren’t particularly worried about COVID. We also explored a couple beautiful beaches; at one, we chatted with some locals, and at the other, Dagmar got to know them in a more compromising way when she tried to have an emergency bathroom break behind a sand dune and moments later found herself face-to-face with a motorcyclist zipping by in full view.

We also had the wonderful experience of going to the city’s first farmer’s market since COVID had started. The place was buzzing with excitement, with everyone having turned out in droves and obviously thrilled to be out and socializing again. We enjoyed some delicious pies and a crepe, and just about dropped them both when we saw a familiar face!! I know that sounds improbable in a country of 5 million that we had only been in for a couple of months–at least one of which we had spent cooped up in isolation, and we were skeptical as well. The two of us had separated to stand in different lines for the aforementioned food, and Stefan found himself doing a triple take when he thought he recognized someone. He rushed through the crowd to go grab Dagmar for reassurance, and she quickly reaffirmed his suspicion: standing right there was Sego, the French girl we had met our second week in the country!

After so many weeks not socializing with people, we had almost forgotten how to talk at all. But we managed to bumble through a very awkward hello. We had last left Sego and her boyfriend Alex in January (it was now June) as they left Huia for the Far North in their van they had kitted out to live in. We were excited to hear how that had all gone, but things quickly got awkward as it sounded like she and Alex had gone their separate ways. It wasn’t entirely clear what the circumstances were (maybe we had dodged a bullet ourselves by not trying out the vanlife strategy), but it put a bit of a damper on the situation and our questions. We didn’t end up doing anything else with her, but it was still a crazy coincidence that we had run into one another. 

After a couple of relaxing days in Nelson, we had finally completed trip around the South Island which we’d started almost 4 months earlier! It had all gone a lot slower than we’d thought it would, what with the hiccup of the pandemic and whatnot, but we had made up for lost time and felt pretty confident that we hadn’t left any stone unturned on the South Island. As we’ve talked about multiple times since, New Zealand is so beautiful that you could spend an entire year inside a 20-mile circle and still not have explored all the beautiful beaches, forests, and mountains, but hopefully, we will be able to win the majority of any future “Well did you visit _____?” conversations.

Our next stop was Wellington, New Zealand’s capitol and familiar terrain from our family vacation the year prior. In order to get there, we had to take Fitz (our peppy little Toyota Vitz we’d picked up in Christchurch) on the ferry across the Cook Strait. The ferry left from the sleepy little town of Picton, which we had one night to explore before leaving the South Island for good!

From Nelson to Picton

After arriving in Picton, we did a short hike, the Tirohanga Track, which ended up with a beautiful overview of the harbor where the ferry came in. We didn’t do a whole lot of research on the ferry, but it’s fair to assume that the reason the Cook Strait Ferry drops off there is because of the protection offered by the long Queen Charlotte Sound. The Cook Strait between the North and South Islands funnels in the winds of the “roaring forties,” strong wind currents that arise at that latitude. As a result, according to Wikipedia, the Cook Strait “is regarded as one of the most dangerous and unpredictable waters in the world.” Hence the need for a nice long windbreak wherever you’re docking!

Post-hike, we went looking for food. Despite being the site of the best non-flying route between the two islands, Picton is in fact a tiny little town. It has all of about 2 main streets, so there wasn’t much to choose from. We settled on some more fish and chips from a walk-up fast food joint, and the quality was about what you would expect. Even so, fried food has a pretty high floor!

We stayed overnight in a hostel which appeared to be from around the turn of the century, giving it that (c)old combination we’d grown so accustomed to in many areas of New Zealand. Stefan spent most of his time huddled around the fire and wifi in the chilly common room, but Dagmar was more adventurous and chatted with several other travelers. She didn’t end up meeting back up with them during her time in New Zealand, but they at least exchanged numbers, which seems like a win after so little social interaction during the previous months! The hostel also provided ice cream for all the residents in the evening–even though it wasn’t exactly the warm treat that might have been better suited to the indoor temperature, it was still a very nice gesture which you wouldn’t typically expect at a hostel.

The next morning, we did another short hike through some hilly scrubland next to town. We managed to get lost (mostly blamed on Stefan, who thought he had memorized all the turns they took through the twisting paths, but apparently this was not the case) and it eventually started to rain, but we still made it back to the ferry before we’d gotten too wet or the ferry too departed.

We grabbed a quick bite to eat (again, nothing to write home about even though we tried out a classier cafe), and then got ready for the ferry crossing! We’d gotten a ticket for the two of us and Fitz the previous day, and drove over to the ferry entrance. There was an absolutely massive line of cars, and we frankly had no idea if we’d gotten in the right lane. Good thing we’d guessed correctly, as it would have been as impossible to turn around in that line as on a standstill interstate traffic jam! 

We definitely were glad we hadn’t tried to make a mad dash for the ferry to get back to the safety of our very kind hosts at our third HelpX like we’d contemplated when lockdown was originally announced back in March. If the 1-2 hour line was considered normal, we didn’t want to imagine the chaos of everyone trying to make it across the strait in those 48 hours before the lockdown went into effect.

A surprising discovery helped pass the time: as we were messing around with the radio, we were astonished to all of a sudden find Fitz’s GPS spring to life with a movie. We briefly thought maybe we’d managed to intercept some satellite TV before we realized that the car had been sold to us with a DVD hidden away in the player. Who knows if that was a gesture of generosity or someone desperately trying to rid themselves of a curse, but given that the DVD was the abysmal The Legend of Tarzan (despite the star-studded power of Christoph Waltz, Samuel L. Jackson, and Margot Robbie, I bet you forgot they even made this 2016 flop, didn’t you?), we’ll have to assume it was the latter. Nothing would have been better than that movie–in the inverse sense of ‘that movie was better than nothing.’ Probably should have just watched the rain drip down the window. But hey, it was a nice surprise–ultimately disappointing, but a surprise nonetheless. We would be sure to pay the karma forward by leaving the DVD in the car when we sold it several months later.

As our wheels rolled onto the ferry gangplank, we left the South Island for the last time. Even though all of New Zealand is heart-stoppingly gorgeous, and even though we had plenty of adventures left to come on the North Island, and even though there were certain regions we found less appealing than the rest, the South Island is just the cherry on top of the already unbelievable cake that is New Zealand. There is such an incredible amount of beauty packed into a relatively small area: the rolling oceanside hills of Otago, the dramatic fjords of Milford Sound, the snow-capped peaks of the Southern Alps, the gorgeous lakes around Queenstown, the joy of a perfect sunny day in Akaroa, the golden beaches of Abel Tasman… any of those places would be the showstopping highlight of any other trip, but on the South Island you can’t go 2 miles without discovering more incredible landscapes. If you like traveling, this absolutely one of the places you must see in your lifetime!

From Picton to Wellington

The ferry ride itself was a bit surreal, as–barring the Nelson farmer’s market above–it was the largest number of people we’d been around since COVID had hobbled the world. It wasn’t crowded per se, but the QR codes you were supposed to scan to track your movement throughout the ship were a silent reminder that we were only one presumed infection away from a contact tracing panic. 

Night fell as we crossed the stormy strait, and it was dark by the time we arrived in Wellington. Stefan didn’t particularly enjoy navigating the narrow, hilly, unlit, rainy streets on the way to the AirBnB, but we did make it all the way in one piece. Does it still count as arriving in one piece if you lost a piece along the way? Because that’s just what Stefan did: when trying to make a quick u-turn, Stefan + a curb finished off the crunched hubcap that Dagmar had weakened up several months before. Poor Fitz.

The rough weather never left us during our stay in Wellington, so we stuck to primarily indoor activities. We visited the Te Papa museum on two separate days (the full name, Te Papa Tongarewa, apparently translates to “container of treasures”). We had explored the majority of the museum the previous year, but one standout we had to spend extra time with was the exhibit on kakapo, the world’s only flightless parrot. If you know anything about New Zealand birds, you probably can guess this at this point, but kakapo are critically endangered (New Zealand’s Department of Conservation lists their current population at 201–a number which somewhat dishearteningly was 204 when this blog post was originally drafted several months back). This has resulted in lots of interesting attempts to encourage them to breed, such as…well, how about you just watch the video posted at the start of this entry!

If you want to learn more about the kakapo, you can follow one of them named Sirocco on Facebook–conservation efforts have made this bird an internet sensation and the posts are both informative and entertaining!

Besides the portions we had already seen, we spent an entire day absorbed in a special World War 1 exhibit which we had considered when visiting the museum with Stefan’s parents the previous winter, but which had ultimately scared us off due to the long line and the price of admission. One year later in the post-COVID world, however, both speed bumps were thoroughly flattened!

The exhibit was extremely interesting–not just from the standpoint of military history, which Stefan always enjoys–but also in seeing how a culture deals with unsuccessful military ventures. In the US, the military history the general populace primarily learns about is the ‘necessary but victorious’ narrative of the Second World War: the Greatest Generation made the biggest sacrifice imaginable to defeat the baddest bad guy of them all. Oh yeah, and we won. The American War for Independence, our Civil War, and the First World War are all also more or less portrayed using this same framing. Wars like Vietnam, where countless people died senselessly (well, even more senselessly than usual) with virtually nothing to show for it are typically pushed into the background (somehow, our history classes always ‘run out of time’ for that one despite retreading the same ground year after year on our successes).

But what happens when your biggest military contribution on the world stage happens to be a resounding defeat? That’s the situation with New Zealand. The most notable contributions of ANZAC forces (the coalition of Australian and New Zealand soldiers that fought in World War I) is the Gallipoli campaign, which, as an American, you again probably haven’t heard much about. Basically put, this was an attempt to take the Dardanelles and the Bosphorus, two strategically important straits in Turkey. Imagine D-Day if it had been 8 months long, was literally 25 times more deadly in terms of casualties, and at the end the “Americans” didn’t get anywhere, packed their bags, gave up, and went home. 

The Te Papa exhibit provided a lot of insight into how New Zealand seems to grapple with this difficult history which doesn’t sell itself quite as simply as the US’ overseas triumphs. The two big themes we took away from our visit were 1) war is horrible and 2) the soldiers should be honored. Graphic descriptions of the squalid, lice-infested, freezing cold and burning hot conditions are interspersed with literally larger-than-life, ~14-foot tall sculptures depicting heroic charges and gallant last stands. Biographies of promising young lives cut short in a pointless strategic misstep are displayed side-by-side with descriptions of how Maori fought figuratively to be allowed to do so literally in order to prove their worth to a fledgling country. While the latter representations of brave soldiers still retains the slightest whiff of jingoistic pageantry, the exhibit does successfully walk the line between “This war–and by extension, all of them–was incredibly stupid and we shouldn’t subject ourselves to it again” and still honoring the memories of the average people who died far away from home.

Going back to those gigantic, lifelike sculptures (again visible in the video earlier on in this post), they were created by Weta Workshop. Those of you familiar with the Lord of the Rings films likely know them as the ones behind the amazing practical effects which still hold up over 2 decades later, but they’ve since become involved in a huge number of famous productions. We took another day in Wellington to visit the “Weta Cave,” which features tons of famous memorabilia used throughout their filmography as well as explanations on how these effects are brought to life. The neatest part was touring the “bigatures” for a TV show called “Thunderbirds Are Go.” To be honest, neither of us had heard of that show, but getting to see the MASSIVE miniatures they used to film it was extremely neat. Stefan was particularly pleased, as he had visited the Weta Cave back in 2011 while studying abroad in Melbourne, but (correctly or incorrectly) recalls it as having been much smaller and more like a gift shop than the full on tour experience it had grown into.

Although most of our activities were indoors due to the nasty weather, we did revisit Zealandia, a gigantic ecosanctuary inside the city. Surrounded by a pest-control wall, the intention is to restore an area of New Zealand to the way it would have been before human settlers arrived.  Once again, this was something we had seen the previous year and which Stefan’s parents had paid handsomely to let us visit, but in the aftermath of COVID, the public was offered free admission so we had a second walk through. The dreary weather didn’t bother us much, as we basically had the place to ourselves and part of appreciating New Zealand’s greenness is appreciating the soggy weather that makes it that way!

Highlights included one of the few other guests pointing out a tuatara they’d spotted to us (that’s the lizard-that’s-not-a-lizard we talked about in our last post), watching hordes of sparrows steal food from kaka (another cool but predictably endangered parrot), and spotting a landho (you’ll have to watch the video to find out about that one!).

We also enjoyed finally being in a big enough city to partake in some culinary variety, and splurged by eating out far more than we should have. One of these restaurants Dagmar made reservations at was of the increasingly-popular “board games + food” sort. They were the tiniest bit cranky with us since we had gotten lost and showed up almost an hour late for the reservation, but we had a great time anyway. 

While carefully reading the rules for a hockey-penguin-flicking game in one hand and absentmindedly cramming French fries into his face with the other, Stefan heard a loud clink on his plate. This unexpected sound was quickly followed by the more expected delighted tittering coming from Dagmar, who was both very pleased with herself for having snuck something onto one of Stefan’s fries without him knowing and simultaneously relieved that he had not gobbled it up. That something was the pounamu ring Dagmar had bought back in Queenstown; she had completed her dare of proposing back to Stefan! As interesting as it would have been for the relationship for him to have made the first proposal but rejected the counterproposal, Stefan couldn’t help himself. Wellington had been wet and cold, but all the time with Dagmar was warm and fuzzy!

That’s it for our latest entry! Hopefully the excessive length equals the arduously-long wait. Our next entry, which we hope to publish around the second week of January, will cover our adventure up the west coast of the North Island to New Plymouth and Mount Taranaki. Not quite a flavor of jerky, but it should be a tasty morsel of a story nonetheless! Thank you as always for reading about our story, and let us know what you think!