On the Road Again

I set off the other day in Magoo with two new traveling companions. Sofie is from Helsinki and has lived pretty much everywhere including NYC and London. Gabriel is from Bavaria; they both just finished tours of Oz and now they have nothing better to do then sit in my station wagon.




Our first night started off on a high point camping at a secret hot springs that is known only to locals but with some tips from my hotel concierge friend in Christchurch we knew where to look.
There aren't many better ways to sit under the sky and drink some wine out of a box. Considering we started off on such a high point it was likely that things would go downhill from there. A rainy day and car full of sandflies proved that point.
We settled in the historic gold mining town of Ross thanks to couchsurfing and used it as a base to explore the west coast.
When the boat was in Christchurch the family and I took a massive drive to the town of Arthur's Pass in order to realize we had no time to explore and to immediately turn around and go back to the city. We decided that we didn't have enough time to see this viaduct that we had been told about. We were wrong because I came from the other direction this time and it was literally 2 minutes from the edge of the town and it was incredible. There used to be a harrowing mountain road carved into the side of the range. The viaduct finally created an easy link between the coasts.




I had heard stories about the aggressive behavior of the native Kea birds and this was my first encounter with them. They are very curious and have the habit of landing on your car and ripping all of the little rubber bits off of it. Therefore you need to keep one eye on the incredible surroundings and your other on the annoying birds flying around your car. It reminded me of my epic struggle back home with The Bird in my parent's house. Except this time I didn't have the sink sprayer handy to blast the Keas.




Take a look at the V shaped barriers to protect the support columns from rockslides.




We then headed north on the West Coast to Punakike in order to see the pancake rocks. It was a series of tidal pools and blowholes with the added feature of distinctly layered limestone rocks. It was cool and did make for good pictures.








Next we are off to places further south.