At last the day came. Our flight wasn't until the evening so, to conserve our leave entitlement etc., we both went into work in the morning. We left Bristol around 17:00 and Frances, Barbara's sister, drove us to Heathrow where we arrived with sufficient time for a farewell drink before checking in for the flight. The 21 hour flight went smoothly, we were pleased we had decided to pay the extra to travel Club and get the wide comfortable seats.
Our route took us to Sydney via Bangkok; at Sydney we transferred to a flight to Christchurch in New Zealand and from there we proceeded on to Wanaka with two more internal flights. We got off the plane for half an hour in Bangkok, but one airport is so much like any other that we didn't really feel we were in a foreign country, let alone on a continent we had never visited before. The same was true of our brief encounter with Sydney airport. We were pleasantly surprised to find we had been given seats in the business section of the 747 from Sydney to Christchurch. So we arrived in New Zealand having travelled in comfort all the way. The connection in Christchurch had seemed a bit tight, especially as we wanted to leave two of our bags at the airport to collect on our return to Christchurch; there does not seem be any good reason to carry cold weather gear around here in the middle of summer. However air travel in New Zealand is, as we soon found out, a most casual affair and we had plenty of time.
The flight from Christchurch to Queenstown was on a 737 (which was packed). The problem with a 737 is that the (small) airport in Queenstown is situated at the edge of a large lake and the approach is along a winding river in a rather deep valley. Not only does the plane have to dive fairly steeply down into the river valley once it has crossed a ridge from the east, but when it finally has negotiated the tortuous path you suddenly realise the runway does not seem very long. In fact our plane finally pulled up just a couple of yards short of the end of the runway and the lake.
In Christchurch we had been assigned seats 2A and 2B for the flight from Queenstown to Wanaka. We were told to check in with the Mount Cook Airline staff when we arrived in Queenstown. The man we saw simply took our boarding passes and said the plane would depart in about 40 minutes and he would page us. When the call came we were introduced to Graham, our pilot, who took our bags to his Cessna which only had two passenger seats! When we had booked we didn't realise we would have our own private aircraft. This was our third flight in a row on a plane with a different name on the side from that on the ticket. We flew Air New Zealand from Sydney to Christchurch in a Qantas 747, from Christchurch to Queenstown the airline was Mount Cook Airlines but it was an Air New Zealand plane, now we were on an Aspiring Air plane.
The flight from Queenstown was a little bumpy but the views from the small plane were superb, and Graham pointed out features of interest along the way. On arrival at Wanaka we were met and driven to collect our rental car. All the arrangements were very efficient. We arrived in the hotel around 17:30 local time (GMT +13 hours) tired but very happy. It had taken us just 36 hours from leaving Bristol to arriving here.
The weather in Wanaka was unusually hot for the time of year, mid 20's. The sky was gloriously blue with scarcely a cloud to be seen. After England in December and 36 hours travelling, it was a real pleasure to put on a tee shirt and just feel the fresh air around us.
Next morning we were up early and enjoyed our first New Zealand breakfast. We really appreciated eating a proper meal for the first time for quite a while; toast and eggs, bacon and sausages (lamb of course). We soon left, anxious to get across to the West Coast for our first sight of penguins in the wild. We had been told by the car hire company to be sure to leave Wanaka at a quarter to the hour as the road to the West Coast was closed due to roadworks. They stopped the road works every hour on the half hour and opened the road again to let the traffic through, so if we left at the right time we would not need to have a long wait when we reached the closed section of the road. In fact we arrived with excellent timing; we had to wait only a few minutes before we were allowed to drive along the section of the road that was being widened from a single track to a two lane road (so vehicles could pass one another). At the same time they were going to seal the road for the first time. Roads in New Zealand are very interesting; there is so little traffic that with the exception of a few principal roads they are mostly single lane gravel tracks. Even on two lane roads many of the bridges are single track. However, as a consequence of the light traffic, we were still able to make better progress than we would have on British roads.
The drive to Moeraki passes through some very impressive scenery; it would have been more so had the weather been better. It was raining heavily most of the day and the clouds were so low that we could not see much of the mountains as we drove through the passes. We did see many spectacular waterfalls coming down into the deep valleys we were driving along. In one spot there is a bridge across the Haast river, at this point the river is a raging torrent and upstream several waterfalls can be seen coming vertically down from the clouds. It is impossible to estimate the drops of these falls but they must be several hundred feet. Later we found out that these waterfalls are only temporary. There is so little soil to retain the water that when it rains the falls operate but when it is not raining they soon dry up. But it really does rain. On the west side of the mountains at high altitudes the annual rainfall is around 500 inches.
In Haast we stopped to buy petrol, it is wise to keep the tank topped up as filling stations are few and far between. We also went to the tourist information office where we spent some money on a tee shirt for Barb, and some maps and guides. Haast seemed to consist of the garage, the information office and a motel! Everybody we met in New Zealand was most helpful, especially those living outside the main population centre around Christchurch (the population of the South Island is about 400,000 of which 300,000 live in the Christchurch area). Unlike in the USA where 'have a nice day' can sound almost like an insult, in New Zealand they all seem genuinely interested in the people they are serving. What a refreshing change.
