“Are you scared?” she asked me. Scared, me? No way. But the truth was I was a little scared. New Zealand is often considered the adrenaline capital of the world but I wasn’t queueing up to jump off a bridge or leap out of a plane. No, I was getting ready to walk back into a pub full of local Kiwis. When I first set foot in room 3 minutes earlier in my bright blue jacket and brown beanie with a silly puffball on top, I stuck out like a sore thumb. Getting stared at by every set of eyes in the room was unnerving enough the first time around and now that I’d placed my order with the waitress in the Bistro next door I was steeling myself for re-entry.
It was my second to last full day in New Zealand and I wanted to spend it being a tourist. The previous three weeks were hardcore photography bootcamp: sunrise and sunset every day, marathon drives, and more than one multi-mile hike back in the dark. I was exhausted and it was time to relax a little. So two days before my flight back to the US I found myself in the Catlins, the wet, wild, and seldom-visited southeast corner of NZ’s South Island.
The scenery is so grand I have to keep my eyes closed in case they explode.
This is a staircase from hell. This thing makes the infamous Half Dome steps seem like the bunny hill. I thought I was in pretty good shape but these steps have me sucking wind like a Dyson. To take my mind off my aching lungs and shaking legs I try to count the number of individual stairs in this endless trudge but I lose track somewhere in the two thousands.
The trail description didn’t make it sound bad at all: “Track starts out gently then ascends steeply to the Sealy Tarns. Allow 3 hours return.” A pretty unassuming description. Glib, even. But halfway up the track I was learning my lesson the hard way: in New Zealand, when a trail guide says steep, it means steep.
The northern tip of New Zealand’s South Island is windy, very windy. And sandy, very sandy. This combination leads to the formation of sand dunes, which over the eons become sandstone. Because sandstone is soft it is easily eroded. And at Wharariki Beach -where I spent the last three days- the sandstone has eroded to create two of the most beautiful offshore islands I’ve ever seen.
I really like pancakes. I also really like rocks. So when I found out there’s a natural phenomenon on the west coast of New Zealand’s South Island called The Pancake Rocks, I knew I was going to have to pay a visit. The pancake rocks are perched on a tiny coastal outcropping near the town of Punakaiki and do a lot to live up to their name. The rocks are made of a series of limestone “pancakes” that were originally laid down in a process called stylobedding, which is scientist speak for “we have no idea how this happened.” Over time the layers have been eroded over to form a rock garden of fantastically sculpted shapes.
Have you ever been on a glacier? No, that’s not the right question. Better: have you ever been IN a glacier? For me the answer to both was a resounding no, until today. One of the most amazing things about this trip is that I am able to take advantage of opportunities I wouldn’t normally be able to afford. So far that’s meant a rental car, a Fiordland cruise, and perhaps coolest of all, a heli-hike to the dramatic Fox Glacier.
The seals and I, we have an uneasy truce. As long as I don’t go in the water, they won’t bite me. Seems like an easy arrangement to uphold, but just to reinforce it they bark at me and mock charge from time to time. But I bark right back and the peace is upheld. All the same, my adrenaline is pumping and I’m almost happy when the sunset fades and I can skedaddle from their turf.
Barry smells like salami and has hairy ears. He lives on a remote beach at the end of a long gravel road off of a lonely highway in the sparsely populated south island of a country isolated in the southern pacific ocean. And yet he’s famous, for a Kiwi anyway.
Fiordland makes you spoiled. After seeing Mitre Peak rising 5000 feet straight up from Milford Sound, mere mountains just don’t do it for you anymore. You see the endless 1000 foot waterfalls cascading down sheer cliffs and suddenly your backyard falls don’t quite cut the mustard. Any old river coursing through hilly terrain? Boring once you’ve seen Monkey Creek.
It’s always good to see old friends. And even better when they turn up in unexpected places like Queenstown, New Zealand. My college roommate, Dustin, had just finished a cruise between New Zealand and Australia and decided to hop back over to NZ for a few days before he returned to his job designing robots at the University of Colorado.
Having visited NZ a few times before I wanted to play tour guide for Dustin, but that can be difficult to do when your friend is so happy to be in New Zealand that he doesn’t care what he sees. So, Dustin, where do you want to go? “I don’t care, this is awesome!” What do you want to see? “Doesn’t matter, this is amazing!” Anything in particular you feel like doing? “Whatever, everything is fantastic!” After a few more questions like this I began to suspect that Dustin might not care what we did, so I pointed the car south and we headed off to Fiordland National Park.
But a late start prevented us from getting any farther than Te Anau before nightfall so we booked into a hostel, cooked a bit of pasta, and called it a night.
A moody, rainy day in Mt Cook National Park means it’s time to go for a walk. The dramatic clouds and milky glacial runoff lent themselves beautifully to black and white photography.
“Are you scared?” she asked me. Scared, me? No way. But the truth was I was a little scared. New Zealand is often considered the adrenaline capital of the world but I wasn’t queueing up to jump off a bridge or leap out of a plane. No, I was getting ready to walk back into a pub full of local Kiwis. When I first set foot in room 3 minutes earlier in my bright blue jacket and brown beanie with a silly puffball on top, I stuck out like a sore thumb. Getting stared at by every set of eyes in the room was unnerving enough the first time around and now that I’d placed my order with the waitress in the Bistro next door I was steeling myself for re-entry.
The seals and I, we have an uneasy truce. As long as I don’t go in the water, they won’t bite me. Seems like an easy arrangement to uphold, but just to reinforce it they bark at me and mock charge from time to time. But I bark right back and the peace is upheld. All the same, my adrenaline is pumping and I’m almost happy when the sunset fades and I can skedaddle from their turf.
