A Week in the Clouds

Joanna writes:

In case you are still harboring fantasies of colorful bears that shoot rainbows out of their tummies living on bouncy cotton clouds, we are sorry to report that these bears certainly do not reside in New Zealand. The clouds here are decidedly not cottony or bouncy. They are, in fact, rather cold and wet, but also visually appealing in their way.

Our intimate acquaintance with the clouds here began in Nelson Lakes National Park, where we finally did the very NZ backpacker thing of hiking up a mountain to a back-country hut and staying there overnight before hiking back the next day. We set off withh our very heavy packs (we had to bring our car-camping stove and pot) on an overcast morning, with the assurance that the weather was supposed to clear in the afternoon, but it never did. We entered a cloud about an hour before we reached the hut, and emerged from it sometime the next day. The hike was still a wonderful and beautiful experience, and I think our legs are much stronger now, too. This was Ben's first hike with a big pack, and the farthest either of us had ever hiked in two days (20 km in, 12 km out, much of it very steep!).

The hike turned out to be great preparation for our next WWOOFing situation, which was also on top of a mountain. We stayed with a wonderful family just outside the town of Kaikoura--Achim and Nicole and their children Felix (6) and Anna (3). We had our own private hilltop complete with cozy caravan, outdoor kitchen, "long drop" and goat. The goat, Ma, was nice company, and we just had to move her hut around so she could reach the nicest grass, and feed her our food scraps. See picture above.

The views from the hilltop were fantastic, but we spent the first 3 or 4 days completely inside of the clouds. One morning we woke up and discovered, to our surprise, that the clouds had cleared and there were huge, craggy, snow-capped mountains behind us. We could also see out to the ocean and the town and a lovely river wound its way past our mountain into the sea. Wow. I spent most of my working time weeding, though Ben got the chance to work with the young autistic son of a friend of the family.

Kaikoura is a small touristy town on the east coast of the South Island, famous for its whales and fur seals. We spent one afternoon poking around the coastline, found a fur seal sleeping on the rocks about 5 meters away from us, and saw orcas swimming remarckably close to us. They didn't jump or anything, but we saw their dorsal fins and the air from their blowholes. We also had one fantastically beautiful sunny day, and took a hike part way up Mt. Fyffe, one of those snow-capped craggy mountains. We also took a swim in a gorgeous little swimming hole in the river below our mountain--most of the water here is an amazing blue color due to the sediment in it, known as rock flour.

After Kaikoura, we spent a couple of days in Arthur's Pass National Park in the middle of the South Island, where we did a number of lovely hikes with incredible views. This picture shows us on top of Avalanche Peak (oooh). We then travelled quickly south via Queenstown, a backpacker party town where we attended a "beach party" (wooo!) at a local bar that included a very awkward wet t-shirt contest (I did not participate). Now we are all the way south in Riverton, WWOOFing at "Granma's Growers."