The view from Mt. Fyffe
Sunset from our beach The morning after our bus arrived in Wellington we took the 3 hour ferry ride across the Cook Straight to the South Island to start the second half of our adventure. We arrived in Picton just after 1pm, and after a quick look around town we got on the road and headed down the coast. We spent our first night on the South Island camped in a bush on the side of the road just outside of Blenheim, but our second campsite was picture perfect right on the beach. We set up camp around 6, early enough to have a few hours of daylight left, and ate dinner on the black sand beach at sunset. The beach was covered in driftwood so we tried our hand at building a beach hut, which ended with me tripping on a stick and breaking my little toe, so Steve had to give me a piggy back ride back to the tent.
Despite the broken toe we made good progress the next day, and rode the last 65 of the 105 kilometers to Kaikoura in a little over 3 hours. The first half of the ride was right along the ocean and we made a few stops to watch the New Zealand fur seals and hike to a waterfall, then the road turned inland for a while with a backdrop of big beautiful mountains. Kaikoura is a cute little town on a peninsula overlooked by those same mountains and visited by seals, dolphins and whales. We worked out a deal with the holiday park, so we stayed for 4 days and cleaned rooms for a few hours a day in exchange for a free campsite and $15 an hour. We took a walk our first night and ran into Nate and Sara, friends from work in Skagway who are living and working in town for the season.
The weather over the weekend was a bit rainy so we spent most of our time just relaxing in the tent and eating the best fish and chips ever. On Monday the weather started clearing up, so in the afternoon we booked a tour with Seal Swim Kaikoura. They took us out to the seal colonies on a small boat and we snorkeled with the fur seals. A couple of them came quite close, and it was great to see them underwater, they're so much more graceful and agile than on land. We also wanted to swim with the dolphins, but it was so busy in town that they were booked solid, so we figured it would be better to try to do it when we come back on our way to Christchurch in a few months.
The range behind Mt. Fyffe Tuesday morning dawned without a cloud in the sky, so we packed up and said goodbye to the holiday park and set our sites on Mt. Fyffe, the 1600 meter peak that overlooks the peninsula. We got the idea from Sara and Nate, who had done the hike a few days before we arrived, and they let us borrow a backpack so we could stay the night at the hut a few hundred meters below the summit. The hike was a very steep but well-groomed 4x4 track, and it only took us 3 hours to reach the hut where we enjoyed stir-fry chicken with vegetables for dinner and some good conversation with two girls from Germany, a woman from Christchurch and her son from Slovakia. We turned in early for the night and woke up at 4am to hike to the summit for the sunrise.
Sunrise from the summit It was pitch black, and somehow both of our headlamps managed to die overnight, so we had to hike in the dark. The stars were just bright enough, and the trail was pretty wide and smooth so we didn't have too much trouble sticking to the trail. We made it to the summit at 530, just in time as the horizon was starting to turn pink by then. I've seen plenty of sunrises, but rarely have I been still to watch the whole thing. It was a grand show, the sky lightening slowly from East to West, the transition from pink to red to orange to light blue, and finally the sun racing over the horizon in less than a minute. The mountains behind us were beautiful as well as they were slowly illuminated by the dawn. The hike down the mountain was quite steep and even more tiring than the hike up, but we made it down by 11:30 and Nate picked us up so we would have time to make some progress on the bikes before the end of the day.
We got on the road around 2pm, and rode just a few hours to get a jump on the distance to Christchurch. We had been told the road was fairly flat from Kaikoura to Christchurch, a lie we've heard all too often and once again proved to be untrue. The first hour of riding was right along the ocean, flat and stunningly scenic, but the road soon turned inland and began climbing the big hills we had seen in the distance from the summit of Mt. Fyffe. After about 35k we reached a turnout at the bottom of one hill, and decided to save the next big climb for the morning and set up the tent for the night.
For more pictures check out the Photo post.
For more pictures check out the Photo post.
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