Photos / 2003: Japan, New Zealand, Fiji and New York /
We arrive to a rainy and miserable New Zealand. Granted, in November it's still spring, but it didn't help our mood for the coming three weeks of driving up and down the country.
...or so we were told it was. We couldn't say for all the rain and fog.
We rented this car for almost no money at all in one of Auckland's many car rental places, and made our way south.
One of the few, if not the only, dry cave in Waitomo south of Auckland. The rest are more or less water-filled. There's another famous cave in Waitomo where we went on an underground boat ride in the dark, with thousands of tiny glow worms hanging from the ceiling, like a star sky. The little buggers didn't like camera flashes though...
When I say "dry", I really mean "not very dry at all". There was dripping going on all over the cave, forming stalactites and stalagmites over hundreds of years.
Strange rock formations indeed.
Leaving our underground adventure, we returned above ground to find that it's still rainining. Yay.
Three swedes. One car. More rain.
Trying to outrun the rain, we sped south, stopping on a coast road when the rain actually did clear to marvel at the view.
We saw the rainbow as a good omen.
It wasn't a good omen. It rained even more in Wellington.
At least it cleared up when we left Wellington on the ferry. The city didn't look quite as bad as when it rained. It actually looked quite nice.
Four hours of no rain? Impossible!
Going from Picton and the ferry west to Abel Tasman National Park, we took a pause from the meandering crawling up and down mountain roads to admire the sunset.
The last stop before the national park was a small, picturesque seaside village that I unfortunately can't remember the name of.
Like in so many other places in New Zealand, you didn't have to go far to see beautiful nature.
Since the walks through the park took days, we opted for a boat ride up the coast and a short walk back. The wind messed up my 'do and nobody told me.
We came upon a delightful bay surrounded by forest-clad mountains, most likely one of many, each one more scenic than the other.
Lazy critters they were.
Small beaches like this dotted the coast between the cliffs and mountains. During the summer they're packed with tourists and sand flies, but we pretty much avoided both and could enjoy the nature undisturbed by man and um... nature.
And so we set forth through the wilderness.
Strange plants grew everywhere.
The vistas were quite breathtaking.
This is me trying to get my breath back from the vistas.
Panakaiki is a small stop on the west coast, where the sea and the wind have carved holes and tunnels in the cliffs. When the waves crash into them, it blows water through the rock formations and forces it up in mighty cascades.
Guess what. It rained at Panakaiki. This time we didn't mind, since the storm made the place all the more spectacular.
Even small places had cheap but good hostels for backpackers. I don't remember which hostel this is (it might have been in Greymouth), but they had animal-themed rooms for no extra charge.
We actually returned to Panakaiki the next day, because all the sudden the weather was great again.
Although it was the best during the storm, we could stay longer at Panakaiki this time around and actually look at the place, instead of just being wet and cold.
These allegedly pancake-like rock formations has given the place its name.
Some of New Zealand's many birds showed up in the sunshine.
Going south to Fox Glacier, one of the two big glaciers on the South Island's west coast (the other being Franz Josef glacier), we went up, up and up. It got pretty cold and foggy in the mountains, let me tell you.
Arriving at Fox Glacier we found ourselves in an old, smelly little shed that was miserably cold. Even with sleeping bags the night promised deadly cold.
Ah, saved by the whiskey.
It was worth enduring the freezing night to wake up to this view.
A group of death-defying adventurers set forth to conquer the Fox Glacier ice monster.
Our guide led us up the mountainside, where we paused to enjoy the view and the vertigo.
It's much bigger than it looks. Much bigger. Do you see the people near the base? No?
Exactly.
Risking my own life I descended into this yawning chasm, forcing a smile at the camera, despite knowing that it could close at any moment and crush me like a paper cup.
Three swedes, one conquered glacier.
Going further south from Fox Glacier there were a bunch of short but spectacular stops along the road.
No, you can't bungy jump from this bridge.
You see those trees by the pool? During mild summers, a certain lichen grows on them that gets bluish in color during the sunset.
No, really, the pools get their name from the water. It's very blue, you see.
Just a beach somewhere on the west coast, with strange black sand.
The way south to Wanaka goes through an scenic mountain landscape.
Scenic indeed.
Queenstown was small and very focused on adventurous tourists, but I guess it was OK. It was surrounded by more of those mountains.
A Queenstown classic - a highly maneuverable jetboat speeding through a narrow ravine and doing 360 turns, which got us pretty wet but thrilled.
Tired of driving, we took a bus tour to Milford Sound. We stopped several times along the way for more of New Zealand's incredible nature...
...like these plains. It's like something right out of the Lord of the Rings movies. You expect a massive Rohirim cavalry charge to shatter the peace and mow you down any minute.
The road got treacherous further into the mountains, with treathening avalanches but also more striking landscapes.
Turn your back on these little buggers and they'd dismantle your car in a minute, out of sheer curiosity.
Glaciers had carved this mighty fjord over the millenia. See that white little dot? That's the ferry. The mountainsides were over one kilometer high.
Three swedes, one sound. And rain, of course.
They said this looked like a lion lying down. Looks more mountain-shaped to me.
No picture can do the massive mountains justice, the way they looked small from a distance and suddenly they towered all the way to the heavens when you got near.
When it rained there where hundreds of temporary waterfalls running down the mountains, so I guess the rain wasn't all bad.
When it also stormed, the waterfalls were sometimes blown back up again.
Turning back north from Queenstown, the landscape didn't get any less majestic and wild.
Leaving Picton at night.
In the middle of the North Island lies the Tongariro national park, which unfortunately we only saw from our car because of the weather. The big volcano is apparently Mount Doom in the Lord of the Rings films.
One of the several thermal parks around Rotorua.
These things bubbled all over the place and emitted steam that smelled like rotting eggs.
We braved the fumes anyway.
The erupting geyer itself wasn't as interesting as the small mountain of sediments it had created.
Sulphur in the water gave the pools funky colors. A group of japanese tourists ignored the warning signs to dip their feet in it. We never saw them again.
Probably because we left right then, but we'd like to think they were dissolved by boiling acid.
Actually, Fredrik felt he had to test the waters.
The fool. How we laughed.
We all wanted to see something related to the Maori, the original polynesian inhabitants of New Zealand. We went to a reconstructed traditional Maori village outside Rotorua, where we were greeted by a warrior making us choose between war or the tour and food we paid for. We chose the latter.
It was a pretty touristy place, but still nice.
Here we are, a mere hour before we hurled ourselves out of a plane at 12.000 feet. Bungy jumping didn't appeal to me, but I'm very glad I tried skydiving.
Since we had some extra time, we returned to Waitomo. The landscape was very picturesque when it wasn't raining. We half expected hobbits to emerge from the hills.
Three swedes, one old tree.
The sunset made us forget how miserable Waitomo was the first time in the rain.
We decided to go on a three hour cave exploring tour, so they slapped wetsuits, harnesses and helmets on us...
...and sent us dangling down a yawning chasm. When I say "yawning" I really mean "a little more than 30 meters deep".
We climbed some in the dark. Then we floated down an underground stream in rubber rings, watching the glow worms in the dark. Then we floated without the rubber rings in the dark. After that we climbed up two waterfalls in the dark. It was also very wet and cramped.
In the end, we did see the light of day again. The cave trip turned out to be one of the best things we did in New Zealand. I strongly recommend it.
North of Auckland is a pocket of old forest that the european settlers for some reason didn't burn down. There are still some of the giant Kauri trees left. This baby is over 30 meters high.
One swede, three sisters. Tree sisters, that is, not the sexy human kind, unfortunately.
Back to Auckland before we went on to Fiji. It turned out to be a nice city.
Very nice indeed.