Southern Island Highlights with the Heddens

 Akaroa
Jeff simply refers to this idylic town as "Heaven."  The winding road leading here took us over and through hills for around an hour, before dumping us out in an area that looked more like a travel magazine photo spread than real life.  The grass seemed a brighter shade of green and the sparkling water a more brilliant blue-green than the rest of the country.  Akaora is the delightful and welcoming remnants of a French settlement.  Its location, only about an hour and a half outside Christchurch but tucked away between picturesque coves and rolling hills, gives the speck of a town a hidden gem quality that couldn't even be worn off by the other tourists, souvenir shops, or upscale bars and restaurants.  Even with some tourist and vacation-home hype, Akaora was just too tiny, sleepy, and otherwise perfect to come across as anything but one of the sweetest small towns we'd ever been to.

The Giant's House
Akaora was also home to one of the most unexpectedly wonderful sights in all of New Zealand: The Giant's House.  This amazing house and grounds are the culmination of one artists' many years of hard work and creativity.  Decorated with unbelievable mosaic sculptures throughout,  the Giant's Garden is a one of a kind place. The house is a gorgeously restored old mansion, painted a bit like a designer Easter egg. The owner and artist is also a trained horticulturist, so her garden, beyond having dozens of striking mosaic pieces, is meticulously landscaped.  The time and effort put into all the details of the garden and home, large and small, are absolutely amazing.  There should be a better word for it, but amazing will have to do.




 The word for the admission price for the Giant's House is easier: flabbergasting.  Annette was prepared to turn around without seeing the House, even after a 20 minute walk to get there.  Without knowing too much about it, $20 (US) certainly seemed steep.  Normally this would be too much to pay for any attraction, but we took the plunge and didn't regret it.  While $20 per person is still a lot, the energy, both creative and pure manual labor, that the artist poured into the house, garden, and grounds radiated in always beautiful, often inspiring ways.  She incorporated themes from history, modern society, the more conventional art world, and even the bible in the most creative collection of sculpture and mosaic we have ever seen (or could ever imagine).  The house, both the outside and what we could see of the inside, carried the artists wacky artistic genius as well, adding to the illusion that we had stumbled into some brightly colored fantasy world.  The Giant's House changed our concepts of art, gardening, home-ownership, and mosaic for ever.  Marvelous!

My parents came to New Zealand, and all I got was this stupid cold...
We're convinced that Dale got healthy and regained his strength by infecting all of us with his horrible Seattle bug.  Marie was hit hard at the very end, while Jeff and Annette took turns with the funk around the five day to one week mark after exposure.  While our illnesses weren't as epic as Contagion, we still sometimes wished Dale had been quarantined upon entering the country, sparing us the itchy throats, pressurized sinuses, and dripping noses.  It was a bit like a sickness relay race, with all four of us passing the virus baton around as we motored around NZ.  As it was, we all felt a little bit of Dale's pain and slept a little more on some driving days, so it wasn't that big of a deal.  Annette did miss an entire stop with a sweet as waterfall (on the North Island), but that's what digital cameras are for, right!?



Mt. Cook
Mt. Cook, now also called by its Maori name, Aoraki, is famous as NZs tallest mountain (12,316 f), and maybe a bit less so as the training ground and favorite peak of the first person to summit Mt. Everest - Sir Edmund Hillary.

Sir Hillary's confident mug stared at us from the NZ $5 bill long before his statue and many photos did the same in and around the Hermitage at Mt. Cook, which is where we lived it up for two nights in a posh room with amazing views of Mt. Cook and the surrounding mountains.  The mountain loomed large, as did Hillary's legacy.  Hillary could probably only be more beloved in NZ if he had managed also to play for the All Blacks at some point.  Sir Hillary is a remarkable man and climber, but we all agreed that it would have been nice to see his Sherpa and master climber, Tenzing Norgay, get a little more credit.  But NZ's favorite explorer/climber wasn't the only interesting thing to learn about out by Mt. Cook.  There were the mountains themselves, which provided beautiful backdrops to several very good hikes (in NZ they call them "tramps," and a packed picnic lunch is a "tramper hamper").

 

Dale's favorite part of staying at the historic Hermitage was probably the night we spent stargazing with a semi-professional astronomer through binoculars and a high powered telescope.  We were blessed with a really clear evening, perfect for viewing the Milky Way, the Magellanic Clouds, Alpha Centari, and other Southern Hemisphere night sky objects we don't get to see from our part of the world.  The Hermitage also had a planetarium, inside which we saw films varying from informative and interesting (the one about black holes) to creepy and laugh out loud funny on the unintentional comedy scale (the one about a young boy and his handsome adult friend that was really supposed to be about an amazing observatory built on the highest peak in Chile).

Franz Joesf Glacier
The best part about Franz-Josef the town was the breakfast we had the morning before our big hike.  Their banana French toast was a big hit with us, but all the food we had at The Landing (Franz Josef's "trendiest" restaurant, we were told) was delicious.

The second best part about the glacier itself was getting to hear Dale say "Glazure" over and over.  It's difficult to say why he pronounces "Glace-ure" as though he is describing his favorite kind of doughnut, but it was sure fun to make fun of him for it!  A woman we met at the Kauri museum pronounced the word as "Glass-ee-ure," so Dale certainly could have sounded goofier.  But not by much.

The first best part about Franz Josef Glacier was the very difficult and very rewarding monster of a hike we took to a lookout over the massive but (sadly) shrinking chunk of slow-moving ice.  We saw nature in action, as two landslides made a ruckus we couldn't ignore.  And the power of the rocks rolling down the slopes across from us were, even from a distance, quite evident.  Beyond the above, we think photos will best describe this wonderful hike:

Doubtful Sound
One thing that practically every tourist visiting New Zealand does is a cruise of Milford Sound.  Not us!  Thanks to Marie's expert planning, we dodged the more popular Milford in favor of its equally spectacular, less visited, and more detached neighbor Doubtful Sound.  Both sounds are at the southern end of NZ's South Island in a fantastic area called Fiordland.  Marie proved herself a true ninja of trip planning by finding us a small boat to spend two days on, instead of the normal few hours (after several of travel) or a night on a larger, slower, and less atmospheric boat with everyone else.  We only ever saw two other boats on the sound while we were out on it, and if you include the four other passengers and two crew members on our own boat, only six other people in two days.  The feeling of solitude was made memorable by large mountains, long and deep fjords, and waterfalls everywhere we looked.

The weather varied from misty and drizzly to flat out raining for pretty much our entire two days on the sound, but the precipitation just made the mood more mystic and the waterfalls stronger.  There was plenty to do our first day on the boat.  We tooled around various arms of the area and learned about Doubtful Sound and Fjordland in more detail.  We also checked crayfish traps, and watched as one of our crew went diving in the frigid water for more when the traps turned up only a few.  We later found out that we needed so many crayfish because they were going to be our dinner!  Also included in our dinner were some of the fish we caught later on.  One gentleman on our boat caught, ten or twelve, while we were content to catch one or two each.  Annette caught her very first fish and the fun that was had by all made all that standing in the rain worth while.  Jeff caught the largest fish on the boat, but it was only good for bait and not for eating by us humans.  Although, his fish should probably be credited with luring many of the kingfisher's dozen or so fish!

Our meals were all pretty delicious, especially for being cooked on a boat.  And dinner was made even better with a delightful bottle of wine A & J picked up on one of those Australian winery visits.  We all slept well after a day of magnificent scenery, sea lion watching, fishing, and listening to a know-it-all  (but very nice) Italian gentleman tell everyone how it is all day.  We spent over an hour kayaking the next morning, and that lune Jeff jumped into the freezing water from the top of the boat.  We were told by our crew that at least one person does it every trip, so Jeff figured someone had to do it.  Plunging into the sound was good for the soul, but the body and mind both benefited from the serene morning spent kayaking and soaking up all that pretty.

Queenstown
We only briefly skimmed the surface of this perfect little mountain/resort town with the Heddens, but the drive in and setting of the town were both a picturesque (can we use that again in a NZ post...?) as it gets.  Mountains.  Water.  Sheep. Very Few People. Winding roads and vast, wide open sky.  Just wow!

Queenstown was also where Dale and Marie caught their flight away from us and back toward Seattle.  Seeing Annette's parents go was a lowlight of our time with them.  But the good news was that we saw them like fifty times at the airport between dropping them off and them actually leaving, since we had some business stuff to plan for our final week in NZ.

Our two weeks with the Heddens went by too quickly, but we made ourselves (and themselves) feel better by stressing that we'd be home in only two months!