Travel log of Eli and Anna Bendersky

Hi all,

We spent another day in the Wanaka area before heading north, doing the Rob Roy trek (4 hours) which climbs very close to the Rob Roy glacier in Mt. Aspiring national park.

It was a very beautiful day walk, though the road to it is pretty bad. 30 kilometres of it are unsealed (gravel) with some small fords to cross. It’s nice to have a rental car for cases like this

Then, we drove north along the west coast of the south island. Our first stop was at the Franz Josef glacier. We joined a guided 6-hour climb onto the glacier, which included the ride and all the gear (rain jacket, wool hat and gloves, rubber boots and crampons for ice climbing).

There was a guide and about 10 people. The guide had a huge ice axe with which he carved steps on the glacier to ease walking. In total, we spent 4 hours on the ice. It was pretty amazing - the ice has different colors depending on its depth and age, from blue to cyan to white. The guide also found some interesting ice tunnels and crevasses to squeeze through.

Altogether it was a great experience (there are more photos at the photo album). We also had luck with the weather, as it was neither raining nor too hot or cold. On the next day, as we began driving further north, it started pouring again and we felt lucky that it didn’t coincide with the glacier climb. When it pours here it gets really wet - very strong rain can go on for hours at a time. This is also why the west coast of the south island is a rainforest. It’s very interesting to emerge from a jungle right to a glacier.

We reached Greymouth, where we stayed for two nights in a very beautiful hostel. The hostel also gave out kayaks for free paddling in the nearby river, which we did. However, in contrast to the common NZ waterways which are usually crystal clear and ice cold, the Greymouth river wasn’t too cold but wasn’t too clean either (and Anna managed to fall into it when she climbed out of the kayak…)

Our next stop was Nelson, on the north coast of the south island and near the popular Abel Tasman national park. We spent a couple of days walking around Nelson which has a few nice day walks and beautiful parks, and then drove to Abel Tasman to begin our trek.

There are quite a few options for trekking there - one can go for any period from 1 to 5 days, walking, kayaking or both, and there is also a wide range of accomodation available. We decided to go for the all-water option, renting a kayak for two days (freedom rental, not guided) and spend the night on a backpackers boat hostel.

Our kayak was for 2 persons, quite big and very heavy, but after initial acclimatization we learned to control it pretty well and enjoyed the paddling very much.

It got quite windy and we had some fun trying to propel our kayak forward amidst big waves in a region called The Mad Mile.

We spent the night on Aquapackers, a hostel boat in Anchorage bay. The stay included dinner, breakfast and lunch sandwitches for the next day. We arrived early so we got a double bed, though it was located in a small room with 10 other travellers. They really know how to use up space efficiently on a boat…

The dinner was a barbeque, with nice steaks and horrible sausages, which the travellers were feeding to sea birds when the crew wasn’t looking . After that we played a very stupid card game with a bunch of people from Holland, two Americans, one German and a Kiwi crew girl. The loser of the game was supposed to jump naked to the water, a punishment proposed by the crew girl (it was after dark). Ironically, she lost. And jumped !

On the second day it was calmer and sunnier, and we had time to explore two lagoons along the coast, and two islands with seal colonies. There were also albatrosses, weird diving birds looking very much like penguins (but flying) and cute black birds with red beaks. On one of the islands the seals were just having their morning swim, and didn’t feel too embarassed by us floating just a couple of meters nearby.

We finished the trek wet, sunburned, very tired but happy and were taken back to our car in a water taxi. Then we headed south-east towards the Nelson lakes national park, stopping for a night in a pretty bad hostel in St. Arnaud. In the morning we did a short walk near lake Rotoiti, were badly bitten by sandflies (again !) and continued our journey towards the north-eastern tip of the south island.

Yesterday we stayed in Havelock, a small and relaxed fishing village between Nelson and Picton. In the evening we received a surprising bonus - the owner of the hostel took the guests for a hour-long walk to the forest to see glowworms. We walked with flashlights and stopped at some point, turning them off. It was amazing to see the worms glowing as “stars” all around us. In addition, we watched the owner feed eels in a creek (with sausage and ham !).

Today, after a short walk we drove to Picton, from where we have a ferry to Wellington (North island) on Tuesday.

That’s all for now. Love and kisses.
Anna & Eli

Hi all,

We spent a few days at Dunedin - New Zealand’s “University town” and its surroundings - the Otago peninsula - known for its sightings of wildlife. On a day trip to the peninsula we managed to see Royal Albatrosses - huge sea birds (3m wing span), seals, sea lions (which are, to our expert level of understanding, are just brown seals) and yellow eyed penguins (from afar).

The animal we watched were all in their natural habitat. We found the seals on a remote rock formation on the beach, the albatrosses flying around, and the penguins - walking to their nests on a surfers’ beach at dusk (ignoring the surfers completely, but fearing us…).

In Dunedin we visited the Cadbury chocolate factory, which proved to be more interesting than we expected (we didn’t expect much), and as a bonus we got to taste several kinds of chocolate. Then we headed to one of the city’s biggest attractions - Baldwin Street. Now, what could be special about just a random street in one of Dunedin’s pretty suburbs ? Apparently, Baldwin Street is the steepest street in the world. The average gradient of the street is 3.41 that is, for each 3.41 metres you walk, you ascend by 1 metre of altitude. The maximal gradient of a part of the street is 2.86 - computation of the angle in degrees is left as an exercise to the reader.

After parting with Dunedin, we drove south west to Fiordland national park. For the first two nights we had a booking in a large backpackers hostel in the Te Anau village, right on the bank of lake Te Anau. We booked a cruise in the Milford Sound (the most famous of the many fiords in the park) for the day after our arrival, and drove there in the morning. Unfortunately we had quite a bad luck with the weather on that day - it was raining really really hard (170 mm of rain in a single day !) and we were soaked wet from a short 15 minute sidewalk along the way, in spite of wearing rain proof jackets.

The drive was still well worth it because the road is very beautiful - with high mountains rising steeply on both sides of the way. One positive result of the rain is that it creates a lot of waterfalls flowing from the mountains - truly a spectacular and very unusual sight.

The rain ended before our cruise began, but we still missed most of the sights because of the heavy clouds. We did get to see a lot of waterfalls - under some of which the boat passed, which was nice.

On February 1st we began the 4-day Kepler track. It is a circular 67 km long route along the Kepler mountain range which begins and ends near Te Anau. The first day is a moderate climb up mount Luxmore, which took us around 4 hours. It became rainy and quite cold once we reached above the bush line, but at least the rain drives the sandflies away.

This is a good point to stop and tell what sandflies are. These are small, mosquito-like bloodsucking bastards that disprove the myth that there are no predators in New Zealand. The first time we got badly bitten by them was in the Divide, right after we finished the Routeburn track. A week after and we were still addicted to Fenistil to soothe the terrible scratching. We got bitten again, quite a lot, on the first day of the Kepler. Never mind that we have a pretty good (Australian) insect repellent - sandflies only take a few seconds to bite you 20 times, while you’re reaching for the repellent in the bag.

Back to the track though. In the hut we met a nice group of Israelis and spent time chatting with them on the second the the third day too. We also met a British girl who studies in Melbourne, and a German guy (about 45 years old) who is in the beginning of a 2-year trip to Australia, New Zealand and Asia. In one of our chats a very important question was raised - what was named Kiwi first - the bird or the fruit ? We asked a New Zealand lady who was also trekking and she told us that the bird was definitely first, and that the fruit originally came from China in the 20th century, and was at first called Chinese Goosebumps.

The second day was mostly “Alpine”, which means that the tramp is above the tree line, and hence very exposed to sun, wind, rain and snow. It snowed on us a part of the way. It wasn’t too bad as we could play snowball wars and it didn’t impede walking. Once we crossed the mountain ridge to the other side, the weather changed completely. The rain clouds get stuck on the mountains and don’t pass to the other side.

This, by the way, is the cause of the different climates on the east and west shores of the NZ south island. Lots of rain clouds come from the west and shed vast amounts of rain on the west coast (7 metres of rain annually in Fiordland !). Most don’t get past the mountains, and the east coast is much drier (”only” 1-2 metres of rain annually…)

So, once we started descending from the other side of mount Luxmore, the rain stopped, the sun was shining and we saw 7 rainbows along the way. Can you spot the two in this photo:

(this is lake Manapouri far in the backgroud, by the way)

In total, it took us about 5 hours to finish the second day, which was the most difficult of the track because of the long descent at the end of it. The third and the fourth days were much easier, on an almost level terrain along the shore of lakes Manapouri and Te Anau. The hut on the third night was right on the shore a lake, in very beautiful surroundings with a nice beach (though the water was too cold).

After finishing the track we spent another night in Te Anau and headed north, to Wanaka, which is a beautiful small town on the shores of a lake, with snowy mountains of the Mt Aspiring national park in the background.

The weather is currently very nice - it’s warm and sunny. We will spend a couple of days here exploring the area and then continue north along the western coast.

Here is the route so far.

There are more photos at the photo album.

See you,
Anna & Eli