Kids

Posted on August 4, 2016 by d4vid

Was able to meet up with five of my favorite ex-ODW coworkers.  They were all TDs back in Shanghai.  I call them “the Weta kids” because they left en masse for Weta.

More slightly bizarre Kiwi Mexican food, but the margaritas were great.

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Comfy

Posted on August 4, 2016 by d4vid

Stayed in this comfy, apartment-like hotel in Downtown Wellington my last couple of nights.

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Indy

Posted on August 4, 2016 by d4vid

My New Zealand Air flight from Christchurch back to Wellington was in a prop plane!  I felt like Indiana Jones!

The crew, however, did not appreciate it when I yelled “Nice try, Lao Che!” out at the tarmac and slammed the cabin door shut.

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Simulacrum

Posted on August 4, 2016 by d4vid

Back in Christchurch, I was in a bad way.  It had been nearly two whole weeks since I had had any Mexican food and I was jonesing hard.  I found a place with the promising name of “Mexicano’s”.

Yeah, um, no.

It was like a strange interpretation of Mexican food.  It reminded me of two things:

1. The sorta-kinda “California cuisine” at the California Pizza Kitchens in China where every dish looks like it was reverse engineered from a picture from an American CPK menu.

2. The synthetic-tasting steak Jeff Goldbum sends through the telepod and makes Geena Davis try in Cronenberg’s The Fly.

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Castle

Posted on August 4, 2016 by d4vid

This spooky outcropping of rocks is called Castle Hill.
Undoubtedly haunted.

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Skid

Posted on August 4, 2016 by d4vid

I saw this road sign all over New Zealand.  (And this was the best picture you could get?  Well, I’m sorry for the potato quality, but if you don’t like it why don’t you go to New Zealand and spend all your time capturing the perfect road sign still life?)

I love trying to imagine what, exactly, the car had just experienced to produce those particular overlapping skid marks.  It’s like the couch stuck in the staircase in Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency.

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Watershed

Posted on August 4, 2016 by d4vid

From the South Island’s west coast, I headed east, straight through the mountain range at the heart of the island.  It felt very much like driving through the Rocky Mountains.
A rainbow ended a the small town of Arthur’s Pass in the middle of the mountains.I wasn’t able to capture it well, though.  But I tried. Yet more majestic mountains. Yet more stunning vistas.
There is so much natural beauty throughout the island that you almost grow numb to it all. It just keeps going and going.

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Aviary

Posted on August 4, 2016 by d4vid

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the birds.  Now, IANAO (“I am not an ornithologist”) but even I was gobsmacked by the sheer variety of birds throughout New Zealand.  I saw more species of birds in two weeks in New Zealand than I had in my entire life up until that point.

Before the coming of man, these islands truly were a paradise for birds.  And birds filled every ecological niche, even those that are filled by mammals in other ecosystems.  It’s fascinating.

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Feast

Posted on August 3, 2016 by d4vid

Before venturing through Arthur’s Pass back to Christchurch, I spent the night in a small coastal town called Hokitika.  Grabbed a bottle of New Zealand Pinot Noir from a liquor store and a pepperoni pizza from Fat Pipi Pizzas before checking in to a sleepy place called the Stations Inn, high above the town, overlooking the sea.

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Glacial

Posted on August 3, 2016 by d4vid

Didn’t have time to get very close to Fox Glacier.  Took this shot looking through the valley with the glacier in the distance.
I was able to get much closer to the Franz Josef Glacier, but it started raining and the surrounding mountains were exploding with waterfalls.

The glacier was named after Franz Josef I of Austria by Julius von Haast.  (Presumably because every other damn thing in New Zealand was already named after Haast himself.)  If “Franz” and “Austria” ring a bell it’s because Franz Josef’s great-grandchild was Archduke Franz Ferdinand whose assassination would eventually precipitate the World War I Memorial in Glenorchy.  Small world.  And the slow glacier of history grinds on.

In cheerier news, the mountains along this glacier were used for the “Beacons of Gondor” sequence in The Return of the King.

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Gnarled

Posted on August 3, 2016 by d4vid

I reached the west coast of the South Island, looking out over the Tasman Sea.The landscape often struck me as looking like a particularly well-watered version of San Diego.  But then there were these strange, gnarled trees everywhere which made the place feel more than a little alien.

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Decor

Posted on August 3, 2016 by d4vid

Had a surprisingly tasty venison lasagna at the Hard Antler Bar & Restaurant in Haast.

In my head, Gaston kept singing “I use antlers in all of my decorating!”

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Riparian

Posted on August 2, 2016 by d4vid

Cutting through the mountains driving westward to the coast of the South Island, I kept crossing and recrossing crystalline rivers like this one.

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Postcard

Posted on August 2, 2016 by d4vid

Every inch of the Sound Island felt worthy of a postcard.  This was just some random mountains by some random lake.

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Avalanche

Posted on August 2, 2016 by d4vid

The road to Milford Sound was treacherous.  It had just been cleared of the snow which blocked the road and kept me in Glenorchy those extra two nights.  The mountains were so steep, so snow-covered that the entire area was an avalanche risk and cars were forbidden to stop.

I snapped a single pic waiting at a signal for the tunnel under the mountain to clear of outbound traffic.  (See that tiny black oval at the end of the road?  That’s the single lane tunnel under that giant fucking mountain.)
Milford Sound was an eerie clash of alpine and tropical.    The foliage looked downright Hawaiian, yet the mountains were dusted with snow.
I had miscalculated how long the drive all the way from Glenorchy would take.  The day’s last sightseeing boats out into the Sound had already left.  The Sound itself was calm and quiet. I found this giant block of sacred greenstone (“pounamu” in Maori) in the sightseeing boat terminal.
In fact the Maori name for the South Island is “Te Wai Pounamu” which means “Island of the Greenstone Water.”I started worrying about getting snowed in, so I hurried back.  All the way to Queenstown.

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