New Zealand's “Untamed Wilderness”
After our windless but otherwise wonderful “sail” off the North Island, our plans took us to New Zealand’s South Island. Zeynep had planned a great adventure, hiking for several days unsupported on a small island at the southern tip of the South Island… so basically the end of the world. But that knee I banged on the boat wasn’t feeling all that hot, and a quick trip to a doctor on arrival in Queenstown confirmed that hiking wasn’t in the cards.
Fortunately, our collective travel planning abilities with spreadsheets (cue hero music) is not insignificant. So at almost literally the last minute we completely changed out plans, opting out of unsupported hiking on a bum knee and opting into a road trip up the West Coast Region of the South Island, known here as “New Zealand’s Untamed Natural Wilderness.”
New Zealand’s West Coast is sparsely inhabited and much of it is quite remote. To get here we drove from Queenstown through a pass in the Southern Alps, popping out the other side suddenly at the Tasman Sea crashing into shore, which definitely gives you a sense of “untamed.” Along the way it rained a fair bit, something it does all the time here thanks to the rain shadow created by the Southern Alps, which in turn created stunning rainbows at every turn in the road. The one at the top of this post was the most complete rainbow either of us had ever seen. Turns out what’s at the end of the rainbow isn’t a pot of gold, just the paradise that is New Zealand’s South Island.
A quick note on the “sparsely populated” nature of the West Coast Region. I should have clarified, sparsely populated with humans. As Outside Magazine recently put it in their South Island travel guide, “Ever wondered why such a gorgeous country has managed to remain relatively unpopulated? Sand flies, my friends, and millions of them.” At some point I made the mistake of opening the car door at a stop to get some fresh air, only to shortly find myself being sliced open by the knife-shaped mouthparts (not kidding) of the female sandfly. New Zealand is a super special place, and I guess by law of large numbers it had to have something going against it.
Much, much less frightening than the sandflies are New Zealand’s famous (and endangered) rowi Kiwi birds. Our first stop on our roadtrip was Franz Josef Glacier, which the Maori call Ka Roimata o Hine Hukatere, “the tears of the avalanche maiden.” (Yeah, us colonizers didn’t do the world any favors by renaming everything…) The small town at the terminus of the glacier, which spills out of the Southern Alps into the sea, is conveniently home to the West Coast Wildlife Center. Rangers here go out into the bush and retrieve Kiwi eggs before they hatch to protect them from stoats, which were imported many years ago to control the rabbit population (the rabbits themselves brought by the British for hunting sport), but decided eating Kiwi hatchlings was easier than chasing rabbits. The eggs are then incubated, and once hatched the Kiwis are cared for until they’re strong enough to protect themselves in the wild and released. The fluffy guy above is named Scooby!
While at Franz Josef Glacier we stayed at a place called “Rainforest Retreat,” which at first I thought was just some creative marketing. But no, the West Coast is home to one of the world’s few temperate rainforests, and the hotel was indeed nestled right in the bush. Our “tree hut” had, as you can see above, quite the intimate view of the rain and the forest.
Finally, I’ll say that while I’m pretty bummed that we didn’t get to go hiking at the end of the world like we planned, the West Coast has been pretty swell to us thus far. Exhibit A above, Exhibit B below, there’s not much here except stunningly beautiful, “untamed wilderness,” and New Zealand’s world class white wine. Not a bad Plan B for this week.
