r/ThornTree

Two of us spent nearly six weeks in New Zealand on the first hang-the-expense trip of our lives. NZ lives on tourism and charges accordingly. TBH you could do it more cheaply but it would take even more advance booking and planning than I spent months on.

For lucapal’s benefit, let‘s start with the no-car part.
Landed in Queenstown after let’s gloss over how many hours in planes and airports, picked up Bee Cards and bussed into town. The bus system goes as far as Arrowtown with its bike trails and the Bee Cards were also valid in Dunedin and Hamilton. Many tour companies will bus you

- to Glenorchy for your choice of hiking or kayaking
- to Te Anau for biking, a bird park, and onward tours to and around MIlford Sound

A picture of takahe will come later, but It was in Te Anau that Mr T was moved to tears to meet a bird that had been thought to be extinct. Gerald Durrell wrote about 1960s captive breeding programs that brought takahe back from the tiny population in Fiordland that had escaped stoat and weasel predation.

Another shuttle with another chatty Kiwi driver whisked us past the parts of the Kawarau gorge and Lake Dunstan that people with better nerves than mine could cycle. Big Sky Bikes had arranged everything for our next five days across the Central Otago Rail Trail. An enthusiastic team has created a 1:1000000 scale model of the solar system along the way.

Three of our hosts had contributed: Ken GIllespie, our driver for a tour of old mining towns, gave fence wire for some of the model planets, and two of our astro hosts helped with the planning. I‘d connected with Paul BIshop in Naseby and Ian Griffin in Middlemarch, and they generously helped Mr T select and image southern-sky targets.

The search for the likeliest clear dark skies had shaped much of our itinerary, and Te Anau and Central Otago, heck, even the rooftop terrace of our Queenstown hotel, delivered in spades. Here are a couple of Mr T‘s subsequently processed images: the Eta Carinae nebula and the marvellously named Fighting Dragons of Ara.

One more kind driver took us from Middlemarch to the middle-of-nowhere terminus of the Taieri Gorge Railway for a spectacular trip into Dunedin. We tiptoed around the broken glass in the student housing ghetto on our way to the science museum headed by the aforementioned Ian Griffin.

For the first time but far from the last, Weather with a capital W forced a change of plans, so instead of a tour to fur seals and yellow-eyed penguins, we took in the Settlers’ Museum, Speight’s Brewery and the exquisite Chinese scholar’s garden with its potted history of Otago’s Chinese community.

Grateful to be driven on the twisty narrow roads of the Otago Peninsula the next day (kiwis call them windy, which they also are, depending how you pronounce it) to the Blue Penguins Pukekura, with stops for shorebirds and albatross.

And then we broke down and rented a car, because I hadn’t been able to plot a bike or bus route to Orokonui Eco Sanctuary. This is one of the increasing number of predator-free shelters on mainland New Zealand, joining the island sanctuaries by dint of rigorous fencing, trapping and hygiene measures (wipe your feet! don’t park your car within three metres of the fence! close that airlock door!). Better picture of the takahe here. We learned a lot about trees here, and many other birds including the melodic tui.

A delayed flight to Wellington gave us only two nights and a day there, just enough for Zealandia sanctuary with its ancient tuatara, kiwis heard but not seen, and the Te Papa Museum. Excellent displays on immigrants and refugees, Maori/Pacific Islanders’ celestial navigation, and of course Gallipoli (more tears).

Last car-free day, a tourist train (almost the only kind left in NZ) took us from Wellington to Hamilton, past sheep, forested gorges and glimpses of the North Island’s volcanic spine.

There’s about three weeks left on the North Island, but I will pause for breath.