On the 12th we packed up and said goodbye to Verena (but left her our contact info) and got a ride into Collingwood. Our bus left at 11am and arrived in Takaka at about 11:30. Since we were early we walked to the cafe and ate a huge bowl of Kumera (”Kum’ra”, aka sweet potato) chips (fries). The bus for Motueka (”Mot”) left at noon, we ran into Eric the bicyclist from Oregon again.

The bus dropped us off at our hostel, we stayed at the White Elephant again. We went to the internet cafe for a few hours and then went grocery shopping. Evening was spent at the hostel re-organizing packs and filling out postcards.

The next morning was cold!! We got up at 6:30am and packed, our bus left from the i-site at 8am. We arrived in Nelson a little after 9am, and after some trouble finding a phone number for the rental car company we were picked up from the i-site. The car we got was really really nice!! It was a 4-door Nissan and it was huge compared with the last one. It drove nicer, too.

We headed south on highway 6 and took the inland road to Greymouth, and we arrived in Whataroa about 6 hours later. Not much exciting to tell - stopped for soda and gas once.

The White Heron Tours cabins were ok. Small and with a kitchen, though the toilets were outside and in the cold. I made pumpkin soup with potatoes for dinner (YUM) and we role played all evening.

It rained lots all night, and I slept really well. In the morning unfortunately it was still raining, so we didn’t get to go kayaking on the lagoon. We went to Okarito though and spoke with the company, they said we could go the next day if the weather improved. They also gave us directions to where we could see Fernbirds, so we drove back up the road and walked on a short little trail looking for them. It was still raining and there weren’t any Fernbirds. There were Brown Creepers, but due to rain, lousy lighting, and foggy binoculars we got only horrible looks at them.

Since we had nothing else to do we headed to Franz Josef. They had a nice visitor center there and I bought some stuff. We went shopping in town and had lunch at a cafe, but didn’t go see the glacier because of the weather. We headed back to the cabin and were bored for most of the afternoon, and I called mommy.

I slept well again and we were up by 7am. The weather was awesome - sunny with clouds hanging on the mountains. We headed back to the trail off the Okarito road to look for Fernbird. We had to wait awhile, but I got to see one!! They’re hard to find and they don’t hold still for very long, but we heard them dueting and that helped. There were also Redpolls feeding on seedheads, I hadn’t seen those before either.

Despite the good weather we decided not to go kayaking, mostly because we had a long drive to Wanaka ahead of us and in order to make it there we’d have to leave by 2pm - meaning we’d only have 3-4 hours to kayak. We stopped in Fox Glacier for gas and breakfast - I had a bagel. We drove south down the very sindy (but pretty) highway and stopped at Lake Moeraki. It was windy and there wasn’t much to see in terms of birds. We went south again through Haast pass which was absolutely GORGEOUS. I haven’t felt more like I was in Middle Earth from the LOTR movies than passing through those mountains. There was a wide, rocky river that was this amazing blue color, and waterfalls cascading down the mountains absolutely everywhere. A lot of the mountains were snow-capped.

After the Haast Pass we stoped at Makaroa, where there was a 20-minute bush walk. We didn’t see anything terribly exciting… there were lots of tuis. Then we drove down along Lake Wanaka and Lake Hawea - both of which were sapphire blue and surrounded by high snow-capped mountains. Wanaka is at the south end of Lake Wanaka, it’s a smallish city and it’s really nice.

We stayed at Wanaka Bakpaka, which was a pretty hostel right on the lake. We went downtown to check out the shops and wound up in a store that sold Icebreakers. A really nice sales lady talked Vanessa into buying a wool shirt. I considered getting one because I know the Milford is going to be cold!! The lady also looked at the hole in my Icebreaker leggings and replaced them for me! Wow!!

We went to the grocery store and then out to eat at an italian place where I had a very filling spaghetti with meat sauce.

The hostel was really noisy during the night, the doors were loud and easy to close too hard and people slammed them at 1am. I slept ok but Vanessa didn’t. We checked out and went to cafe, we were hoping that the sports store in Wanaka would open at 9am so that I could buy my shirt. It didn’t though, so we took the shorter route to Queenstown (to save gas) and parked the car so we could go shopping. I found another store that had the shirt I wanted and I bought a black Icebreaker crewe. I also did some xmas shopping. There’s a NZ artist I really like who paints horses - Rosemary Parcell, but I haven’t been able to find prints. If someone wanted to get me a xmas present I would really like a large 12×13 print of Half Pass Grey on Gold (it’s on the website).

I still need to find a hat, gloves, and a duffle bag, but I plan to buy those tomorrow and shop around for good ones today. We returned the rental car and I (stupidly) went and figured out how much the car rental had cost me altogether for this trip…. owie. I had pumpkin soup for dinner again, I should bring some home to the states so everyone can try it.