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''Là, tout n'est qu'ordre et beauté, luxe, calme et volupté''

Charles Baudelaire

New Zealand offers a wealth of outdoor activities. You can walk through pristine native bush or geothermal reserves, raft or kayak in sparkling rivers, conquer mountains and bathe in bubbling mineral pools.

Adventurous travellers can ski a volcano, walk on a glacier, shoot a rapid or dive amongst dolphins and whales. You can also explore the interesting Maori culture at a traditional village or meander along famous wine trails. After all that, you'll have scratched only the surface.

The reason to go to New Zealand is to enjoy spectacular scenery and a unique, unspoiled environment. It offers the stability of a first-world country and a welcoming English speaking population. All the diversity means you could visit again and again, and still enjoy a unique experience every time.

The Lord of the Rings trilogy was filmed throughout New Zealand. You can visit landscapes featured in the film, although sets were removed after filming. There is an incredible array of options to follow Frodo's trail and realize that athough Middle Earth is fiction, the beauty of the South Island is very real.




Christchurch



I arrived in Christchurch from Sydney on a late afternoon flight and landed amidst of a crisp and clear day. My window seat offered some stunning views over the Southern Alps. The weather is the one things that can ruin a trip to New Zealand - it's as unpredictable as in Northern Europe, and since most of the joy of this place is in the outdoors, it's a major risk. Fortunately for me, my first day was one of many sunny days I have had in the country.

Although the Kiwis are freaking out over 'biosecurity', New Zealand custom official put their best foot forward to welcome freshly arrived visitors . It is all a very pleasant experience, unless the sniffer dog uncovers any greenery in your luggage. Fail to declare an apple and it is a 200 dollar fine and full cavity search for you buddy.

I had opted to go without any form of guidance in New Zealand, the landscape is a goldmine of personal advice anyway.




Christchurch, my first port of call in NZ was the only Kiwi city I really liked. Not only does it have decent restaurants and some sort of cosmopolitan feel to it, but unlike its Northern counterparts, it doesn't look like it was created out of prefab 'build your own bungalow in a weekend' kit. New Zealand is pretty rural nation and they don't really properly develop towns. It is a very lowrise bungalist type of country. In all fairness, some of the older houses may be nice enough, but most of the newer ones look a bit like a municipal toilet block found on a recreation area along the motorways.

There seems to be a 'wannabe America' attitude that has influenced the development of small towns, meaning they look just as the ugly stretched-out malls dotting every corner of the USA. Furthermore, given the fact it is a bit of a natural habitat for them, all the big boys in the international fast food business (the Colonel, the Clown and the King) are represented here. If it wasn't for the funny accent and the left side driving you'd be easily fooled into thinking you are in small town America.

Christchurch, on the contrary, is New Zealand's oldest university town. It has a pleasant air, attractive stone houses, and a meandering river, the Avon, bisecting the town. It is a nice place to spend a few days relaxing.



Getting out of Christchurch, you quickly realize what the real NZ is about. And it's about it being absolutely deserted. NZ is a country a little bigger than the UK but it has only about 4 million people. What's more to this lack of density, of the 4 million, only a quarter live on the South Island, so as soon as I had cleared the 'Big City', I had landed in the middle of the NZ of sheep, postcards and the Lord of the Rings.



Transport



I presume nobody has heard of 'The Kiwi Experience'. It is one of the three main transportation companies operating in the country. Naturally, knowing very little about transport in NZ, I looked into this. What it offers you is the chance to travel around all NZ's traveller hell-holes on a coach full of wasted teenagers. Sounds irresistible, doesn't it? It is very poetically nicknamed the "fuck-truck" and this certainly makes it is irresistible to certain types, but you really need a certain mindset to appreciate it; in fact, anyone who enjoys playing organized drinking games with near strangers would probably quite like it. Still, lacking motivation, I looked into this option thinking perhaps it was incredibly cheap, but no. If you are by yourself it works out at around NZ$40 a day whereas you can rent a car for NZ$35; why anyone with a drivers license would possibly use the 'Kiwi Experience' beats me.

Anyway, it narrowed my options down to either renting a car or to buying one. I got quite lucky and came across 3 backpackers from the Midwest who were in a hurry to sell their car 'cheap as chips'.

It seemed like a nice enough car, although its squeaking doors and out of line bonnet suggested that it may once have been two cars. So after some ceremonial tire kicking, authoritive hood popping and suspicious chin rubbing, I decided it was good enough - I mean what do you expect for 350 Euros.



Obtaining registration for a car in NZ is also a walk in the park. The process only takes about twenty minutes, if there's a queue at the post office, that is, and in my case there was. After I filled the A4 page and paid the 10 dollar service charge, the car was mine. The whole process took no more then a few minutes.

I couldn't believe my bad luck as soon as I walked out to discover that within the five minutes I had overshot my parkmeter, I got booked a twelve dollar parking fine. The free man's smile I was sporting quickly vanished. I mean, what the fuck? I had only just transferred the ownership of the car and had to deal with the cops straight away, talk about a good buy!




Mount Hutt

I brushed it off and took the car out for a spin around the island. My first interesting spot on the way South was the Mt Hutt ski field. The road up was snowed in and thus quite frightening. There were no crash barriers and, for around 6km, there was a ravine varying between 100 and 500 meters. I didn't trust my car just yet so I parked it and hitched a ride up. Almost everywhere along the road, one wrong move and you would be tumbling down; my Kiwi driver didn't seem to care, and drove up at 90 km/h, pissed.

Parking ticket aside, and feeling light from the idea of having escaped a close casket funeral, I can say that it was a lucky day. I had arrived at Mt Hutt on the only day of the year when they held a special promotion with free ski passes for everyone.

The ski fields and the snow are disappointing to anyone used to the European Alps. The slopes are smooth but they are icy and rocks are emerging from under the thin layer of snow. I couldn't complain though, it was still a great way to spend the day.

From Mount Hutt, I made my way down to Wanaka and en route, I made a stop at the coastal town Timaru, where the cozy hostel was so empty that it could have been my own house.

Wanaka





On my way to Wanaka I learned my first NZ lesson. If you have anything less than a full tank, you'd better fill up; sheep don't need petrol stations. After a 30 minutes drive out of Timaru to Wanaka, my fuel gauge indicated a frighteningly low level and, according to the odd farmer I drove past, my best bet would be to make a U-turn and backtrail all the way. I was a bit gutted but it was still better then ending up spending the night in the middle of absolutely nowhere.


Wanaka

Wanaka is well worth it though. The crystal-clear waters of New Zealand's fourth largest lake reflect the snow-capped peaks of Mt Aspiring National Park, whose dominant feature is towering above a magnificent glacier-sculpted wilderness.

A wide range of attractions and adventure sports is all within reach of Wanaka. You can take a scenic cruise on the Lake or sample locally made wines; you could also hike some easily accessible trails to venture into the hills and mountains surrounding the city.

Anyway, skiing, heli-skiing, snowboarding, mountain biking and climbing are all available in this area. Therefore, Wanaka is a really nice place to relax in, and I did so for a few days before heading down to the real adrenaline mecca of New Zealand: Queenstown


New Zealand (between Wanaka and Queenstown)

Queenstown

Queenstown is at the foot of the "Remarakbles", a range of mountains named for their unusual dead straight north south orientation. It also sits on the banks of a remarkable beautiful lake.

Queenstown is NZ's extreme sports capital, which is cool up to a point. It offers the full monty. It is the town where the bungy jump was invented and therefore it features the highest jump in the world. I had had my share of the Bungee jumping experience in Australia and felt no inclination to reiterate it. Actually I'm no fan at all of this extreme 'sport'.

Now I tried, I really tried, to keep an open mind when it came to dormitories. I don't know if the Lion's Rugby Tour played part in there being so many Brits in Queenstown that day, but the town was packed with them; and so was my dorm.

After another defeat by the British contingent against the All Blacks, I made it back to my bunk. The snoring Irish bloke made it impossible to fall asleep and in the semi-darkness I observed the habits of my room companions. One experienced traveller seemed to have developed a curious habit of falling asleep with one eye closed and the other one open to scan the room and watch his stuff. It was a pretty admirable feat, and I'm sure he was a top chap in his own kind of way, but the fact that he kept an ice axe close by made him come across as a slightly paranoid fellow.

You do indeed spend time with absolute weirdo's in these places, and although my valuables were stored in the trunk of my car at all times, I decided I had had it with the dorm experience.

Someone told me that 85% of the Queenstown workforce is imported and I can believe it. It is very difficult to find any locals working there. Visitors are all foreigners, and if English girls ever wonder why they have a reputation as slag's abroad, they should look no further than Queenstown. Even a hunchback could get laid there.

Franz Joseph's Tramp

I have been told over and over by New Zealanders that I shouldn't leave their country without indulging myself at least once with one of the many beautiful tramps found all over the country. Despite my Dutch origins, I have to say that such a display of liberalism completely took me aback. I mean, where else on earth could it be suggested that the beauty of a country is to be sampled in a whorehouse?

As I later discovered in New Zealand, the term 'tramp' can actually be used both as a noun or a verb. Out here a tramp doesn't exactly designate a prostitute nor does tramping actually suggest you black-out on a boozy night and wake up covered in vomit on someone's lawn. No, here a 'tramp' is in fact simply another word for a trek.

Now, what is so wrong with the term walking that seems to have made it fall in disgrace so much? Just pick up any tourist flyer or guidebook across the world and the chances are that it will be littered with the words 'trek' and 'hike' but they will systematically avoid the good old-fashioned word 'walk'.

It makes me wonder if it would really be so hard for tour operator to make their sales targets if they sold mountain walks instead of more adventurous sounding treks? Although both refer to the exact same activity, their marketing suggests that they believe trekking is the way to the riches. I am, on the other hand, a little less convinced by this and I'm sure two American dudes (both called George, by the way) would definitely agree with me.

Take the the two titans of science fiction, Star Wars and Star Trek. Well, my first George, George Lucas, with a worldwide gross Box Office total of $5.67B, has not only completely smoked his competitors' meager $1.56B, but also proved that it is Skywalking that rules the galaxy, not Star Trekking it.

But back here in the reality of planet Earth, the other George (ironically a big fan of another kind of Star Wars) who has every reason to prefer the use of the word 'walk' is none other than the current American President. Indeed, if the Kiwis had it their way with the English language, he would be named George Tramper Bush; haha, now how do you market that in the political arena?

Anyway, I digress and, putting linguistic considerations aside, I agree that there are indeed some superb walks on the Southern Island. Take the Franz Joseph Glacier walk; it is quite a nice stroll through rocky terrain leading to a huge ice cube covered in dirt. Sounds wonderful doesn't it? Well it is actually not a bad way to spend an afternoon.





Franz Joseph is a place that is famous for having one of the fastest glaciers in the world. An astounding amount of snow falls in the area and makes the glacier come down all the way to the forest covering the feet of the surrounding mountains. The walk around the glacier is nice but climbing it would be a more adventurous endeavor, requiring you to hire a guide, strapping on some crampons and carrying an ice axe. Since I felt absolutely no inclination for any of this, and didn't manage to steal the axe in the dormitory, I just spend my time strolling around at the base of Franz Joseph and I really enjoyed it.

Back on the road, I observed that the West Coast's damp climate results in some of the swishes temperate rainforests in the world. Stuff grows incredibly well there. I drove forever and ever on a long day through largely deserted and very spectacular wet scenery of huge old trees, turquoise lakes and fabulous snow capped mountains. It really made me come to grips with just how uninhabited this part of the country is.

Everywhere you go on south Island, except the far north east, you are pretty much guaranteed a lovely drive. In sharp contrast to the drive on the West Coast, Greymouth itself is not lovely at all.

Greymouth

If you are going to be a shithole, you might as well become the biggest shithole in the country. Greymouth exemplifies this like no other place in New Zealand. The key to its success? A well thought out masterplan combining location, climate and people. To become a great sphincter, a city must start by chosing the rainiest location in the country. With about 300 wet days a year, the first settlers had found the perfect spot to accomplish their objective and could proceed to choosing an evocative name for their pile of shit. Now how about Greymouth... Yes, no doubt, they had found it and could start running out on the streets butt naked and yell Eureka! They had nailed it.

Once these initial criteria are met, the city needs to wrap itself in a lot of uninspiring industrial type buildings to convey its unpleasant ghost-town atmosphere; and then finally, it needs a sizable population of terribly nosy and slightly paranoid citizens to make it wear its crown with pride.

The result in Greymouth is quite staggering and makes you wonder how exactly they manage to convince these people to stay? I guess they just simply lead them to the bottle, a recipe that always seems to prove effective.

Indeed, what would you do in a place where from one minute to the next, at around 4PM, streets that were alive - in their small town kind of way- were suddenly completely deserted of any human soul? Or how would you react if the owner of the bakery, just as she realized you were trying to rush in only seconds after the 4PM curfew, quickly turned the door lock to leave you outside in the rain, all the while ogling you with a raised eyebrow before forcefully slamming the shutters down without uttering a word? Yes, you would probably start drinking too.

Greymouth actually made me feel as though I'd landed in some bleached out remake of the series Twin Peaks. It is really the kind of place where everybody knows your secrets better than you do and, as a foreigner strolling through town with a Dale Cooper type of enthusiasm, I was leaving a lot of suspicious "curtain gazers" behind me in my wake.

Given this, it comes as something of a surprise that most of the natives love it there. Greymouth may be a real dump, but the dump is home.

I really had no regrets leaving the next morning, even though I realized about 30 km away from town that I had left my travel diary in the hostal. Even such a significant loss wasn't a compelling enough reason to turn back.

Arthur's Pass

After that day in Greymouth, at 7.30 AM (an unsurprising early start), I set off back inland up into the mountains towards Kaikoura. It was a superbly sunny day, and the sun reflected brilliant orange hues on the distant peaks of the Southern Alps. I was in high spirits.

It was a beautiful drive through wild mountain countryside, plunging ravines, icing sugar snow capped peaks on the tops of the mountains. My route took me over Arthur's Pass, which is an area where you can find some decent tramps (treks dude, not prostitutes) throughout the woods. Further away, I found some ski fields, but due to the rather mild weather for the season, most of them where unfortunately closed.

I made my way to Hanmer Springs and spent a day there playing Golf. Although I enjoyed shooting some balls into the wilderness, I had to actually stage the picture hereunder; my handicap has regressed so dramatically that I currently have a hard time finding the greens.




Kaikoura

Kaikoura is stuck out on a peninsula and, by NZ municipal standards, it is a rather sweet place. What makes it spectacular is the fact that it has mountains down to the sea. Now, I realized that a lot of places claim to have mountains down to the sea. This usually means they just have some pretty big hills within spitting distance of the coast. Not so in Kaikoura; they have the real thing: massive snowcapped peaks pretty much set on the beach. Awesome.







I'd come to Kaikoura to see the seals and there were plenty of them all around me. I'd never really given seals much attention before, but basically being a seal seems to involve lying on your ass in the sun all day. The seals actually look like the Gangster Rappers of the animal world. Wander too close of their "hood" and they'll wrestle their weight towards you to show you their fangs and give you a sample of their rather bad breath in order to scare you away.










Picton

On a map, the sounds of Malborough look as though they should be one of the most beautiful places on earth, consisting of spectacular coastline and indented coves but, as you drive through them, they're kind of disappointing.

The little port of Picton's sole purpose seems to be to give you a place to catch the ferry as you head up to Wellington, on the North Island.

Wellington

Wellington, the capital was again packed with Brits for the last of the three All Black tries during the Lion's Tour. I was on a mission: meet up with two world travellers whom one of my travel buddies had met in Guatemala right after we had spilt in Laos.

Martin and Andi were a great couple of blokes to bump into in a foreign country. After a lot of 'Winfried bashing' and beers, we started reaping havoc in the bar by performing our own personal Hakka's to scare our opponents away from the pool table. To our great surprise, our stupid dance actually worked; we ended up owning the pool table for the entire evening, thereby meeting an interesting cross-section of the New Zealand society.

This great encounter didn't make me forget that I was on a mission up North, to Auckland, with a few stops on my way in Taupo, Rotorua and the Coromandel Peninsula.


Andi and Martin, Wellington NZ

Taupo, New Zealand's great lake is lovely in its own way, and around here, of all places, bungalow architecture seems to have enjoyed perhaps its greatest flowering. There's not a great deal to be said about the lake except that it has some exceptionally stylish thermal vents nearby and is a charming place to go for walks.

Rotorua







Rotorua, further up North, is famed as a spa town. From the moment you enter Rotorua, you know you are somewhere like nowhere else. Lazy drifts of steam escape from cracks and crevices in thermal parks throughout the city and its environs. These constant steam drifts, together with the distinctive smell of sulphur, let you know you are in a place nicknamed 'Rottenrua' (haha) on account of its fragrance.

I'm not sure I'd want to live in a town that smells of rotten eggs and farts. My god does it stink out there. It takes a bit of suffering, but once you overcome the stench though, it is a quite interesting place. Rotorua offers the opportunity to encounter some of the world's most incredible earth forces and the chance to relax in bubbling, plopping mud pools, crater lakes of boiling water coming from deep within the Earth's crust.


Hot Spa, near Rotorua



There really wasn't that much to do in Rotorua other than hanging around in these thermal pools, so that's what I did. As I wadded in the steam amongst other lazy kiwis, I just lay down, relaxed and stared at my rather ugly toes to find a clue on how to sell that damn car with a bit of profit. Auckland seemed to be pretty much my only option, so that's where I went.

Auckland

Auckland, which is actually a pretty big city, is a large stretched out collection of, you guessed it, bungalows. The one landmark building is the Sky Tower which was built a few years ago to fulfil the rule that all 'modern' cities must have at least one stupid building looking like something coming straight from Star Trek.




Anyway, Auckland rounded up my stay in New Zealand. I spent a week with my cousin and his family, which was great. It is really nice to just kick back for some time in a foreign city where some of your family can show you around, or in my case, provide you quality time and accommodation.

I also managed to sell my car for 900 NZD to three Mexican students; not bad considering I had paid 600NZD for it a few weeks earlier. My Honda was the definite winner over the Kiwi Experience.

What I've seen of the North island was a bit bland though. Perhaps this was due to the fact that the South Island had spoiled me completely by offering its beautiful scenery straight away.

To be fair the North Island isn't exactly a terrible place but it probably didn't help that it was pissing down for most of my stay there. Neither did the fact that I was put at knife point twice by groups of eight wannabe L.A. Gansta's make it any nicer. I had never believed NZ to be a dangerous place, but apparently Samoans and Maori scum roam around to make sure it is.

Any place that manages to combine the world's largest concentration of bungalows and American style Gang violence is definitely somewhere you pass through on the way to other places.

Chile con Carne

As far as I'm concerned, that other place is Santiago de Chile, my entry point into South America. I have arrived there after exactly 200 days on the road (201 if I take into consideration crossing the Date Line). New Zealand was the furthest point on Earth I could travel to from Europe without having to leave the planet. As Bilbo Baggins put it, I went "there and back again" and I am delighted to be in the Latin World where I can practice my rusty Spanish.

One thing that strikes me is the amount of meat these people eat. With three daily servings of 'carne' this is the ultimate vegetarian's hell. I quite like it in fact, although I must admit that it is a bit much even for my carnivore diet.

Santiago had a very strong appeal to me; the reason being that, about eight years ago, I had plans to relocate there with my girlfriend Sylvia. I can't help wondering how different my life would have been by now if the plan had somehow materialized. On first impression, it is definitely a nice enough place to live in, with welcoming people and a flourishing economy.

I'll conclude with a quote from Pablo Neruda, a poet very revered by the Chilenos:

" I can see how puzzling a country can be that starts at the frozen South Pole and stretches upwards to salt mines and deserts where it hasn't rained for eons"

I haven't yet made up my mind as to where to start in this hugely diverse country and, while I'm out here trying to solve this puzzle, I wish you all the best.

Take care,

Rem

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