Day 7

Our first day on the South Island began with a brief tour of Picton. We drove up the steep hills to an overlook of the town and bay. It is modest and blue collar, clearly driven by the ferry traffic, and the resulting shipping to the rest of the island. We descended, and quickly found a post box to mail the several post cards that we wrote on the ferry before hitting the road once again.

This day we were to make the long trek west across the island to a town called Charming, and a lighthouse called Cape Foulwind. We made a quick decision to stop in the South Island wine country of Marlborough before making the long haul. 

Earlier in the week we’d identified Wither Hill as a winery we wanted to visit based on a couple of tastings. We drove about an hour to a more familiar setting of brown hills, and older vines. Wither Hill was a modern take on a winery, with a perfectly manicured foliage and symmetrical building design. Two levels of observation decks that looked out on the vineyards and mountains, and they were almost unbearable because of the winds blasting in from the west.

 It also had a massive basement again with perfect symmetry, full of casks, and complete with a tasting table smack in the center of the cellar for the high roller tasters. 

We were not those, and tasted in their front room with a couple of Canadians. This region was known for it’s whites, and it showed why. Their basic Sauvignon Blanc was extremely drinkable, even at 10:30am, and we finished the tasting with a Riesling unlike anything we’d had before, with a honey finish. Literally honey. We walked out with both of those, and carefully hit the road once again. One last winery, Fromm, a far more modest and friendly environs, with the proprietor giving us a brief economic lesson of New Zealand wine, and some very tasty Pinot Noirs.

The road west would be about 4 hours through a mountain pass, and a rain storm. Definitely the most difficult driving we’d had yet, but we and Van had made fast friends, and we felt reasonably comfortable navigating the windy mountain pass on the wrong side of the road. A quick digression: New Zealand does many things right, including paying their workers fairly, a generally laid back attitude, and using the metric system. Oh god how much measuring distance in meters makes so much more sense! But, driving on the left side of the road is wrong. It’s arbitrarily wrong, but it’s wrong because most of the world drives on the right, just like the US is wrong for not using the metric system… though that’s not arbitrary. That’s just stupid.

We popped out of the mountains and out of the rain clouds appearing on the coast. With the GPS coordinates from NZ Frenzy in the Tom Tom, we headed to a hike along an old coal mining track. We hiked dutifully in our rain jackets as the sky was still lightly spitting at us. 

The trail followed an old coal train line, which featured a very small train the must’ve been one of the coolest and terrifying train rides anyone has ever taken, as it ran up a “creek” the was properly a raging river, passing by four waterfalls feeding the beast.

 The tracks fell away a couple of times, where we read about the runaway train crashes. A superb introduction to the west coast of NZ. 

From there we headed south to get a close up look at the Cape Foulwind lighthouse, which was disappointing, not only because of the pouring rain, but also because of the lighthouse itself which was a newer utilitarian concrete structure built to replace the old historic one, which we found the foundation for, but nothing more. 

Not all was lost there however, as we hiked down to the beach when the rain let up, and found some really beautiful scenery and rock formations.

With daylight running out, we hit the road again to look for our next place to camp. Somehow we found ourselves about half a kilometer off the main road smack in the middle of a rainforest, which sounds far more glamorous than it was. Where we slept couldn’t be called anything but a ditch, where it rained hard on us all night long.