Although it was quite late (3pm) or maybe that’s why, we went on really well. A first driver brought us a bit further out of the city to get a better spot for hitchhiking. We also got quite fast our second driver. This time a woman, who would have picked us up also at our first spot, but first went shopping and then picked us up at our second spot. She drove us around 60km out of town. There we waited until Jeanine picked us up a little bit later, who turned around because of us. We were the first hitchhikers she ever picked up and she figured out to be a perfect lift. First of all, it was really nice to chat to her and she drove us directly to our new couchsurfing hosts in Invercargill. In addition, she offered us to show us around Invercargill and Bluff the day after, what we accepted happily and thanking.

But first we introduced us to our new Couchsurfing hosts Dawn (27 years) and Elijah (30 years) and their children Libby (5 years) and Olli (3 years). So a quite young family and really kind and open-minded. The children enjoy the couchsurfers as well as they are a nice variation in playing.

The next morning, Jeanine picked us up and welcomed us with a package of 3 different sorts of cheese, because her partner works in a cheese factory. Incredibly yummy! Then she drove us to Bluff, the most southern city of New Zealand, start point for the exploration of Stewart Island (what we skipped due to heavy rain on the Island) and famous for its oysters and Blue Pot Fish. After a short walk along the coast, we realized terrified that the new camera had again a dust spot in the middle of the lens. It couldn’t be true! Afterwards we met again Jeanine to have such a Blue Pot Fish & Chips for lunch. We actually wanted to invite her for lunch, but she was too fast and paid for us. After a short trip to a lookout above Bluff, we ate the delicious fish and drove back to the city of Invercargill where we had a coffee together and could finally pay for her. Then, we visited the city museum (which is home to the famous racer of New Zealand “The world’s fastest Indian” and a 100 year old lizard, Tuatara) and made a short walk through the Queen’s Park. In the end Jeanine drove us to a car dealer she knew who wasn’t present unfortunately, so we postponed it to the next day.

In the evening we tried to negotiate with JB-Hifi, how we could swap our camera, but surprisingly even though JB-Hifi is a quite big electronic market in Australia/New Zealand, there is only one shop on the south island, namely in Dunedin. After a longer call with one of the sales managers, we found a solution: JB-Hifi sends us a new camera with a return etiquette to send back the old one. That sounded quite good for us, as we just had to figure out an address for the package, but that we should be able to manage that.

Visiting the Catlins was on the touring program for that day and we rented a car for that. The pictures will hopefully leave a good impression. The highlights are definitely the Cathedral Caves (which were washed out be sea water), some waterfalls (the nicest are definitely the MC Lean Falls) and the spotting of countless even quite active sea lions. Besides that, the road through the Catlins is rich of nature how you’d imagine New Zealand. Green Hills, woody mountains with native forest etc. It’s just extremely idyllic and even not too many tourists since not all tourists go as far south as we did. The only downer was an e-mail of JB-Hifi, saying that we have to send them the broken camera first, before they can send us a new one. This was obviously not very handy in our situation, as we would have been out of a camera for maybe a week. Not very ideal if you’re travelling and always see new things, so we had to find another solution…

So let’s have a look on this weird Friday the 13^th:

We were a bit disappointed as all potential hosts in Te Anau (which should become our next stop) declined our requests. But there was one chance left. Zsuzsi and Adam called their former HelpX host in Arrowtown the evening before, just to figure out that the helper who was supposed to stay with her didn’t show up, why she had a free spot and needed helper. So we directly wrote her, but were still waiting for an answer. Additionally, we had to find a solution for the camera and wanted to have a look on a car just to hitchhike to Te Anau afterwards, but somehow it went out completely different.

First we dropped off the rental car for the Catlins and did a trial drive with the other car. It was a Nissan Bluebird, which looked like you would imagine a car for 1300$ (900€). However, it was a trustful dealer (Jeanine took us to him) including Warranty of Fitness and registration which made the offer quite interesting. While driving the car we also got a mail from Arrowtown, saying that we could come the same day and stay for 5 days. We were so happy about it, that we bought the car instantly. So the camera was our last problem to be solved. Obviously exchanging the camera via currier was no option for us and that’s why we tried our luck in a Panasonic Service Centre in Invercargill. The lady there proposed us to return the camera to JB-Hifi in order to get our money back and try to get another one in a shop (Harvey Norman) for the same price in Invercargill. She also offered us to organize the currier for us. After we called JB-Hifi who agreed with that we went to Harvey Norman. We saw the same camera for 399$ (remember, we bought it for 249$). That was obviously too much. That’s why Tobi went to one of the salesman and just asked him if we could get the camera for 250$. Instead of calling us crazy, he had a look in his computer and we were quite surprised when he said “Yep that’s all right”. We just got a discount of 150$ and couldn’t really believe it. Back in the service centre, the lady gave us the money for the camera in cash and all our problems were solved in around three hours. Sometimes everything works out just by itself… 🙂

In the end we just had to do our luggage and say good bye to Dawn and Elijah and continuing our journey to Arrowtown!

Jeanine, unsere nette Fahrerin und wir in Bluff / Jeanine our lovely driver and us at Bluff

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It figured out to be quite easy to find a lift from the Moeraki Boulders to Dunedin, this time a German couple from Stuttgart who were visiting New Zealand for three weeks. They drove us directly to the town centre and as hitchhiking worked so well this time, we were 3 hours too early for our appointment with Harry, our next HelpX host in Dunedin. He works, however, in an outdoor shop in the city centre, why we just showed up there and stored our luggage in order to wander a bit around the town. Until now Dunedin is definitely the nicest city in New Zealand, especially because its houses are built pretty nice in the surrounding hills.

Finally we also had the opportunity to show our camera to a specialist, but the answer was expectably not very good for us. Cleaning (yes cleaning NOT exchanging) the lens costs more than a new and even better camera. We directly asked him for an alternative camera, particularly one where we could reuse the batteries we already had, but of course the same camera is not available anymore and the newer model uses a slightly smaller battery.

Of course we expected something like that, but anyway we were not very happy when we returned to Harry (from the UK, 40y.o.) who by the time finished working and we were picked up by Harry’s wife Kim (original Kiwi) with their two children (Estella 2 years old and Reuben 3 months). After we arrived at our home for the next days, our mood directly improved. Both were super nice and lived in an old charming house directly in the hills. A grandiose location and really cute house and we should help out with some renovating work. At the beginning we actually thought they would renovate it in order to permanently live there with their kids, but far from that. They renovate in order to sell the house as good as possible in order to go on a bicycle trip around the world with the children in around 9 months. What an amazing idea 🙂

As the next day was meant to be rainy, we negotiated with them to do our work on that day. This time we had to sand the windows (Kerstin) and the door steps at the entry (Tobias). Not the funniest work ever, but as Australians and Kiwis say “it pays the bills” or in our case the accommodation. In the afternoon we were also able to look after our camera and drove to the city with Kim’s car in order to have a look in three different electronic stores. Harry even had a customer card to save up to 20% for one of them. There were not too many choices and we quickly figured out three potential candidates: a Samsung, a pretty good (and heavily discounted) Panasonic Lumix and the newer model of our old one (also a Lumix). As the better Lumix was just slightly more expensive than the “worse” one, we bought that one and we finally had a camera without four dust dots in every picture.

In the evening there was a big family dinner including us and the former HelpXer girl, who by the time worked and lived with Kim’s father. Additionally, there was another German family (including a one-year old child) who were picked up by our two hosts in a café some days ago. Apparently they didn’t know them before, they just saw them sitting in the café and recognized their bicycles and the baby trailer at the front door (they cycle around New Zealand). So they thought they could invite them to stay at their house for some days and get to know how the tour with the kid works out. It must have been a really funny situation for the Germans, as they told us that Harry and Kim just walked into the café and asked them “do you already know where you’re going to stay tonight?”. After they answered “We’re searching at the moment” they answered “if you want you can come to our house”. They even lent them their campervan for two days so they could visit the Otago Peninsula. Quite crazy if you think about it, but according to our experiences also quite typical for the kindness of Kiwis.

The next day, we had the pleasure to borrow the campervan as well and visited the Peninsula, too. It is accessible through two windy roads with some access roads to the sea with nice beaches which accommodate seals and sea lions. One of them is Sandfly Bay which is accessible via climbing down a sand dune only. As if that wouldn’t have been wicked enough we were welcomed by a sleeping seal once we reached the bottom. This was, however, not the highlight of the day already because the edge of the peninsula is the natural habitat of a colony of albatrosses. One may think that this is not really spectacular, but apparently it’s the last colony of this species on a mainland of the earth. All the others live on small unsettled islands in the south pacific. Of course the operators of the colony know that as well, why it’s quite expensive to see the Albatrosses in their nests (45$ for a 40 minute guided tour). Of course the Albatrosses don’t care about human borders why it’s possible to spot them flying around if the weather is all right. Even though we had not perfect weather (Albatrosses like to fly if there is strong wind, and we had cloudless sunshine without much wind) we were lucky and saw some Albatrosses flying quite close over our heads. On the way back home we also visited the Tunnel Beach a bizarre sand stone formation in the ocean which reminds a bit to the Great Ocean Road in Australia. After a short walking track one stands on something which looks like a bridge formed of sand stone. One can even climb to a small beach which is accessible through a tunnel in the sand stone. On our way back to the car we met the three Canadians of Oamaru, what a funny coincident.

In the morning, Tobi found a car in the internet which would possibly meet our requirements. A very old (1988) cheap Ford from a serious trader which had a current warranty of fitness and registration. That sounded almost too good to be true. Unfortunately it had some problems with the engine which stalled when staying too long why they asked us to come back the next day when they fixed it. Actually we wanted to head to Invercargill that they, but we thought let’s give this vehicle a chance. After we didn’t hear something back until lunch time, we called them again just to get told that they couldn’t fix it and gave the car to a wrecker…. Kim was so nice to drive us to another car sold by a private person, but that one figured out to be quite shitty and she dropped us off at the highway that we could hitchhike to Invercargill…

Schokoladenfabrik / chocolate factory

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So we were standing at the street again waiting for someone to pick us up. Our first lift brought us to Omarama. The second one was a Kiwi, who made several stops during his drive, because apparently he had fun in being our tourist guide. So we could see the biggest earth dam of the southern hemisphere at Lake Benmore. Apparently, our driver told us a very funny story about the dam. Around 1 ½ years ago a, let’s say it like this, really amorous couple took a boat to drive over the lake. They were probably busy with more important (!!!) things than navigating to boat and that’s why they fall down the dam. Lucky enough they were not insured but the boat was demolished and they had to pay a quite high fine. Unfortunately, he didn’t go to Oamaru, but to Timaru and that’s why he dropped us off in a small village named Kowra. And there we were waiting and waiting and waiting, for 1.5 hours until finally a Chinese couple picked us up. They were really nice and were on their way from Queenstown to Christchurch. But we very often heard that 80% of the bad car accidents around Queenstown were caused by tourists (mainly Chinese), so we were a bit sceptic. On the other hand we didn’t have a choice so we jumped in. Let’s say it like that, obviously we survived otherwise writing would be a bit difficult. But his way of driving was quite adventurous and that’s all we say about that.

He was really kind and drove us almost in front of the place of our couchsurfing host, our first one in New Zealand. Alex accepted our request although he wasn’t at home, but he told us his flatmates would be ok with hosting us. We realized quite fast why, the house was completely filled up with couchsurfers (10 inclusive the two of us). Dave, Alex’ representative didn’t know that we were arriving and accommodated us quickly in Alex’ empty room. The other couchsurfers were a funny mixture of all parts of the world, 3 Canadian girls, 3 American girls, a German couple and the two of us. The next day, two German girls arrived, but that time the Americans and the other couple were gone. We got along quite well with the Canadians and exchanged some hints, the Americans helped us planning our travel through the States. Our Hungarians in Twizel gave us the hint that Megabus opened its summer sale and offers lots of cheap bus tickets. After a bit of research we found bus tickets for Washington – Philadelphia – New York – Boston, all with a stopover of a few days, for believe it or not 9.50$ per person for the whole distances. After having done that, we had a look at Oamaru, which to be honest isn’t a lot. There is a nice old part of town and actually the most important thing, penguins. We tried to see yellow-eyed penguins that arrive 2-3 hours before sunset on the beach in order to feed their kids, and we could see ONE. While wandering around we almost fell over a seal that was laying in our way (you can find them really everywhere).

After a nice evening with everyone of the flatshare, we made our way to Dunedin the next day. We actually wanted to visit the Moeraki Boulders in Oamaru, but got to know that they are half way to Dunedin. That’s why we asked our first lift to drop us off there and heavily loaded we wandered along the beach having a look at rocks, which lie almost perfectly globular on the beach. Really stunning what nature can do. We continued our way to Dunedin to our next HelpX family, but this is another story.

Lake Benmore Dam

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Quite spontaneously we found a HelpX host in Twizel, this time on a camp ground. We didn’t get a lot of information in advance, just that we were accommodated in a campervan and that we had to start working on Monday (because our boss was away for the weekend) and all this even though we arrived on Saturday evening so we had the whole Sunday off. We got five different lifts until we reached Twizel (all of them were amazing) and an older lady led us to our quite luxurious camper (she was there only to help out for the day and was quite confused). We had a television, a fully equipped kitchen and even a bicycle. Not too bad, we thought! As the next day was our free day we directly made our way to explore Mount Cook, with 3724m the highest mountain of Australasia (Australia, New Zealand and some of the pacific island, it has NOTHING in common with Asia). But Mount Cook is not only a mountain, it’s THE mountain, yes exactly, THE mountain Smaug (the dragon of “The Hobbit”) stole from the dwarfs. After such a short amount of time we directly saw our first movie location of “The Lord of the Rings / The Hobbit” 😉 After an older French tourist couple picked us up and drove us to Mount Cook Visitor centre we decided to do two walks: The Hooker Valley and the Sealy Tarns Track, both 3-4 hours which filled out the day quite well. The first one is an easy track which goes through the Hooker Valley, over three swing bridges along the Hooker River until it ends at the Hooker Glacier Terminal Lake which even contained some huge pieces of ice. So much for the topic with the climatic change. By the time it started to rain and storm even though there was sun in Twizel for the whole day. After that we overcome the Sealy Tarn Track which can be described by using three words only: steps, steps and steps. We didn’t count the steps but they took us up for 600m which provided us a phenomenal view over the valley, the glaciers and even parts of Lake Tekapo. Unfortunately the summit of Mount Cook was covered with clouds. Mount Cook is, however, the mountain many tourists never see because it’s always covered by clouds.

Back at the camp ground at around 7pm and two lifts someone was knocking on our door: it was our boss and the owner of the camp ground Peter. He told us that we were living in the wrong caravan which is owned by a private person. The older lady accommodated us in the wrong one and the key she gave us was not supposed to fit for it… That’s why we had to move to another, smaller and less comfortable caravan the next day.

At the same evening we also got to know our HelpX colleagues Zsuzsi and Adam from Hungary and we directly got along very well. They are in New Zealand for 6 months on a Working Holiday Visa and by the time they already were in Twizel for roughly 2 weeks. They often do HelpX for 2-3 weeks in order to have more time at the different places (and to be independent of the weather). Pretty smart if one has enough time!

The next morning was our first day of work and as it was a Monday there were a lot of check-outs meaning a lot of work to do. Tobi became the job to clean the bathrooms and toilets in the cottages of the camp ground. To be fair we have to say that this was a very easy job as most of the guests stay for a maximum of 2-3 nights and that’s why most of them stayed quite clean. Kerstin’s job was, however, to clean the kitchens and living rooms. A job which was quite relaxed as well, UNLESS there were Chinese people staying. We start to develop a proper aversion to Chinese or better to say to Chinese tourists. The guests of the cabins were asked to clean their dishes after the visit, but at Chinese cabins the dishes were wet or even dirty in the cupboard. Sometimes quite disgusting and it also took much longer to clean and dry it. However, after 2 ½ hours we were done and Peter explained us his rules for HelpXing. We had to work 15 hours per week together to pay for the caravan and if we worked more we would get the money in cash. As we wanted to stay for 5 days only and we already stayed two nights without working we were a bit defaulted but we had quite a big day and Peter seemed to be very fair anyway so it wouldn’t become a problem at all. We spent the afternoon with shopping (as we now knew that we had to supply our own food) and visited the Twizel Lake (Lake Ruataniwha) together with Zsuzsi and Adam.

The following days we visited the other lakes, Lake Tekapo with the biggest oscilloscope of New Zealand and Lake Pukaki with its surreal turquoise colour. We climbed Mt. John next to Lake Tekapo which gives a great 360° view. At Lake Pukaki we walked around the Kettlehole at the summit of a former volcano and used a pathway through probably private properties which was worth the risk. We got a beautiful 270° view of the Lake and Mt Cook, which finally was out of clouds. We again hitchhiked for these visits and one of our lifts offered us an accommodation in Wellington! Someone told us that we had to go swimming in one of the lakes what we did for sure. To make it short, FREEZING COLD, maybe 16°C. Jane (the wife of Peter) declared us as completely crazy. She said the lake would be even too cold for fish which explains the fact that there are usually no boats driving on it. Anyway, Lake Pukaki is the movie location for the village at the lake of “The Hobbit” which was reason enough for us take a swim there 🙂

Unfortunately Twizel remained in sad memories. While we took pictures of the lakes we discovered a dust spot on the lens of our camera. That wasn’t a problem until we used the zoom but if we did we spotted up to four dust points on every picture. That’s maybe one of the worst things that can happen during a travel to get problems with the camera. As Twizel is not the biggest city in universe there was no camera shop there and we had to wait until we reached the next bigger city.

Thursday was the day of our departure and we hitchhiked to our next stop which was in Oamaru. After a very sad good bye with Adam and Zsuzsi, Peter gave as a lift to the highway. We are definitely going to meet “our Hungarians” again, first of all they were going to go to Auckland the next Monday where we will be in a couple of weeks as well. On the other hand they fly to Canada/USA in summer to visit Zsuszis family and participate a volunteering camp in New Hampshire we may apply for as well if the time fits and even if that won’t work out we will be in Boston during that time so not too far away!

So we were standing at the road again waiting for a lift to Oamaru, a part of the story which became, let‘s say slightly exciting. But more will be written in the next post.

Mount Cook: wie immer unter einer dicken Wolkendecke / as always hidden under clouds

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After the arrival in Christchurch the security checks passed by quite fast this time, but most likely because it was 5am. So well, after we were security checked, telling them what kind of food we imported and showed our lately cleaned tracking boots (New Zealand is quite free of pests and tries to stay like that), we were finished. It was even so early that there was neither a bus nor anything else going to the city, why we took a comfortable bench at the airport and Kerstin had a nap. After all that we drove to the city centre where we walked around a bit until our host Chris picked us up around lunch time. As we couldn’t find a couchsurfing host, we signed up for HelpX. The idea is quite easy: for four hours of work a day one gets food and accommodation. Chris and Glen accepted our request for a one week stay and the start in New Zealand couldn’t have been any better. Our main job was to walk the three cute dogs Molly, Tessa and Casper along the beach, which is quite hard to explain as a job and it was more fun anyway. After we picked up the leash the three got crazy excited started barking 🙂 The second job was to weed the former vegetable garden, meaning that we had to remove everything what we could find. After we finished that after 4 days Chris asked us to remove the whine leafs at her fence which came over from the neighbour’s garden. An easy job and it was even quite funny. For all that we got super delicious food, starting with chicken, fish & chips and Glen even got some Crayfish and baked vegetables of course with the beloved sweet potato (Kumara). Both did this so well, they should think about opening a restaurant 🙂

Of course, we wanted to explore Christchurch itself as well. We heard of the bad earthquakes in Christchurch (between 2010 and 2011), the worst was exactly 4 years ago in February. We were really surprised that there is still so much visible of it. A lot of empty buildings, which were neither knocked down nor rebuilt, half demolished buildings being supported, everywhere construction sites, very often changing detours and lots of free areas on which there were once buildings and are used now as parking spots. Ones, even our bus that we took to go to the city had to pull over, because there was apparently a new detour he didn’t know about. Nevertheless the people seem to gather courage again and also see the chance to give the city a new surface. One can see this at various Street Arts around the city (which somehow was reminiscent of Melbourne) and the newly built ReStart Mall which consists of containers including nice cafés and other shops. A very cool spot in “new Christchurch”! Beside a self-guided tour through the city and the botanical garden Chris and Glen took us on a little road trip to show us around Christchurch and Littleton. This gave us a first impression about the roads in New Zealand: windy and hilly. Once we reached the top we had a phenomenal view over Christchurch! We also met Sarah, an exchange student from Ohio we got in touch with through couchsurfing and participated a couchsurfing event in order to gain some contact with Kiwis.

Of course we also had to plan how our journey should continue. Chris helped us a lot with that by taking a map and marked everything we need to see on the South Island which gave us a proper route. After we read all of our guide books we saw that she included everything and therefore she planned the perfect route for us, just awesome these Kiwis 🙂 We also thought about our type of transportation, mainly if we wanted to hitchhike or buy a car. Glen was our hero when he drove us around to several car dealers for almost the whole afternoon, but unfortunately there was nothing which met our requirements. That’s why we decided to start hitchhiking and keep our eyes open in the next bigger cities. Suddenly the week in Christchurch was over and our journey through New Zealand began with the world famous metropole, Twizel…

Das erste Nickerchen in Christchurch / The first little sleep in Christchurch

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