Feb 10th: The West Coast crawl; So Long South Island; The Fourth Chapter.

Leaving Queenstown:

We left the Crown Plaza around noon, reluctant to part with the thousand-thread-count sheets but ready to hostel hop further up the West coast. We took our time leaving Queenstown and visited several wineries before turning north. Had an amazing lunch at one, where we had a prepared three course lunch which included salad, salmon and pork belly, which is like if bacon and steak hooked up and had a crispy, succulent baby. Seriously, that good.

New Zealand, of course, makes a lot of wine, but it makes it mostly for export. We heard several times that there's no way Kiwi's could drink the amount of wine their country produces amongst themselves. Kiwi wine makers will also tell you New Zealand is famous for it's Pinot Noirs and the growing conditions here are perfect, as well as it's Pinot gris or chardonnay, I forget which. But it's white. And while those are all very fine, we found ourselves more partial to the rieslings, so we picked up a few bottles to send home. (Mom and Dad, if all goes according to plan, you'll have a pretty rad souvenir on your doorstep soon enough.) 

Greysmouth:

We sobered up with a cheese platter and more ice cream, and proceeded to head north to Greysmouth. We stayed, as is our steez, in a small town 30 minutes south of the city, which doesn't have a lot, we were told, except for shops and restaurants. We did find out that the original Montieth's brewery is in Greysmouth, so we continued our theme of drinking small portions of lots of alcoholic beverages and walking it off. Found a nice place for a pizza, ate pizza, proceeded back to the hostel where we made hamburgers. Quite tasty. 

After two nights at Birdsong, our hostel near Greysmouth, and after being told for the millionth time "You really should get a BBH card" from every backpacker, I finally caved and bought a subscription. Budget Backpacker Hostels is a network of nearly 400 hostels in New Zealand, with ratings and descriptions. You get a pamphlet with all the hostel information and a free phone card and $2-$4 discounts on each night you stay, and it's way, way more helpful than the Lonely planet hostel lists. For one, the people running BBH hostels are way more likely to point you in the direction of other awesome hostels. The old motel in Oamaru pointed us towards the hostel in Dunedin, and the people at Birdsong directed us towards this awesome place in a tiny town called Hector that wasn't even in the Lonely Planet guide. Totally worth it. 

Getting to Hector:

We got a recommendation from the people at Birdsong to hit up a place in Hector called The Old Slaughterhouse. The only snag, she said, was that the hostel couldn't be reached by car. You had to park your car at the bottom of a hill and hike your way up ten minutes. We called to make reservations and the guy, David, said he could pick our stuff up on his small four-wheeler if we could hike up the trail, but not to worry, because the ocean views would be worth it. 

So we left the next day, waking up around 7:00 in order to see the the Pancake Rock formations, a unique formation, the only one of it's kind, and the pancake rock blow holes, which shoot water like geysers at high tide. Unfortunatly, high tide was sometime around 9:00, and we were two hours away. Matt was a real champ about this, as I wanted to get there early to make sure we didn't miss the blow holes, a phrase not many people are keen to hear. 

Pancake rocks themselves are very Dr. Seussian in nature. They look like the goofy towers in his made-up citys, all layers and full of windows, peaking at peculiar points, and in general don't make much sense, but are pretty fun to look at, as it's the same kind of feeling I think you'd get if you were to walk through a picture book. But it was cold, rainy and window, so we passed through it pretty quick. 

We got to the Slaughterhouse around midday after stopping for a killer breakfast at this yellow cafe run by an American from South Orange, New Jersey, who moved to New Zealand and decided to start up her own cafe when she realized there was nowhere to eat. 

(Side note: It's a lot of fun to meet foreigners in New Zealand, as we've all got our favorite foods we miss and love to cook. You really get a feel for it in the hostels, watching people make their favorite pasta dishes or cooked vegetables or whatever. Matt loved to point out that every german we met missed yogurt and german bread so much, and almost everyone had their own favorite bread recipe.)

So we get to the old slaughterhouse, and this intense mountain mad rolls down to greet us. He's super friendly, ties our bags to the bag of his four wheeler, and totes them up the side of the mountain, and we head up the hillside, with nothing but our good faith to tell us we'd see our bags soon. 

The path zigzagged and hairpinned the entire way up, and ten minutes later we were looking at a completely secluded compound of about three wooden cabins. We learned that David had built the entire place with help from his sons. A former sheep shearer, this is how he lives and spends his time: tending to back packers and keeping up the place, which is goregeous. Reminded me of Dad's friends on Whiteby Island in Washington state. 

We spent the day taking a five hour walk to see the waterfalls, then got dinner. But we didn't make it back before dark, unfortunately, so we had to walk that ten minute hike up the switchback trail in the dark, with nothing but iPods to light the way. We would be scared, but we were pretty used to this sort of thing. 

I See Spiders When I Close My Eyes!:

Unfortunately, we bagen running out of time. We ran our next couple of travel plans by David, who said we'd never be able to do what we wanted to do in the amount of time we had. At that point, Matt had two days till he had to leave, and we still wanted to see the Golden Bay and Able Tasman Park. He figured he could push his flight back one more day and buy some time. So we shimmied up north and stayed at a place called Shambala in the North part of the golden Bay. 

We picked this place because we had yet to stay in a one of the Eco-friendly hostels. Curious to know whether or not we could survive on solar power and dying to know what a biodegradable toilet looks like, we booked two nights. 

Oh man. The bugs were everywhere. I love the sounds of cicadas, but the boom of these bugs was so loud that we had a hard time talking to each other. New Zealand only has one poisonous spider (and it's not even that poisonous; it won't kill you, for example, but your limb may swell up), the Whitetail, and we saw our first Whitetail near our cabin. And it turns out that a biodegradable toilet is just Hippy for Litter Box. (Sarah, you know that particular brand of litter you love, Feline Pine? It's a lot like that.)

The best part of our stay here was the Mussel Inn, a hippy bar that brewed its own beer and had wicked awesome mussels. Also saw an awesome be-dreaded hippy chick named Lauren Kate sing and play guitar. She did an amazing cover of Radiohead's "no alarms, no surprises," literally so good I stopped where I stood and had to listen. Matt bought the albums and got one of them signed, thus making the Hippy's day. 

I Left My Heart (And Stomach) In The South Island:

The next day we left from The Golden Bay and just barely, barely, by the hair of our teeth, as Matt put it, made it to Picton to reach the ferry. The train left at 2:25, and boarding time was 1:30. We walked the boardwalk after dropping off the rental car and loading all of our loose bags and such at about 2:20. The whole thing went off nearly without a hitch, until Matt looked up at me and we realized that in my haste to pack up all the loose items in the car--iPods, wallets, socks, etc--I'd forgotten to pack the Nintendo, which I'd been playing with in the front seat and left in the glove compartment. 

"Shit," I said. 

Matt kept a level head (mind you, he kept said head the entire trip to the ferry--as I'm freaking out and convinced we're not going to make it and that we'd be better off paying the $200 fee to board the car or ditching it in the parking lot instead of returning it to the rental station, he reminded me that the worst that could happen would be we'd just catch the next ferry and stay in Picton for three hours. No big.) and called the car station and arranged it such that the car rental guys could leave the game boy with the next ferry headed to Wellington, and we'd pick it up later.

The game boy incident turned out to be not the least of our worries. Upon arrival, we realized that the car rental places were closed for the most part, and the only one open had one manual stick shift left. So we had to catch a taxi to the airport to pick up a rental car there. And we got our car, we decided to check out what looked like a great malaysian restaurant, highly recommended by the Lonely Planet, only to find out that it no longer existed. 

Although it was a tough night in Wellington though, we stayed at one of the nicest back packer's places we've been, with more killer views, just outside Wellington, and with an amazing Mediterranean breakfast place close by that had some of the best food I've had in NZ. 

Driving North:

Unfortunately we couldn't stay in Wellington long before heading up to Raglan, a surfing town an hour west of Hamilton, New Zealand's largest inland city. And it was in this hostel where we met some more amazing Germans, stayed up late to talk and made plans to surf the next day, before Matt had to leave, for real this time. 

I was pretty wiped out from one day of surfing, so the second day, the one we were to spend surfing with the Germans (Karolina, Tobias and Stefan) just Matt and the two other boys decided to surf. Karolina and I spent three hours sitting on the beach and talking about everything I haven't been able to talk about with a girl for the last four weeks. We both had been traveling around with people we'd met in New Zealand, And Karolina decided to part ways with the two boys, who wanted to stay in Raglan surfing for another ten days. She wanted to get to Hamilton so that she could go down to Wellington, which was lucky for me because I wanted to go to Hamilton too. Matt and I were able to offer her a ride and in exchange she was able to offer me a place to stay for the night while I planned a bus trip to Auckland. 

The Last Road Trip, For Real This Time:

The drive to Hamilton was awful. Once it was over, it would mean that my time in New Zealand with matt would be over, and I wasn't ready for that to be over. What with four days of goodbyes, niether of us really felt like ourselves anymore. 

Karolina and I were staying with some people she met through a traveler's networking website called couchsurfing.com. After paying a fee to join, users can meet hosts who will open up their homes and sofas to people traveling who need a place to sleep for the night. It sounded weird, but Tobias and Stefan had done it before and known people that had couch-surfed all across Europe, and Karolina had done it twice before with good results. 

So this was the car trip. I'm in the passenger side, and next to me is the guy I've been traveling with for three weeks straight, the guy I've been hanging out with every hour of the day, flying by the seat of our pants across the south island of New Zealand, planning every day as it begins and falling asleep convinced that Today was the Best Day. In that back seat is the girl I've been hanging out with all day at the beach, who is funny and smart and charming and sweet, and who I'm leaving the boy in the driver's seat for. A girl with a whole knew set of adventures. 

We drove up to Andy's place and Karolina got out of the car. I picked up my purse from the floor of the car and stopped.

"I hate this. This sucks," I said. And what I'm really thinking is that I can't believe how quickly everything has happened, how much has happened, and that it wouldn't have turned out like this if I hadn't missed that train in Picton. "I can't believe it's over."

And Matt said something he said to me a day or so earlier. "This is chapter four: first you arrived in new zealand, then you arrived in the south island and then you met me," He said. "I'm not sure how the fourth installment begins, but this is where it does."

I nodded, I got my things out of the car, gave him a last hug good-bye, and watched the car drive away. 

To be continued.