5.11.2007

Wake up in the Morning, is it Still Dark, or Night Again?: Dunedin to Twizel

We woke up and had a nice breakfast with our friends before hitting the open road once again. The sun being solidly in our eyes for the second straight day, we were both feeling a little road weary, and, as we are now headed to Christchurch and therefore on our way back to the USA, we were both feeling a little eager to get on the plane as well.

We stopped in a little town called Oamaru to see the blue penguin colony they have there, but the penguins are nocturnal, and we were there at, like, 10:00am. Unfortunately, we had to bag it. Maybe in Christchurch we'll see some. Sigh.

So we cut West to get to the side of Mt. Cook we hadn't yet seen in our travels. Our goal was to get as far as a town called Twizel, as this would be a convenient place to get BACK from as well. Halfway there, around lunchtime, we came upon the heavily-recommended-by-Mark-and-Amanda “Elephant Rocks”. From the pictures they showed us, we were looking forward to having lunch and playing Frisbee in this amazing limestone field where they'd filmed part of “The Chronicles of Narnia”. What M&A hadn't told us was that this limestone field also doubles as a sheep pasture so was not the best place to dive for a disc – much less walk without boots. We still had our picnic, though (PB&J. Again.). We sat ourselves down on top of a boulder, away from sheep poop, and enjoyed the breeze and view from this central-NZ pasture. It was the second really great picnic spot in two days, and we were feeling good.

Trying to put as much road between us and Dunedin as quickly as we could ended up working out, and we checked into a backpackers in Twizel by 2:00pm. Both not feeling great, we decided to hunker down for the night and watch movies until we fell asleep. After a viewing of X-Men and X2, that's exactly what we did.

Tomorrow: The Road to Christchurch.

No comments: