Alex's travel blog

Queenstown, New Zealand

It's a common rumour that in New Zealand there are more sheep than people. I can confirm that this is true, but the whole truth is even more incredible. There are TEN TIMES more sheep than people. Imagine what would happen if they rebelled against human rule...

In Picton, on my first day on the South Island, the first thing I did was get my hair cut. It had been in a terrible state. Then I went to catch the Stray bus.

I decided to go around the South Island with a company called Stray, which does the same thing as the more famous Kiwi Experience. It's basically a glorified, very expensive bus pass. Their buses travel on a set route, you can get off at any of the stops, stay as long as you want and get back on next time a bus passes through. In addition, they can arrange accomodation and book activities for everyone, which leads to everyone on the bus staying in the same place and doing the same things. Hence, it's a good way to meet people and make friends. That was the idea anyway, and was the main reason I chose to travel like this...I was getting a bit bored of travelling on my own.

On the first day we travelled to the Abel Tasmin national park, in the north-west corner of the island. The highlight of the journey was when the bus broke down - a great omen on my first day with Stray. We needed to get the engine turning over, or something, so we had to get out and push. This didn't achieve much, but luckily, a tractor appeared from somewhere and gave us a few pulls, and the engine started again. This was all quite hilarious. The next day I booked myself a half-day sail. Abel Tasmin national park is a beautiful stretch of coastline with forested slopes rising behind pristene, golden beaches. We sailed up the coast, then I got dropped off and spent the rest of the day walking back to the hostel. This was a great day: the weather was perfect, the beaches were beautiful and it was the first time I'd been sailing, so I enjoyed that.

We then headed out to the West Coast and stayed in a pub in a tiny place called Barrytown. Barrytown is tiny - just a handful of houses. The only businesses are the pub, and a cafe about 1km away along the main road. I really enjoyed staying there. It felt very remote, middle-of-nowhere feel, but the pub was busy and lively and had the feeling of being the social hub of the community. I can imagine people coming in in winter to take refuge from the storm beating the coast, and huddling in front of the fire. The bar was packed both evenings we stayed there: there were hundreds of people from Stray and plenty of locals, so it was fun hanging out there. When we arrived on the first evening we had a roast dinner which tasted indescribably good to me. It was the first proper meal I'd had in New Zealand. Things were so expensive (relative to South America) here that to stay on budget, I had no choice but to self-cater. Because I was moving about so much, I was unable to buy lots of ingredients and store them, so the meals had been pretty basic. Instant macaroni cheese was a popular option. Occasionally I'd treated myself to fish and chips, a Burger King or a Subway. So yeah, the roast was good.

We had a full day in Barrytown the next day. It was the 15th April, so it was the exact half-way point of my trip! I told this to several people and received various degrees of enthusiasm. I had a relaxing day not doing much. In the afternoon I went for a walk along the beach with a German girl called Silke. There's meant to be lots of greenstone, or jade, to be found on the beach. Apparantly someone travelling with Stray found a piece worth $500! We had to walk down a long road to get to the beach - at the end of this was a campervan, and outside of it was a big cockatoo sitting on a cage. Naturally this attracted our attention, and the man from the campervan came to chat to us. Here's the crazy guy

He told us exactly where we should look to find the jade, so I was quite confident of finding some. An hour or so later we were back, empty-handed. So he gave up a small piece each (come to think of it, Silke got two pieces). I was overwhelmed and was under the impression that my piece was worth $100 or something. In a shop I visited later, I saw similar pieces selling for a few dollars...but still, it was a very kind gesture.