The Down Under Expedition # 4: Farewell to Nelson

So the Adam/Nelson International Chamber Music Festival came to an end Saturday night, and the next morning it was time for me to pack up and move on.

And I must admit, I was very sorry to leave Nelson.  I was really starting to feel at home there.  It's quite an experience to visit a city of 50,000 people and find yourself in the middle of spectacular scenery, beautiful old architecture, extensive urban services, plenty of culture and entertainment, and many, many fine cafes, restaurants, pubs, wine bars, brew pubs -- and all with a decided small-town vibe to it.  Well, you get the idea.  All these riches were located within a 10-minute or less walk of my très deluxe motel, the Palazzo Motor Lodge.  If you ever head to Nelson and plan to stay more than an overnight, I heartily recommend it.  Not only are the rooms beautiful and comfortable in every way, with full kitchen facilities, but the couple who own and manage the property go out of their way to ensure that everything is to your liking, as well as sharing tips on places to eat, things to do, and the like.  This kind of family-like experience is all too rare in Canadian and American cities in the context of a hotel property.

I also had a field day with the multiple restaurants.  Not the brew pubs, though.  I've drifted away from beer and more to wine in recent years.  However, Nelson is the centre of an active hop-growing industry and therefore, no surprise, the craft brewery capital of New Zealand.  Nelson is also surrounded by a number of active vineyards and wineries, and just a couple of hours by road from Blenheim, which is the wine capital of New Zealand!  Believe it or not, in six days I had different wines at every dinner except one, and every lunch except one, and never duplicated a selection.  That was with all white wines, and all from the Nelson area.  I didn't once get into any from Marlborough (the region around Blenheim).  

The best thing about Nelson was the extreme friendliness of the people.  Not just service staff in the tourism industry, but people sitting next to me at concerts, people I was introduced to, people sitting at the next table in a cafe or on a patio, everyone was so much friendlier than they would be in similar situations at home!  Believe me, Nelson has totally won my heart and I will be back!

(The Festival runs every second February.  Hmmm -- 2019?  2021?)

Once I finished packing up and checked out, I took the road east from Nelson to Havelock.  The entire stretch from Wakapuaka to Rai Valley was genuine mountain road, either snaking up and down the hills or threading through the narrow valleys.  So it took me about 90 minutes to drive to Havelock, where I had a mid-morning coffee and snack.  Two of my friends heartily recommended me to try a New Zealand style of coffee called a "flat white".  It uses less milk than a standard latte or cappuccino, with a thinner foamed layer on top, and allows the distinctive taste of the espresso to come through, nicely enhanced and not at all overwhelmed.  I'm hooked!  So I enjoyed a flat white facing a marina on the shore of Pelorus Sound, one of the ocean inlets known collectively as the Marlborough Sounds.  As the map shows, this coastal region has one of the world's most contorted coastlines.

After leaving Havelock, I followed what looks like the "direct route," the thin line winding along the shores of Pelorus Sound and Queen Charlotte Sound to Picton.  Ha ha!  Again, a mountain road every inch of the way, with innumerable sharp bends twisting your driver's arms into knots.  Most of the way the speed limit is 50 km/h, and you're doing well indeed if you can hold that speed!  But there are compensations, such as these terrific views of Havelock and the Pelorus Sound region from the mountainside across the inlet.

As you drive along the shores of Queen Charlotte Sound you enjoy beautiful views every inch of the way -- but it's almost impossible to find a safe place to pull off the narrow road and take pictures!  However, on the hill overlooking the small town of Picton there is a good-sized overlook and parking area.  And here you can see exactly what makes little old Picton so important to the entire country: the harbour where the car ferries arrive and depart from Wellington on the North Island.  Here you have one vessel from each of the two main operators at the docks, as well as a good overview of Picton town.

In Picton the long-threatened rain finally happened, but had the good sense to do its thing while I was inside eating lunch.  During my 75 minute stop I got a good meal, a good walk, looked into a couple of stores, and walked around down on the waterfront.

After that I drove south on State Highway # 1 to Blenheim, a reasonably quick and easy drive.  About 10 kilometres north of Blenheim the road suddenly popped out of the mountains onto the low, dry Marlborough plains and the sun came out -- wine country par excellence.  

But I wasn't planning any big-time sightseeing for the rest of the day.  As usual after a festival, I was pretty tired.  A good afternoon nap was next on the agenda.  For dinner, I went into town to one of the few restaurants open on Sunday, and had a delicious lamb dinner for about 60% of what it would have cost me in a Canadian restaurant.

The next day involved a very long and roundabout route to get from Blenheim to Christchurch.  The usual direct route, State Highway 1, has several sections both north and south of Kaikoura either buried under mountains or drowned under the ocean as a result of the November earthquakes.  But the alternate route is certainly a long one: all the way west to Murchison, and then back south and southeast to finally reach Christchurch.  So an early start was essential.

The trip ended up, with several short stops, taking seven and a half hours -- mainly because construction season is in full swing.  I must have gone through at least 20 different sets of roadworks.  And for almost the entire distance it was raining, just about to rain, or just finished raining.  The sun only came out as I approached Culverden, an hour north of Christchurch.  Anyway, rain or no rain, I did manage to get a few photos as the road wound its way between and over all those mountains.

A little by-note: a couple of Maori names appear in today's post.  As with all the Polynesian languages, from Hawaii and Tahiti to Samoa and Fiji, the Maori words are basically pronounced by sounding every letter.

Lake Rotoiti ("Roh-toh-ee-tee", just to give you the idea) at St. Arnaud, complete with ducks and dramatic cloud-capped mountains.

Maruia Falls south of Murchison.  I'm always up for viewing a good waterfall, but this one has a particularly unique history.  This impressive waterfall didn't even exist until after the great Murchison earthquake of 1929, which was a 7.8 on the Richter scale.

An Alpine valley east of Lewis Pass.

After the sun came out, the rock formations in Weka Pass just north of Culverden.

The Down Under Expedition # 3: Dealing With Mountains

The South Island of New Zealand is mountainous.  Although there are lowland areas, mostly along the eastern shore, the island as a whole is a complex of mountain ranges thanks to plate tectonics.

Nelson, where I'm staying right now, is on the western skirts of one mountain range.  Farther to the west there are more ranges stretching right down to the ocean between the two main islands.  The famous Abel Tasman National Park occupies the ocean end of just one range of mountains, the one separating Tasman Bay from Golden Bay (large red dot on map).  State Highway 60 winds along the border between Abel Tasman and the far larger adjacent Kahurangi National Park, which stretches all the way to the coast of the Karamea Bight.  Here's a map to show where everything fits together.

To really appreciate these parks you need to be in good shape, prepared to go backpacking -- or, as New Zealanders say, "tramping".  It's the national sport down here.  Everywhere you go, in towns and villages and even in cities like Nelson, you see "Backpackers" signs -- hostels or lodges dedicated to the backpacking business.  And it is big business.  For the most popular tracks, you need to have reservations months, or even years in advance, to get permission to hike.  Abel Tasman Park is also and especially famous for its scenic coastline, and sea kayaking is very popular here too.

Alas, such pursuits are now far beyond me, but there is one good way to come to grips with the country in a car.  It's State Route 60 which runs from Richmond north through Motueka and then across the mountains to Takaka and Collingwood in the Golden Bay district.  

The road across those mountains is laconically referred to as the "Takaka Hill" and I have to bite my tongue to keep from saying exactly what I think of such misleading information.  It's a mountain road, in no uncertain terms -- 25 kilometres of nonstop snaking bends and steep grades, and rising to an elevation of 791 metres above sea level which is certainly high enough to make the air both fresher and much colder than down below!  By the way, the Takaka Hill is one of many locations in New Zealand used for filming The Lord of the Rings movie.

The sign at the foot of the hill announces "Takaka Hill OPEN".  I take that to mean that this highway, like many mountain roads, can be closed in winter by bad weather.  And there goes the only land link between Golden Bay and the rest of the world (except by backpacking).

Anyway, here are some pictures taken during my two-day exploration of this region.

The pebbly waterfront of Ruby Beach (halfway from Richmond to Motueka), with a spectacular view of the mountains along the Nelson shore of Tasman Bay.

The lagoon behind several small islands along the coast just before reaching Motueka.  Abel Tasman National Park occupies the mountain region to the right.

South of Motueka, the dramatic rock formations and sandy beach at Kaiteriteri.  This is the point of departure for boat tours of the Park's shoreline, which take most of the day.  There's no dock.  The tour boats load by simply driving into the beach bow-first and lowering a gangway directly onto the sand.  That's the same way they load and unload at the various stops in the Park itself.

The eroded rocks of the karst landscape atop the Takaka Hill.  Believe it or not, this rock is marble, the same marble used to build the Cathedral in Nelson.  The rib-like erosion is caused by water leaking downwards through cracks or holes in the rock.  

A seven-minute walk from a car park brings you to these views from the Hawkes Lookout just below the summit of Takaka Hill -- back west across Tasman Bay towards Nelson.

Southwest view into the yet higher mountains of Kahurangi National Park.

Perfect weather for a day's drive like this!

A few minutes later, across the crest line, the Harwood Lookout gives a spectacular view across the Takaka Valley towards the high mountains in the west portion of Kahurangi National Park.

Far below, and six or seven minutes' drive away, a campervan (motorhome) makes its way slowly down the west side of the Takaka Hill.  The zoom lens makes it look a lot closer than it actually was.

Off in the distance, beyond the farmlands of the Takaka Valley, the waters of Golden Bay gleam on the horizon.  The town of Takaka is out of sight beyond the right edge of the picture.  

The Down Under Expedition # 2: A Day in Nelson NZ

The trip all went off much as planned, and I'm now settled in for a week in Nelson.  It's a nice-sized city of about 50,000 people at the northern end of New Zealand's South Island (in New Zealand, that population gets you into the national top ten).  Unlike North American cities of comparable size, Nelson's central area is very compact, and easily walkable.  The suburbs then spread out for quite a distance north and south along the east shore of Tasman Bay.

Nelson is said to be the sunniest city in New Zealand, and I believe that.  The surrounding hills are covered with a lot of dried grasses, a look reminiscent of cities like Kamloops in central British Columbia's dryland belt.

First, then, a few pictures of the landscape, and the inevitable mob of sheep:

Although the huge expanse of Tasman Bay looks very inviting, much of it goes dry twice every day at low tide!  On the shores of the bay by the entrance to the city stands this striking sculpture.

Now, into the city itself.  It's New Zealand's second-oldest city and the historic district on and around South Street certainly shows the mid-1800s heritage.

In the centre of the city, on Church Hill, stands the Anglican Cathedral.  Construction of this church along conventional Gothic lines began in 1925, but the building was finished in a more modern design of the upper portion, the bell tower and the chancel in 1965.  The banner on the tower is a promotion for the chamber music festival I'm attending.

Next to the church is one of the many splendid flower bed displays around the centre of the city.

Below Church Hill stretches Trafalgar Street.  The first tree-shaded blocks are lined with half a dozen different restaurants and pubs, all with outdoor patios.  Even though the summer weather hasn't been very hot here this year, the patios are still a wonderful laid-back way to enjoy the time.

One reason why Nelson is such a prime tourist destination is its proximity to the rugged mountain scenery of Abel Tasman National Park.  This park is famous for its backpacking trails and in particular for its coastline, accessible by ocean kayak, with beautiful pristine beaches, clear water, and colonies of seals.  My days for such activities are over now, but I'm going to head that way next and try to get a bit of the flavour of the Park anyway.

The Down Under Expedition 2017 # 1: Clear Skies Flying

Okay, I really haven't got that much to share yet -- but so many people wanted pictures that I thought I'd share a few results from today's flight.  Toronto to Los Angeles on Air Canada's Boeing 787 -- and that was a first for me.  It's an awesome plane: spacious, comfortable, smooth-flying, huge  overhead bins, the tinted windows that you can adjust at the touch of a button all the way to full blackout (no pull-down shades needed).  But of course, you are really here for the pictures.  So, here we go:

Winter prairies in South Dakota:

Mountain scenes in the Colorado Rockies:

 

Las Vegas and the mountains of Red Rock Canyon nature preserve.  You can see the huge hotels of the Las Vegas Strip, and the airport, at the right edge of the second picture.

Inside Out and Upside Down

There are few experiences I've ever had in my travels that are more disconcerting and disorienting than flying between Canada and Australia or New Zealand.

I went for the first time in 1994 and as you read this I am ready to leave and go again.

To grasp the scope of the problem, you really need to take another look at a map of the world: a kind of map such as you rarely see in North America although it's common in Australia and New Zealand.

The first key fact is that the Pacific Ocean is humongous -- the Atlantic shrinks almost to the dimensions of a puddle by comparison.  We aren't normally aware of its sheer size in North America because it always appears in two separate chunks out at the edges of our traditional styles of world maps.  But yes, it's huge.  A nonstop flight from the west coast of North America to Sydney in Australia will take 14 or 15 hours, give or take a bit.  

And that's only the beginning of the problem.  Depending on route and time of year, you're going to cross anywhere from five to eight time zones on the way down -- cue the massive jetlag.

And as if that weren't enough, you're going to cross two imaginary but nonetheless very significant lines on the map: the Equator and the fiendish International Date Line.

Take the Equator first.  As soon as you cross that line into the southern hemisphere, things began happening that can disorient you mightily.  I found out about the big Number One on my first day in New Zealand 22 years ago.  I was on a driving trip along the coast, and stopped for a swim and quick power nap at a beach.  Since I'd been driving south when I stopped, I turned south out of the parking lot when I got rolling again.  But something was wrong.  After a few minutes I could see that I was passing road signs and a village that I'd already driven through before my stop.  And that's when it hit me: in the southern hemisphere, the sun parades across the NORTH side of the sky.  Thinking "south", I automatically turned towards the sun -- when I should have turned away from the sun to keep travelling southwards.  

You can get a distinct feeling that everything is backwards in other ways too.  The sun still crosses the sky from east to west but, as you stand facing the sun, it is travelling from right to left, not from left to right.  This all took a few days to get used to.  Less confusing, but still a bit odd, is the reversal of the seasons, so that the dead of winter in Canada coincides with the height of summer in Australia and New Zealand.

And then there's the pesky, man-made Dateline.  When the system of universal time zones was developed in the late 1800s (by, among others, Canadian engineer Sir Sandford Fleming) it became necessary to set a point at which each day would officially "begin".  Since there was already extensive traffic of ships across the Atlantic Ocean, the decision was taken by an international conference to follow Fleming's suggestion and set the starting point in the middle of the Pacific, along or near the 180 degree meridian of longitude, where it would inconvenience the smallest number of people.

Well, that's no longer true because of the development of longer-range aircraft and the vast increase in trans-Pacific trade.  But we're stuck with it now.  

The workings of the International Dateline baffle many people, but the concept is actually quite simple.  Let's zoom in on the map and have a closer look.   All the zigzags are just to allow the entire territory of one country or another to be on the same side and therefore on the same day.  Each day, then, actually begins first in New Zealand and the Pacific island countries of Samoa, Fiji, Tuvalu and Kiribati.  The real champion among inhabited territories is the island of Kiritimati (that's pronounced "Christmas", by the way), the easternmost inhabited island of the nation of Kiribati.  It's in that big jog to the south of Honolulu.

As you cross the Dateline going west, you set your clocks ahead by one entire day.  Going east, you set your clocks back by one entire day.  People in Australia and New Zealand are much more used to this gimmick than we are, and will say, ever so casually, "We're eighteen hours ahead of you" or whatever the exact time difference may be. When you get right down to it, that's the easiest way to calculate the time difference between home and where you are in those countries.  I quickly caught the habit when I was there before.

The one time when the relationship becomes really clear is on New Year's Eve, when the television shows the fireworks going off in Auckland and Sydney long hours before the ball drops in Times Square in New York -- in fact, around sunrise New York time on December 31!

When the Dateline gets really weird, though, is when you fly across it.  Going west, many nonstop flights travel through the night.  So you will leave, let's say, Los Angeles on a Monday night.  During the flight your clock will advance to Tuesday at midnight and then as you cross the Dateline it will advance again and you'll arrive in Auckland or Sydney early on Wednesday morning.  Tuesday has simply vanished from your calendar.  This could be excessively bizarre if you happened to have your birthday on that Tuesday!

On the return flight, because of the direction the time zones are rolling, you can leave Auckland or Sydney on Thursday around 1:00 pm, fly through the rest of the day, evening, and night, and land in Los Angeles in the morning in time for a late breakfast -- but it will still be Thursday, so you will actually get almost all of Thursday twice.  Obviously the only sensible thing to do is to fly home on your birthday and be sure to have your cake in Australia and eat it too in North America!

As for me, the mere thought of a 14-hour nonstop flight is enough to exhaust me (once when I was 40 years old was quite enough).  If you look again at the map, you'll see that convenient cluster of islands about a third of the way across the ocean from the U.S. West Coast.  It's called "Hawaii", and that gives me my cue.

Even a two and a half hour stopover in Honolulu is a huge benefit on such a long trip, giving you a chance to stretch your legs, rehydrate, breathe fresh air (sections of the terminal at Honolulu are linked by outdoor walkways) and generally wind down before the next leg.  Not only that, but it becomes simplicity itself to throw in an extended stopover in Hawaii at next to no extra charge on your ticket, as I am doing on the way home.

Best of all, it gives me my excuse to fly again with one of my all-time favourite carriers: Hawaiian Airlines.  You have to try this airline to believe it.  The service is always outstanding, attentive and friendly, and the food is a far cry from traditional "airline food".  The menus offer an intriguing fusion of various Pacific cultures, just as Honolulu itself is a city populated by almost all the nationalities of the Pacific Rim.  If you want to see what I mean, go to their website and you can find menus for the meals served in business or first class and in economy class on all their major routes.  Indeed, Hawaiian Airlines (as far as I know) is the only airline that gives free meals to all passengers (not just the premium cabin) between the U.S. mainland and Hawaii.  A trip on Hawaiian always makes me wonder why anyone would want to fly across the South Pacific with any other airline.  

The Great Canadian Winter Epic

Some of my faithful readers will recall that in 2015 I went on an epic summer of rail touring all across Canada, covering both the Halifax-Montreal route and the Toronto-Vancouver route.

(You can read about it here:  The Great Canadian Epic, Part 1 and 6 following posts)

At the end of that summer, my thought was that it would be interesting to cross the country by train in the winter, and see how different everything looked.  This week, I've done just that.  I didn't go all the way to the East Coast, but I again took the 4-night, 3-day ride on The Canadian from Toronto to Vancouver.  And it certainly was different!

First and foremost, the differences in the train itself.  In summer it was a massive consist of no less than 25 cars, with five different scenic dome cars spliced in at intervals.  That included two dining cars, several coaches, and a whole parade of sleeper cars.  This week, the scale was much more modest: just 10 cars with only one coach, two dome cars, five sleepers (one of them not in use), and a single baggage car.

With the smaller train came a smaller number of passengers.  However, they formed just as fascinating a cross-section of society as before.  The one really noticeable difference was this: never before in all my train journeys have I seen so many single travellers.  Usually, I'm it -- or pretty close.

The amount of Canada you actually see from the train in winter is much less than in summer just because of the much shorter daylight hours, especially on the most northerly stretch of the line in the Prairies.

Another thing that does change is the entertainment -- every time I've travelled, a different group of performers.  At regular intervals throughout the trip, a piano and guitar-vocal duo called The Audio Rays entertained us with 30-40 minute concerts in one of the lounges.  They gave a great mix of well-known standards, lesser-known but intriguing songs, and original compositions of their own.  Their style ranged across jazz, blues, light rock, and folk.  Their last set, after dark on the final night, included a first-time performance of a song developed during an impromptu song-writing workshop the previous evening, which was really impressive considering the short notice!  What set the seal on their work, for me, was their deeply moving performance of Cohen's Hallelujah which concluded that final concert.

And then, predictably, there's the winter weather.  The shocker here was that after 3:00 pm on the first full day we got nothing but sunshine, all the way from Hornepayne in Northern Ontario clear through to Vancouver.

Unlike my previous trip, we fell three hours behind time by Edmonton and stayed that way right to the bitter end.  The result was that we missed the mountains west of Jasper altogether but travelled through a fair chunk of the Fraser River Canyon in twilight the next morning.  It was astounding.  I've travelled the Canyon several times by road, but the highway is so much farther up the sides of the gorge that you don't get more than the odd passing glimpse of the spectacle.  I feel that I never truly experienced the Fraser Canyon before this trip.

Sadly, the VIA train normally transits the Canyon in the dark.  Only the tour trains of the Rocky Mountaineer routinely travel through the Canyon in daylight.  Well, I'm glad I got to see as much as I did of that awe-inspiring place.

One technical note: I made a serious boo-boo when I decided to make do with my phone instead of carrying my more bulky SLR camera along.  In the dim light of a cloudy winter Ontario day, or a pre-dawn transit of the Fraser Canyon, the pictures turned blue despite my best efforts to correct them.  Please be patient with me!

With that, I'll stop writing and just let my pictures and brief captions speak for themselves.

The train circling Gogama Lake in Northern Ontario:

Arriving in Hornepayne, Ontario, in a snowstorm, and then the change in the weather less than half an hour later (and still in Hornepayne):

A stand of trees in a clear sky west of Hornepayne:

A clear but very wind-blown morning of flying snow in Winnipeg:

The prairies aren't all flat -- shown here in Manitoba:

A sculpture of rails and wind drifts by Mother Nature in Rivers, Manitoba:

The spectacular view of the Assiniboine River valley in Saskatchewan:

A prairie sunrise east of Edmonton:

Mountain views on the approach to Jasper:

The main street of Jasper, the train station, and surrounding mountains:

Early on the last morning, some views of the Fraser River Canyon and surrounding mountains: