Mid-Semester Break: Touring the South Island

This Monday, I began Term 2 of my semester here at the University of Canterbury. I have just emerged from my mid-semester break, which was about three weeks long and which involved visits to Queenstown, Te Anau, Fiordland, Wānaka, the Fox and Franz Josef Glaciers, Hokitika, Punakaiki, Abel Tasman, the Marlborough Sounds, and finally, Rarotonga (one of the Cook Islands).

My break was divided into two parts: a trip around the South Island, during which I was accompanied by two friends, and the IES Abroad optional trip to Rarotonga. All but one of the students in the IES Abroad program went to Rarotonga. 

My two friends and I, for our trip around the South Island, bought tickets for three experiences: treetop ziplining in Queenstown, guided kayaking around Milford Sound, and a tour of the glow worm caves in Te Anau. I had been on the fence about buying tickets to the Te Anau glow worm caves, since I knew that glow worms live naturally throughout New Zealand and can be seen for free, but I ended up thoroughly grateful for the purchase. You take a scenic boat ride to the caves, then come inside for hot chocolate and a lesson on what the glow worms are and do (revealing that they are actually maggots, not worms), before a guide leads you out to see the worms. 

There is a short walk through the caves to get to the boat, which takes you through shallow water to see the parts of the cave with glow worms. Our guide walked in front, shining his light on the stalagmites, stalactites and small waterfalls. I had only been in one cave before, Ruby Falls in Tennessee, but I remember thinking it was shockingly beautiful. I’d been wanting to see a cave in New Zealand, and I was loving this one: the drama in the rock formations, the cool quietness of being inside the earth. Our guide showed us where some water fell from up above and invited us to drink it, explaining that it was almost the freshest water in New Zealand (I think he ranked it second or third). He explained to us that from that point onward, we couldn’t even whisper, as it would echo and carry to the other people already seeing the glow worms.

We walked in silence to the boat, which waited on a black pool of water. We clambered in. Then, our guide turned off his light and we were plunged into a darkness unlike any other I had ever known. It was a kind of darkness that your eyes strained against, as they would in a blinding flood of light, because it is so dark that you feel blinded in another way and you search for any sign that your eyes still exist and can still work. We were packed in so close with the other passengers that our legs were pressed up against each other, but when I turned I didn’t see even the silhouette of someone else, just that absolute, dizzying darkness. It occurred to me that there was something poetic about caves holding so much beauty and yet dwelling only in darkness. It’s like keeping a secret that even you can’t know. 

In the quiet and altered atmosphere of that boat ride I felt like I had been lulled into a dream. Just as I began to wonder where the worms were, one by one, tiny spots of light began appearing above our heads. Like I’ve felt at many other points in my travels around New Zealand, I had a hard time believing that what was happening around me was real. The longer I looked at them, the more the glow worms seemed like hallucinations—moving and changing, hazy, dancing constellations wrapping around my vision—until at last we pressed so close to them that I could have reached out and touched the cave rock. And even as I didn’t I could sense its presence there, jutting, and then the glow worms became clear, blue and green pinpricks of light. I could not make out the body of them. My breathing slowed, and when I turned to my side I found that in the glow of the worms I could now see the outline of my friend’s face, a dark shape against darker background.

We went around in that boat for probably  30-minutes. I don’t know how our guide navigated us or how we didn’t bump into any rock. It was the darkest, quietest 30-minutes of my life, and when our boat finally came back to where it had started, stepping off the boat felt like stepping out of another world. Needless to say, I rate and recommend the Te Anau glow worm caves highly. I put it up there with the Kaikōura whale and dolphin watching, which I did a couple months ago, as one of the best ticketed experiences here in Aotearoa. 

Another ticketed experience was our guided kayaking around Milford Sound. Most people take a cruise around Fiordland, but I wanted the feeling of being in the Sound, so I had pushed for kayaking. I had also initially pushed for Doubtful Sound over Milford, because I had heard it was quieter and more remote, but when I realized that Doubtful Sound would suck up a lot more time and money we settled for Milford Sound.

Settled is an inappropriate word because Milford Sound ended up being absolutely breathtaking, with one of my friends calling it the most beautiful place he has seen in all our time here. The night before, it had rained hard, leaving us a little low on morale and our tents dank but also leaving the mountains of Fiordland spilling over with waterfalls. In our kayaks, we were able to paddle right up to the rock of the mountains. My friend and I paddled beneath a waterfall and let the fresh flowing water fall onto our faces and into our mouths. Because of all the flooding, we are also able to paddle out into a little inlet, which our guide told us would be entirely drained away in a couple hours. It was magical in there, sitting in the clear and shallow pool of water, swallowed up by the lush and thriving greenery. And the Sound wasn’t busy like I had feared—we only saw two ships the entire three or so hours we were kayaking, and those ships passed by quickly. 

It sprinkled on us a little, but this was welcome because it cooled us off and cast rainbows over the water. When we left the boats my arms were tired, parts of me were soaked, and we were hungry enough to eat a few hippos, but we are all very satisfied. I would recommend Milford Sound kayaking.

In general, I found Queenstown a bit touristy and overpriced. However, the ziplining was fun, and The Remarkables (mountain range) and Lake Wakatipu are beautiful. Besides the ziplining, Te Anau glow worm caves, and Milford Sound kayaking, all other exploration we did in our stops around the South Island was by foot. We hiked the Diamond Lake and Rocky Mountain Track in Wānaka, Robert’s Point Trail, the Callery Gorge Trail, and the Tatare Tunnels Walk by the Franz Josef Glacier (hike Robert’s Point to see the glacier), and the Hokitika Gorge Walk in Hokitika (a very easy, 40-minute return). In Punakaiki we walked to see the Pancake Rocks and Blowholes, and in Abel Tasman we camped by the beach and spent the day exploring the coastline. 

Overall, it was an amazing, though very tiring, way to begin the break. In my next blog: Rarotonga!