Calling an Audible: Roadtrip Through the Catlins

New Zealand Travelog #10
Papatowai, NZ - Wed, 10 Apr 2024, 2:30pm

This morning we called an audible on our plans. The weather was looking to be crummy again for the whole day, clouds all day and rain starting soon, so it wasn't a great day for hiking in the mountains around Queenstown. Yeah, we made the best of it yesterday, but we weren't up for a second day of it. And today we didn't even get to start off with a beautiful sunrise over Lake Wakatipu. At dawn today the sky basically just transitioned from dark gray to medium gray. Instead of fighting it out to see if we could even see the mountains through the clouds we decided to pull the plug on Queenstown and do a roadtrip visiting waterfalls in The Catlins.

Re-planning the day's activity wasn't too hard. Hawk had already built a list of waterfalls we might like to see in the Catlins, the coastal mountains on the southeastern corner of New Zealand's South Island. When we were planning the trip we thought we might spend a day or so out in this region, but then we scrapped it because we were crunched for time with so many other worthy things we wanted to see and do. Well, when one of those worthier things (mountains around Queenstown) turns less worthy (due to rain), something else (the Catlins) moves up the list.

I'm jotting down these thoughts right now as we're halfway through our trip. We're in the small town of Papatowai eating lunch. It's a very small town. There's, like, one gas station here, and it's also a restaurant and general store.

So far it's been a good day. We've visited a few waterfalls already. The weather's not great; it's still cloudy and raining lightly. But while that's crummy weather for seeing mountains it's actually halfway decent weather for seeing waterfalls. We'll visit a few more after lunch and then complete our drive on to Te'Anau, where we're staying for the next two days.

Update: Here are journal entries I posted later with photos and details of the 4 waterfall hikes:

• Purakaunui Falls
• Matai Falls— and bonus Horseshoe Falls
• McLean Falls
• Koropuku Falls

Catlins Roadtrip: 5 Things from 500+ km

New Zealand Travelog #11
Te'Anau, NZ - Wed, 10 Apr 2024, 9:30pm

We've just gotten settled into our hotel room in Te'Anau after a roadtrip through the Catlins in southeastern New Zealand. After 524 km of driving and several miles of hiking it's been a long day!

Per my note a few entries ago about striving not to fall two weeks behind on blogging this trip I'll hold off on post pics from our many waterfall hikes today. Let me just leave it for now at: We hiked a bunch of waterfalls, it was great, and (as expected) the crummy weather wasn't so bad for seeing waterfalls. But what else happened? Oh, there's so much else to share! Here are Five Things:

1) Sheep, Everywhere. The other night in Queenstown we saw a historical marker stating that New Zealand has 10x as many sheep as people. That was according to a monument to the guy who supposedly first brought sheep to the country. At the time of its construction there were 40 million of them (sheep, that is) versus only 4 million people. A quick search shows there are 5 million people in New Zealand today while the sheep population has dropped to an estimated 25 million. Though from today I think we saw almost of million of them. It's not obvious near a bigger town like Queenstown how many sheep there are, but out in the countryside they're everywhere, dotting every field, every hill.

2) It's all small towns. After connecting Monday in Auckland, New Zealand's largest city, we flew to the touristy town of Queensland. Bustling as it is, it's got a population of only about 50,000 in the metro area. Once we left that comparative metropolis the next largest town we drove through was Gore, with a population of just over 8,000. Most other towns we drove through have populations better counted in the dozens than even the hundreds.

3) "It's like 1950s America... but with cell reception and civil rights." Driving along lightly traveled 2-lane country highways rarely, past sweeping vistas, with the occasional bucolic small town made me imagine that this is what traveling in the Western US would've been like many years ago, perhaps in the 1950s. Except that today we enjoy modern conveniences such as cell reception and civil rights.

4) The Gore-Clinton Presidential Highway. As we approached the town of Gore I thought, "Huh, like Al Gore. Then a few miles later we saw a billboard on the side of the road proclaiming it the Gore-Clinton "Presidential" Highway. You see, Clinton happens to be the next town of any size along the road— and by any size I mean its population is fewer than 300. I'm just surprised the people here cared enough about US politics 30 years ago to bother. Though maybe that's because of #5....

5) It seems like every 4th person immigrated here. People in small towns, and even some of the slightly bigger ones, like to ask, "Where are you from?" I happily tell them I'm from the US, near the city of San Francisco. (Note: I do not say "California" when I'm halfway around the world, expecting people in a different hemisphere to know names of the various 50 United States.) What's been weird today is that seemingly every 4th person says, "Oh, I'm from the US, too." Or they're from the UK. Or another country. And I don't mean fellow tourists— I mean people living and working in New Zealand.