Catlins Roadtrip: 5 Things from 500+ km
Apr. 10th, 2024 11:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
canyonwalkerNew 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.
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.
