Nov 8 - "Ride Me" and Faith Based Driving

So the partially obscured image you see is the tattoo on the lower back of a girl we saw at the top of the gondola ride in Queenstown. It’s a little hard to make out, but it says “Ride Me”. Sadly, I wussed out of flat out asking her if I could take a picture, so what you see above is the best effort to sneak one. It’s the first lower back tattoo I’ve seen that I can recall since we’ve been here. Tattoos don’t seem as common here as in the US, but piercings seem to be more common, if anything. Lots of pierced nostrils and lips here.

The other part of the title is what I have labeled driving in New Zealand. It’s very apparent that Kiwi’s very early on must develop a certain amount of faith that the lorry (that’s a truck to us Yanks) in the oncoming traffic lane around the blind turn or over the blind hill is in it’s correct, intended lane. The faith works both ways of course, and I say the have to develop it because I think I have seen exactly 2 turns in NZ that weren’t blind. You have more views of magnificent precipices that you could easily drive off of then you do of the oncoming lane of traffic. If it weren’t for the driving on the other side of the road, I’d strongly advocate sending Americans here for a week to learn to drive. There’s no “not paying attention to the road” here. You pay attention or you get flattened. I wonder what the accident statistics are like here.

So we drove to Dunedin today, from Queenstown. I’ve been having a great time, the scenery is fantastic, and traveling about with the Jester has been great fun, but I think I’m ready to pause for a bit. The downside of seeing so much of the country in such a short period of time is that you burn out from being always on the move. We go from here to Christchurch, and final winding down to head back to the States. Last night I didn’t sleep well, couldn’t get to sleep, and woke up early. It was like I had an exam today or something. Jester developed a migraine, or started to; he’s catching a nap in the other room right now. So I think the travel has started to take its toll on us. The weather today was also not great, so that wasn’t much help. I’ve started to look forward to getting home, organizing the photos and making a trip scrapbook type thing (which will most likely be online of course, although I am thinking maybe I should print off a batch of the better pictures). Seeing the friends and such is also sounding good. I’m going to really realize just how out of touch I’ve been the last few weeks when I get home.

Let’s see…drive here was not bad, despite the weather. We stopped at a Lord of The Rings filming location, one that I think is very recognizable, the Pillars of Kings on the River Anduin. I will of course have to check my DVDs when I get home and compare to photos. I’ll put some kind of screen capture of the scene vs. my picture up. Geek cool! We also stopped at the winery that the location sits on and picked up some wine. Sadly, there was no “Return of the King” label wine.

We bought sandwiches this morning, planning on stopping at a scenic location to eat them. The weather foiled this plan, and we hit some construction (we suspect they were clearing the road of debris from a rock slide) which sat us on the highway for 20 or so minutes so we ended up eating mostly there, in the car. Oh and it started to snow (small hail really) while we were eating. Once we got rolling again we stopped a little further up at a nice lookout point, finished eating, and took some more pictures of the strangely green water. Had we mentioned the water yet? All the bodies of water in this country seem to be this deep, but bright shade of green. It shows up well in the pictures, that’s not a goof on the cameras part, it’s really that color. No idea why. Dunedin is a bit of a mess, and oh, they actually had HIGHWAYS on the way in. Not much by our standards, but a little bit. It was odd actually driving on two-lane high speed roadways again. Return to civilization!

Now that I said that, I just realized I think that’s nearly true. Our next stop is Christchurch, the major city of the south island, so we are most likely done with wilderness areas, other then the final drive to CC. The CC drive is along the coast, so I expect it will be very nice, and since it is our last drive, and we are in CC for a day, I feel no need to hurry. I expect we’ll make several scenic stops. Hey, it just started raining! For real rain though, not the miserable cold drizzle that’s been pretending to be rain most of the time we said there was rain! Maybe that means we’ll be owed some sunshine tomorrow!

Back to the drive in…supporting the getting wore out theory, Jester and me both took brief naps in the car during the drive, something we’d both managed to avoid doing until now. The landscape is still varied and incredible, but it’s hard to get decent photos with this weather, and missing 30 minutes of it isn’t the end of the world. Dunedin is a college town it seems, with the University of Otago, Dunedin College of Education, and Otago Polytechnic all located here. The total enrollment is around twenty thousand, so none too large by US standards. I don’t know how that places them in NZ ones.

I’m not sure how much we’ll get done in Dunedin, we had some stuff planned out, but the traffic and roads here are a mess(lots of one ways, and complex traffic patterns) and the rain means we probably won’t want to walk much. Not too much of a loss I suspect, the things we’d be going to see are city color, like a train station, so if we miss it, not a big loss, not to me anyway, that’s not what I came down here to see. I’ll have to write another post later about what we actually end up doing.