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A view out of the bus’s window as we drove up towards Arthur’s Pass |
Today we met our traveling companions and went on our first walks. I took so many pictures, however, that I’m splitting the day into two pages. This first page deals mostly with the day up till just after lunch.
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Mark checks out, decked out in walking togs |
We got down to the hotel lobby, and Mark checked out. We soon met three of the expected members of our group, Pat and Jim Creswell and Tom Sandoz, but when our guide Nicky Snoyink showed up, she told us that the other two members would not be joining us, because one of them had damaged his knee skiing in New Zealand a couple of days earlier. The two of them very thoughtfully stopped by to apologize for leaving us with only five in our group; they would be returning to the States in only a few hours, as I recall, for the necessary knee surgery.
Nicky owns a vehicle that is perhaps small for a bus, huge for a van, and all six of us fit into it with plenty of room to bounce around. She had equipped it with loads of books on New Zealand: there was a nice one on birds in the seat ahead of the one that I chose on the right (traffic) side of the bus. (They drive on the left in NZ. Just one more thing that gave the country a very British feel.)
Our objective for the end of the day was Arthur’s Pass, in the Southern Alps, but we had two walking adventures planned before we would settle ourselves for the next two nights. First was to drive westward across the Canterbury Plain to the foothills of the Alps. The picture to the left (big image, small) is another one I took from the window of the bus, showing a typical scene from that drive: loads of sheep. All of this was forested, of course, before the Europeans came, about two hundred years ago.
Before we started to rise even into the foothills, Nicky stopped off at a little railway station, where she had arranged to pick up a box lunch for us at a food shop. In the picture to the left (small image, large), that’s Tom standing with Mark and chatting alongside the tracks.
We drove half or three-quarters of an hour further, and stopped by the side of the road for a walk up a gentle grade.
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The landscape that we walked up towards seemed truly unearthly. It was dotted with limestone monoliths, some incredibly huge, that just sat there embedded in the soil. Take a look especially at the lefthand picture in the second row: even the small image doesn’t give a feel of the immensity of these boulders. If you can afford the downloading time, you should definitely look at the big image, and notice that the information placards are probably three feet high for the closer one, and no more than four feet high for the farther one.
Those things are huge! And most of them have been sculpted by the winds and the rains, over how many thousands of years, into the most amazing shapes. Look at the righthand picture in the second row, and its knobbly rock right in the center. Or the lefthand picture in the bottom row, with its miniature natural bridge.
We walked about the rocky landscape for a while, and around noon we stopped in the shelter of one of the monoliths for the lunch that Nicky had picked up. All the pictures in the first three rows are from before lunch, and I think the first in the fourth row was taken from our place of relaxation. The others were taken around 12:45, as we started the return trip to the bus. In the righthand picture in the fourth row that’s Nicky telling the group something about the surroundings while Mark looks back to the photographer.
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Next day’s pictures, remaining pictures from this day, previous day’s account. Return to the central New Zealand page; to the central travel page; to my home page.
