Off the beaten path

  Franz Josef, South Island, New Zealand
Friday, January 2, 2009

This morning I set off on a bus tour of the South Island of New Zealand.  At my friend Mick O'Grady's suggestion (a former New Zealand resident), I joined a Stray bus tour.  Stray is a tour bus company that has a network of buses travelling all over New Zealand and once you pay for a package, you can hop on or hop off in any city and stay as long as you like, and then hop on the next bus that comes through whenver you feel like moving along.  There is generally a bus coming through every day, and it will make stops in different cities on its way to its destination city.  It's nice because they find lodging for you and it makes it easy for you to meet new people along the way, since you're riding in a bus with them for hours at a time, and then partying with them and sleeping in the same rooms as them at the hostels at each destination. 

I picked up the Stray bus going to Greymouth, which is on the opposite (western) side of the island.  The package I bought would send me in a loop around the central/southern portions of the south island.  As most people told me, I probably should have spent more time in New Zealand, but I only had 6 days, so I was packing in a lot in a short amount of time.  The trip to Greymouth was truly fantastic.  We drove through the Southern Alps, which run like a spine down the South Island, and despite some fairly treacherous hills and a crazy driver that kept me on edge, the 4 hour ride flew by.

Beautiful view

Much of this area was used in the filming of Lord of the Rings, and you can see why, because it is really beautiful.  We drove through a national park call Arthur's Pass and I just stared out the window the whole time.  Every turn is basically another river or a beautiful mountain pass.  There was also a train option to go through this area, and that train ride is considered one of the great train rides in the world, according to my guidebook.

More great mountain scenery

After arriving in Greymouth, a farily non-descript town, we had to switch to another bus that was coming through, so I had time to grab lunch and walk around for about 2 hours.  Greymouth is fairly non-descript but had a nice little downtown and a Speights brewpub that I stopped in.  Speights is the "Pride of the South" beer that is brewed on the South Island and is, along with Monteith's, probably the most common beer on the Island.  I sat down by myself and ordered some food, and since it wasn't busy, the bartender/owner who was about 50 years old sat down at my table with me and talked for a while.  He was really an interesting and great guy and gave me a deal on my meal after we talked a while. 

Speight's Brewpub

After that, five of us from the bus I was on (two German 20ish girls and two late 20's Welsh girls and myself) joined the Srray bus coming through to go to our final destination for the day, Franz Josef.  There were about 15 people on the Stray bus we joined and quickly got to know all of them.  You could tell the people had been traveling for a while together and it was a mishmash of people.  There were two Canadian guys in the their mid 20's that were traveling separately, a really annoying 40ish British woman, an Irish girl, a Swiss girl, a French dude, and a few other people, plus the people I came on with.  Along the way down the west coast, we stopped at a number of places- a place to get lunch here, a small town along the way there, and then we stopped at this ridiculous tourist outback place where they had us watch a movie about the deer farming industry and how it started.  These Kiwis (which is what New Zealand natives are known as) would ride in helicopters and the helicopter would get really low and guys would jump out of the helicopter and tackle a deer.  Crazy to watch.  They also had a huge wild hog of some kind that they wanted me to feed, but I let some kid do it instead since he really wanted to.  

Wild Hog

Anyways, I was kind of glad when we left this place.  It started to rain about when we were leaving, and that would become a pretty common theme on the rest of my trip.  

Typical mountain view

We arrived in Franz Josef that night and I grabbed dinner with the group at the hostel bar.  Franz Josef is a tiny town, smaller than my hometown of Russia, Ohio (population 551), and is mainly just a bunch of people staying at hostels.  There was a pretty good crowd at the bar and I drank with some of my busmates most of the night.  The big thing to do in Franz Josef was to visit this big glacier and hike up it, but due to my time constraints, i decided to move along the next day rather than spend the day on the glacier, so I had to get up pretty early the next morning and I headed off to bed.  I'm pretty glad I skipped the glacier, as about two days later, two Aussie guys were killed on that glacier after an avalanche hit them.