Middle of Nowhere
Trip Start
Dec 31, 2008
1
5
40
Trip End
Mar 27, 2009
Makarora,
South Island,
New Zealand
Saturday, January 3, 2009
I didn't really discuss it in my previous post, but the Stray bus drivers are a big part of your trip on these tours. They are the guides for the area and are generally cool people who have been doing this for a while. They get you involved with each other by doing contests or organizing the night's activities at the hostels and whatnot. My first day's driver was Rick, a 30ish guy with a really outgoing personality who had been doing this for a while. My bus driver for the 2nd day was Skins (his nickname- I don't think I ever learned his real name). Unlike my previous day's driver, Rick, Skins was a 42 year old guy who was new to this bus company, so he had to read much of his info on the area from notes. He was also driving a much smaller bus, and there were only 7 of us on board- two German brothers in their late 20s, one of whom barely spoke English, two Australian sisters in their 40s who struck me as hicks, a 21 year old French girl named Claire who was extremely shy, and an early 20s British guy that was a lot of fun named Jordan. Jordan and I hung out quite a bit over the next couple days.
As I mentioned above, not a ton happened on this day. It was mostly driving along the coast and stopping at various sites along the way. The scenery was incredibly beautiful and every once in a while we'd pull over and go check out a waterfall off the road a bit, or stop at a local fruit market. The area is so sparsely populated that you can drive for over an hour and barely see another human. One cool place we stopped was called the blue pools, where we walked over a suspension bridge to see this area of a river that had incredibly blue water, and we also saw a really big waterfall. Again, this area was heavily filmed for LOTR, and everywhere you go around New Zealand, you see lots of Lord of the Rings tours.
That night, we stopped at the aforementioned Makarora (population of approximately 20). All 7 of us crowded into this little dumpy lodge where there was a single bar/general store/restaurant that served the whole place. We were supposed to do karaoke that night, but a bachelor party (God knows from where) took over the place so we didn't get to. They had a ping pong table, so I took on some of the other people on my bus for a while and I enlightened Jordan on how to play beer pong, but that was pretty much it this day before I headed off to bed and listened to the old women from our group snore all night.
