* * Day 19, Kiakoura

Jane and Whitney are still asleep as I tap away at the keyboard to document yesterday’s penultimate day in New Zealand. We began the day in Nelson at the home of Jo and Rex Morris, who we’d met through our contacts in Rotary International. Rex is retired and Jo is semi-retired, but on this day she went to her job and was gone when we arose. Rex fixed us a cold breakfast of cereal, fruit, and toast.

Every culture produces things that are paradoxes to others. Like we found in England and Scotland, the Kiwis use a metal rack to serve toast which holds the slices vertically.  This is one of the most useless devices of all time, as toast is better when warm and this device cools it most readily.

Like all our hosts here, Rex and Jo were congenial and amazingly hospitable, freely offering us everything in their home. Each of our many hosts was more difficult to leave than the one before.

On the road again (Do I hear Willy Nelson singing in the background?), I drove Highway 6 through a mixed forest mountainous area to the east, aiming for Highway 1 for the journey southbound. I have done most of the driving everywhere we’ve been, but occasionally have been too sleepy to continue. We were surprised when we rented this car that the rental agency allowed Whitney at age 21 to be a driver; note that the driver sits on the right side of the car and drives on the left side of the road. She took over for me while I slept in the back seat. When I awoke, we were already on Highway 1, a coastal road with the Pacific Ocean crashing on the rocks on our left and steep hills crowding the road and a parallel railroad track on the right. We stopped at a couple of overlooks where we watched sea lions playing around in the water or sunbathing on the rocks. One lion was completely on his back, resting his head on the rocks with his mouth upwards, the same way Whitney says her dog Jason often sleeps.

Our destination was Kiakoura, where we arrived around 1:00 pm. We checked into a motel alongside the highway that Jane had booked the evening before. Our room was in a duplex, single-storey building, with garish black and red interior accents and a kitchenette. Rather than unpacking then, we went into town to look for information and lunch.

Boating tours are offered here to watch whales. We had considered doing this, in spite of the dear cost ($150 per person), but we learned at the information desk that high winds were preventing the boats from going out. So we asked about other things to do that were less costly. While considering our options, we ate lunch on an outdoor table at a nearby restaurant where Jane’s small salad, Whitney’s fish and chips, and my prawns and chips set us back $75 (which was typical). The weather was fine, warm when in the sun and cool in the shade. Sea gulls swooped around and cawed noisily.

After lunch, we drove five kilometers outside town to a winery where Jane and Whitney went inside to do a tasting. I’m not huge wine fan, so I sat in the car and read my book. Ours was the only car in the lot. They returned shortly with a bottle of red. We then went to a nearby lavender farm where Jane and Whitney decided not to pay $5 each to tour the garden. Instead, we poked our heads inside the garage where there was a lavendistillery, presumably for extracting the scent from lavender blossoms, which were hanging from the ceiling in tied clumps. It looked like a moonshine still.

The cities of Christchurch and Dunedin have peninsulas nearby (the Banks and Otago, respectively), and Kiakoura had its own peninsula as well. This one is characterized by high plains atop high, white cliffs. We parked the car near the tip of the peninsula and walked a brick-paved trail steeply upwards to the plain. There were lots of other walkers around on this popular trail. The views were outstanding, with the blue-green Pacific to the east and the huge mountains of almost 9000 feet rimming Kiakoura to the northwest. Clouds played on the slate colored mountains, forested at the lower elevations and barren at the top, giving a great backdrop to my photos. Some walkers had descended other trails to the rocky beaches below. There were several interpretive signs, talking about the native birds and plants of the area. One sign told about the whaling that was New Zealand’s first industry; the killing of thousands of these magnificent animals was deeply saddening to me. The fields were grazed by sheep and cows, in grass that was tall and crispy-brown dry.  We walked a few kilometers along the cliff’s edge before returning to the car.

We drove back into town and bought supper fixings and cooked for ourselves in our motel room, eating salad and pasta, washed down with a bottle of white wine. On TV was a show about real-life dwarves and another about the amazing intelligence of animals.

Today is our last day in New Zealand. We’ll drive to Christchurch this morning, which should take 2-1/2 hours. Then we plan to take a bus tour of the areas devastated by the 2010 earthquake which killed a couple hundred people and destroyed much of downtown. Yesterday, Jo Morris showed us several photos of a home in Christchurch where one of her sons lived during the quake. It was a two-storey house. The top storey seemed unscathed, but the first floor walls were wrecked, sitting at a 15-degree angle from vertical. Interior photos showed the collapse of portions of a brick wall and all manner of debris strewn about the room. It is a miracle nobody was killed in it. The house would soon be demolished.

Then we head for the airport.

Our first flight to Auckland departs around 7 p.m.  From there, we catch the long flight across the Pacific to Los Angeles, arriving around 7 p.m. local time the next day (but we gain a day traveling across the International Date Line, so it’s actually the same day as we depart). We’ll need to go through customs, which is always tiring and stressful, and transfer by bus across the airport to a domestic terminal. Then we take the final flight to Dulles Airport in Northern Virginia, arriving around midnight local time. Then we’ll find Whitney’s car that hopefully my brother has parked there for us, and drive 4 hours home, either through the night or after staying in a motel en-route.  

Outside my motel window this moment are those same mountains that formed the backdrop for my photos on the peninsula. The first sun rays of the day are lighting up the lower slopes and their carpet of green. I hear a train rumbling down the tracks across the highway from the motel. In a day, we’ll be gone and this wonderful adventure will be over. Home, now in the clutches of mid-winter, draws us back. All vacations must come to an end, and home always has a special allure and magnetism. But it’s hard to think about leaving this place. My mind is drawn back to the tombstones in the graveyard in Westport, those with the inscriptions of the towns or counties of origin of the people resting there, someplace in Scotland or Ireland. When those people migrated to New Zealand, because travel was slow, difficult, and expensive and because it was quite literally at the other end of the world, and they would never return. Virginia is a long way away too, but today’s jets will take us anywhere in the world in a day’s time. I’m wondering now when or if I will ever be back in New Zealand, the most appealing nation in the world.