New Zealand: Ridiculously Beautiful

Our first introduction to New Zealand was Air New Zealand's safety video. Though it initially seemed normal enough, it was soon apparent that everyone in the video, from the stewardesses to the passengers, and even the captain, were all only wearing body paint of their uniforms. Here's a shot from the video (thanks, "the internet"!):

Whew! Lest there be some confusion, this is NOT the ridiculous beauty the post's title refers to.

We spent a day in Aukland, which is sort of like a smaller Sydney, and the home of fully 2/3rds of New Zealand's population of 4 million. Then we rented a car, and drove to the town of Wellington on the south tip of the north island.

The country changed a lot during our drive, but much of it was beautiful green hillsides with grazing sheep, like these:

If you're thinking: "well, those are certainly OK, but not spectacular", you are forgetting the cumulative effect of being surrounded by them at every turn. It's a landscape that's difficult to capture in a photograph because it's too encompassing. (But we felt that we should at least try).

The other problem with a beautiful landscape that's literally everywhere is that you kind of can't take pictures of it. If we'd stopped the car to take a picture at every beautiful view, we never would have made it to Wellington!

About the roads: the largest highways we've encountered in New Zealand are small, two lane roads. These connect the cities. All the other roads--to campsites or houses out in the country--are either one lane paved, or, more often, one lane unpaved. The rest is nature.

Though we probably could have made the drive all in one day, we decided to camp overnight about half-way through in a large, flat preserve. The campsite was nothing special, but we took an excellent, long walk, in the view of some snow-dusted mountains on one side, and a cloud-topped volcano on the other:

After our night in Wellington, we drove through a stormy morning to catch the inter-islander ferry at 7:30am. Here's a shot from our car, waiting to park on board.

When we booked the ferry, my mind idly assumed it must be something like the San Francisco ferry. I imagined a nice, pleasant, and above all, calm ride. Of course, the San Francisco ferry never enters the open ocean, which is the crucial fact I was neglecting. After a very pleasant 10 minutes, the astonishingly (and pleasingly) Dutch ship captain came on the speaker to announce that, outside the bay there was "ah....a bit of swell" and that he hoped that our trip wouldn't be "too unpleasant".

There certainly was quite a bit of swell, and a large number of people on the ferry quickly became sick. You were never more than about 10 steps from a "sick bag", however, and the stewardesses circulated, handing out ice (which one was supposed to suck on) and sympathetic words in ample quantities. I had taken motion sickness pills, but they were only barely enough. Jen is naturally graced with an iron constitution.

To be continued in our next post...