Another pre-7 a.m. wake-up to catch my bus north. My tour today is part of the bus system I've been on the past few days, but it's supplemented with more commentary and stops. At the moment, I'm writing from the base of Mount Cook, New Zealand's highest peak. It's a popular destination for people to hike up part of the mountain -- even camp up in huts further up -- but I'm content just looking at it from the bottom. Today I have neither the clothes nor the energy to contemplate a walk up a snow-covered mountain.
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| Mt. Cook |
The main hotel in town, where we are taking our break, has a little museum dedicated to Sir Edmund Hillary, who climbed Mount Cook before he climbed Everest. It also has a planetarium, so I checked out a show about the southern night sky. It was kind of simple, given my level of knowledge of astronomy, but as I'm not familiar with the southern sky, I learned a bit. And it refreshed my memory of things I used to know but have forgotten.
[About 5 hours later...] I've managed to suffer from almost no feelings of motion sickness so far on this trip. Let's see if I can manage to write on the bus. It's a good time to praice my tuping without looking, so I can look out the window while I type. At the moment, we're about an hour away from Christchurch. I am
so looking forward to taking a shower and getting into bed! This area of the South Island is pretty dull -- we're on the Canterbury Plains and it's just farmland. Occassionally we'll drive through a dinky little town and the driver will tell us its history, but even those highlights aren't making this part of the ride too captivating.
Most of the trip today was more interesting than this last bit, though. After leaving Mount Cook, we still had more mountains to see, and stopped at some little famous church, The Church of the Good Shepherd. If our driver told us why it was famous, I either missed it or forgot it (probably slept through it). But it's a tiny little thing in the middle of nowhere. Charming, but I'm not sure why everyone stops to see it. Unless it's because of the dearth of old buildings in this country, and most tourists love old buildings, so we'll stop to look at any of them!
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| The Church of the Good Shepherd |
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| The view from behind the church (which almost no one else bothered to go see). |
Wow, I managed to type two paragraphs while mostly looking out the window while I typed. I hope this is the start of the end of my motions sickness! Then again, there's a difference between tapping my fingers while looking out the window on a smooth road, and, say,trying to read in stop-and-go traffic. I'd write more, but not a wholoe lot happened today to write about.
Oh yeah, this... At the town we stopped for lunch, there was this great antiques, collectables, and odds and ends shop. Among other things, it sells costumes used in films and TV shows shot in New Zealand, like these from
Zena, Warrior Princess, and from lots of other things, like whatever this was starring the world's scariest mannequin:
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| Zena & Friends |
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| From the WTF Show. |
I'd have stayed longer if I had more time!
Tomorrow I head to the North Island. I'll be taking the ferry and
THAT will be a test to see how motion sick I get! Boats and I have never gotten along. I'll be in Wellington for a full day or two, in part just to rest and also because Wellington sounds like a cool city, easy to explore on foot. Then I'll keep heading north.
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