Day 121: Back to New Zealand, Christchurch (briefly), Invercargill

When flying, I love sitting window seat.  This next series of pictures will explain why:

Good morning, Australia.  It's been fun, but it's time to go.

Back to New Zealand:

Hello, Mt Cook!  Or Aoraki, depending on what you feel like calling it.  At 3724 meters, it is the highest mountain in New Zealand.  Both the Fox and Franz Josef glaciers start from around its shoulders.

And we had an exceptionally clear day with great views, too.

You can see that the landscape changes dramatically as soon as you cross the spine of the Southern Alps, too.

One minute, snow covered mountains, and immediately in the rain shadow, this:

Which eventually gives way to the cultivated and irrigated patchwork fields of Canterbury and Christchurch.

My gob, it is smacked.

Once in Christchurch, we almost immediately boarded a two propeller plane to Invercargill, on the very southern tip of the South Island.

Interestingly enough, there is no security at all for these domestic flights.  You just walk into the airport, and immediately onto the tarmac and onto the flight.  You probably don't have to arrive 2 hours early for these.

And on the ground in Invercargill.  It's a small airport, too, and only 3 km from the center of the city, so we just walked in to our Couchsurfing host's home.

We stayed with an incredibly generous host named Amy.  She doesn't quite know how to say no to hosting requests, so she had said yes to three couples that evening.   She even gave up her bed so we could sleep in it, and went to her boyfriend's house.

Molly rocking the side pony.

This park is really just a flood control canal for the city, but it's so immaculately groomed youd never guess unless you noticed the dykes around it, and that the bridges were all solid concrete.

Invercargill was an odd place, but not unpleasantly so.  It had the feeling of a city that at one point had lots and lots of potential, built accordingly, and then never quite lived up to it.  The roads were all about 50% wider than they needed to be, and the downtown had the feel as if it were supposed to be for a much more bustling place.

But it seems to be a bit more on the upswing now.  The local technical university has implemented a free tuition program to attract young people, and it seems to be reversing years of youth drain as people moved away for Christchurch or Auckland for jobs.

Unfortunately, what we needed was to visit the DOC office to buy two backcountry hut passes.  But our flight arrived at 4PM on Friday, which is also when the office closed for the weekend.  So we planned to spend the weekend getting ready for some epic hiking, and entertaining ourselves however we could.