17th March 2011
Or is it?
Today we parted company from my parents (thanks for a lovely holiday and a fantastic trek, see you in four months or so!) and picked up our rental car for a three week tour around South Island. It’s a bit of an old bucket with balding tyres, but it goes okay.
We headed south, taking a scenic route with rugged mountain backdrops, dark pine plantations and rolling sheep-clad hillsides. The sky was leaden grey, sometimes reflected in the waters of a leaden grey lake. When we hit the coast there was such a fierce onshore breeze that one door of the car could barely be opened while the other would be whipped from your hand. We guessed this was fairly normal weather for the area when we saw the shape of the trees. Occasionally the road would wend through a huddled village of weather-beaten houses with a solitary empty coffee shop in each. Pretty much Scotland, really.
So it was no surprise that our road ended in a town called Invercargill. The sun had come out, and this being one of the oldest towns in New Zealand it had a main street full of handsome old buildings that looked quite fetching in the evening light. But once out of the car, the wind blowing straight from Antarctica kept everyone in fleeces and jackets. Luckily our motel room was well equipped with heaters and electric blankets (take a note, South Africa) and the place we stopped for dinner was cosy and served very excellent seafood – like Scotland, the boon of ice-cold high latitude seas is a wealth of good seafood. Bluff oysters are the local speciality, and I can report them to be big and well-formed but not quite as sweet as the best I’ve had.
As a northern hemisphere lad, it actually takes some time to get used to the idea of the southern part of a country being the coldest and most weather-beaten, but so it is here. Scotland in a mirror.
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Hello!
We are in Ludlow! We’ve just had a fantastic (and quite alcoholic) dinner at La Becasse (Tim was lucky and managed to get a cancellation yesterday). Everything is good here, the sun is shining and we’ve had lots of lovely food… But we miss you two LOADS and while we were eating we’ve been planning our list of restaurants for when you get back!! Tim is incoherent because of too much pigeon and venison and rhubarb and can only say rhubarb now 🙂
Love to you both xx
Mmm… pigeon and venison incoherence. And it has definitely been too long since I had rhubarb. We’re finding some good eatings in New Zealand, though nothing quite to match La Becasse.
Tim – we didn’t stop for the tuataras, as we’ve seen them in a zoo elsewhere before. Invercargill was terrifically grim and bleak, so we drove on quickly.
Glad you’ve had good weather for Ludlow!
Did you catch sight of the tuataras in Invercargill?!