The South Island Land Tour Begins - Blenheim, New Zealand

Harmonie
Don and Anne Myers
Sat 4 Apr 2009 04:22
41:30.7508 S  173:57.1836 E 
 
After leaving Tony and Annette's bach on March 6th, Don and I traveled by water and land shuttles to our motel in Blenheim.  Blenheim is a smallish city (~45,000 people) situated in a valley just inland from the northeast coast of the South Island and just south of the Marlborough Sounds area.  When planning our South Island land tour, Blenheim seemed a good place to start -  an airport for my parents to fly into, easy driving distance to the Marlborough Sounds area and pretty, but not overwhelming scenery.  A scenery-starter kind of place - allowing the four of us to start our land tour off slow and work our way up the scenery scale as we traveled west and south. 
 
The other attraction of the Blenheim area, what many people would call the main attraction, is the wine.  Heaps of wine.  World famous sauvignon blanc is produced here.  And bottled with screw tops.  As staunch Californian and Australian chardonnay drinkers, we admit that we have been won over by the Marlborough Sounds sauvignon blanc - as well as the screw tops.  Why bother with a cork screw when you can simply twist off?  These no-nonsense Kiwis are really on to something here - corks can go bad, but a screw top never fails.  Even my mother, mostly a non-drinker, gave the local sauvignon blanc the thumbs up.  Well, not specifically the thumbs up, but she did say it was good and indulged in three or so glasses over the course of our three week land tour.
 
Don and I arrived in Blenheim on a Friday, my parents weren't due in until the following Saturday, and Michael and Jackie (Lady Kay), in the midst of their own South Island land tour, met us in Blenheim that Friday for a few winery stops and dinner.  Picture 1 is Jackie amongst the greenery at one of the Blenheim area wineries.  Michael and Jackie have been tooling around New Zealand since we all arrived back in November.  They first sailed down the North Island coast nearly to Auckland, where they left Lady Kay, and then bought a campervan (RV) and have been land touring ever since.  Avid trampers, they have hiked almost every major track in the South Island and still seem to have the energy for more.  We took a tour of their campervan and decided it was very boat-like in a toaster-shaped sort of way.  The perfect vehicle for boaters to feel at home in while land touring.  However,  after having driven on some of those scary, up an incline, no guardrail, requiring major concentration while driving on the wrong side of a road that is not wide enough for two cars to pass kind of roads, I'm not sure land touring in a toaster would always be all that relaxing.
 
On March 7, the parents arrived at the Blenheim airport in surprisingly good shape after traveling nearly halfway around the world.  Picture 2 is Mom and Dad on the tarmac next to the puddle jumper that brought them from Auckland.  Note the lovely scenery backdrop of their landing and how spry their step is after such a long voyage.  Also note that I was able to approach the landing area and take a picture without being accosted by security people.  No rules.  Such a marvelous thing.
 
The next two and half days were spent in and around the Blenheim area, but before we embarked on our tourism parade, we went to the grocery store to stock up on breakfast and lunch items to keep in the kitchenette of our two-bedroom unit.  (Sorry Dad, but I can't give an accurate summary of our South Island land tour without at least mentioning the slightly limited nature of your diet - some of which I know is due to medical reasons, but what about all the rest?)  Some might say that my father is a little rigid when it comes to his eating habits.  Those that know him might agree with this given that his diet consists of plain meat (no sauces!), potatoes, bread, butter and peas with an occasional stick of celery thrown in.  Ok, this is a bit of an exaggeration - Dad also eats lima beans and asparagus, but he doesn't eat anything remotely ethnic or gourmet.  No Italian (not even pizza!), no Chinese, no seafood (except sardines!), certainly no French (too many sauces!), no Thai, no Indian, no salads, very few fruits.  With these limitations in mind, we set off to the grocery store in search of Dad-approved food staples such as caffeine-free, sugar-free Pepsi, Rice Krispies, Corn Flakes, lactose-free milk, acceptably soft butter, acceptable bread (no seeds, not too hard, not too soft, not too white, not too brown), English muffins, thin-sliced ham for sandwiches, oyster crackers and sugar-free chocolate or cookies.  We came out of the store with a disappointing haul - sugar-free Coke (no Pepsi or caffeine-free to be found), unacceptably hard butter,  marginally acceptable bread, ham sliced too thick, no oyster crackers and no sugar-free cookies.  The disappointment was great, but not overwhelming and we all (including Dad) took a deep breath and moved on.
 
And move on we did.  Below are pictures taken during our travels in and around Blenheim:
 
Picture 3 - We managed to find the Makana Boutique Chocolate factory (which had very good Dad-approved sugar-free chocolate) on the outskirts of Blenheim, and this was the view of a neighboring winery from the chocolate factory parking lot.  The white nets around the base of the vines are put there to keep the birds away from the grapes.  It is autumn here now and the grapes are nearly ready for harvesting.
 
Picture 4 - Dad got a tip from one of his antique car enthusiast friends (who happens to be a Kiwi) about an aviation museum outside of Blenheim.  We visited one morning and were blown away by the exhibits of real and replica World War I airplanes.   We found out why the exhibits were so impressive when one of the museum guides told us Peter Jackson (New Zealand movie director, famous for his work on the Lord of the Rings trilogy) was on the board of the museum and that his studio, Weta Workshop, designed the exhibits.  The museum was housed in a massive hangar.  Once inside, it was very dark with the lighting designed to highlight the exhibits only.  Each exhibit looked like a movie set - complete with one or more airplanes and pilots flying over, in front of, or surrounded by some scene crafted by the movie folks.  Really cool.  The plane in this picture was one of the earliest German planes to be used in the war.  It's hard to tell in the picture, but the airplane is huge, and designed with more bird-like features than any aircraft built since.
 
Picture 5 - From Blenheim we drove to the town of Picton (where Don and I arrived the week before in the tiny plane from the North Island on our way to the bach) and followed the Queen Charlotte Drive along the coast to the town of Havelock (where Annette grew up).  This picture was one of the many pretty scenes of the sounds we saw as we wound our way along the curves of the twenty mile long coastal road.
 
Picture 6 - Havelock is the green-lipped mussel capital of the world and this restaurant, 'The Mussel Pot' proudly displays a giant version of its offering on its roof.  Where but New Zealand would you find giant green-lipped mussels in a giant pot on a restaurant roof?
 
Picture 7 - From Blenheim, we also drove through the Richmond mountain range to the small city of Nelson.  This was good practice for Don - he was able to hone his scary curve management skills in preparation for roads through the more challenging Southern Alps mountain range that would come later in our travels.  In Nelson, we visited the Christ Church Cathedral, which was originally designed in the 1920's to have tall, beautiful spires reaching skyward to impossible heights.  Instead, final construction was delayed, the 1950's arrived and the original beautiful design was voted down by the modern art deco enthusiasts.  Too bad.  To us it looked like a giant came along and squashed the top of the cathedral down into the squat building it is today.  That's Mom and Dad in the doorway.
 
Picture 8 - After visiting the squat cathedral in Nelson, we moved on to what is claimed to be one of the oldest residential neighborhoods in New Zealand - one street of what used to be workers' cottages built in the 1860's.  It's nice to visit a country with a history even shorter than that of the US - at least we have heaps of buildings dating back a bit further than the 1860's.  If you've ever had a driving need to know what a worker's cottage looked like in Nelson, New Zealand back in the 1860's, this is for you.  Cute, aren't they?
 
That about sums up our land tour scenery-starter stay in Blenheim.  More about our trip to the South Island's west coast later.
Anne
 
 

JPEG image

JPEG image

JPEG image

JPEG image

JPEG image

JPEG image

JPEG image

JPEG image