A Grand Tour of New Zealand’s South Island Before Coming Home
Sara Richardson | September 22, 2008
Sara Richardson poses at the Moeraki Boulders at Oamaru. The picture was inspired by the Olympics, she writes.
When someone asks me, “How was New Zealand?” the first words that come to mind are beautiful, empty and wet. Beautiful because of the stunning, untouched scenery in almost every direction; empty except for the herds of sheep, cattle and deer in the pastures on the side of the road and the occasional small town; and wet due to the fact that it was, of course, winter there.
My research at the University of Auckland concluded without definitive results. But we at least found encouraging trends that complement existing reports. We performed structural analyses and presented our work (along with a chronicle of our travels) to the institute at their regular Friday forum series.
I spent my final time in New Zealand on the South Island. All of my previous adventures had been based out of Auckland on the North Island, so this was the opportunity to discover the other half of the country. I rented a car with another PRIME New Zealand student, Andrea Cardenas and took a week to drive a 1700-km (a little more than 1,000 miles) circle around the South Island.
We used Christchurch as a starting point (yes, there is a famous church there) for our trip and drove down the Pacific Coast on Highway 1 – though it was the Pacific Coast on the other side of that ocean. We stopped in Oamaru to see some mystifying spherical boulders on our way to Dunedin, where we took a tour of the Cadbury Chocolate Factory (I’m still working on finishing my chocolate) and saw penguins coming out of the ocean at dusk—so cool! Then it was off to cruise the glacier-carved Milford Sound, where we saw more waterfalls than I could count and precious baby fur-seals sleeping on the rocks.
Richardson (right) and fellow PRIME student Andrea Cardenas at Lake Tekapo.
The drive back took us through Queenstown and by Mt. Cook through simply amazing views. Imagine no other car on a two-lane road for hours, green fields on both sides only disturbed by lines of trees acting as windbreaks and sparingly dotted with livestock, streams crisscrossing the road every now and again, and mountains in the distance elegantly capped with snow. It was gorgeous.
Where some people see traveling abroad as an opportunity for language-immersion, I consider my trip to the English-speaking, metric-using country of New Zealand as unit-immersion. It was good experience for me, and most definitely a summer I will never forget.
It’s been three weeks since I left New Zealand, and in that time I’ve moved into my new apartment (yay!), put my boyfriend on a plane to Costa Rica for the quarter (rough, huh?), and had more meetings than I want to admit to. I still haven’t fully adjusted to life back at home – I keep hitting the windshield wipers when trying to signal to change lanes and I ordered ‘chips’ at a restaurant expecting to get fries. Regardless, I definitely have the travel-bug now and I can’t wait to see what else the world has in store for me.
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Sara Richardson is studying in Auckland, New Zealand's biggest city. |
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