The adventure factor took a great dive the moment we got on the bus out of Haast. We got to Queenstown during the day, checked into a hotel (I needed a telephone for some overseas calls) and then spent a few days setting up our hike.

We had set aside several days for one hike in the South Island. Everyone raves about how beautiful the island is. And it is. Incredible mountains and sounds and forests. We wanted to hike on a mountain track (the NZ word for trail) and we chose one specifically because it's not super-crowded: the Cascade Saddle. It's supposed to be absolutely outrageous, but not nearly as populated as the more famous Milford and Routeburn. These last two tracks are so popular that you have to book in advance; on the Milford you actually have to sleep in sleeping huts along the trail. Camping isn't allowed.

Most tracks have sleeping huts, which cost $NZ8 a nite a person. That includes a bunk and use of kitchen with a wood stove, a table and running water (non potable). You have to bring your own cooking stove. But you can camp for free if you like, usually near the hut, and use a sink and water outside the hut for free. If you want to hang out inside the hut, but camp outside, you're supposed to pay $4 per person per nite.

Well the Cascade saddle turned out to be highly impractical. It wasn't a round trip, so it would have required four days and probably more than $300 of transportation--just getting there and back. We might have still done it, but some other glitches arose. The weather had been really awful, so the saddle, which is normally a non-technical climb, could not be climbed without cramp-ons and an ice ax. We hadn't packed either on our bikes. We would have gotten them and done the trail anyway, but then there was a danger of avalanche, and the risk that we would not be allowed to climb the saddle once we got close. So we wimped out.

Luckily, there's no such thing as a bad trail in NZ. We ended on the Greenstone Caples track, which took us through two incredible mountain valleys and over one not-so-incredible mountain pass. (It was also hard to reach. We had to take a bus, a van, a small boat and another van to get to the trailhead.) The valleys and the forests in the valleys were wonderful. We spent Dec. 6 through 10 on the trail.

After that we ran more errands in Queenstown, which I'll briefly describe. Queenstown has about 2500 residents not including the hundreds of backpackers who swarm through every day. It reminds me a little of Boulder, Colo., only more commercial and less interesting. The streets are lined with expensive souvenir shops for Asian tourists (in this it reminds me of Honolulu), and outdoor gear shops for the trampers who come through setting up hikes. You can buy sheepskins, crystal kiwi birds, and tons of fleeces.

The best thing about the city is the scenery. It's right on a gorgeous lake (Lake Wakatipu) and next to The Remarkables, some very tall, craggy topped snow capped mountains. When we arrived most of the snow was melted off all but the tops of the mountains; but we saw pictures of the place in winter and it looks completely white.

After running more errands in Queenstown, we took the bus to Dunedin, a college town of about 100,000 people on the southeast coast of the South Island. We spent a fine but hectic 24 hours there, including a quick visit to Emerson's micro-brewery.

There we met a deaf brewer, Richard Emerson, age 33. Richard had his first taste of beer when he was 18 and living in Scotland. Then he came back to NZ and worked for a brewery until he was laid off about five years ago. (The word for layoff here is "made redundant.").

Undaunted by his sudden redundancy, Richard took his savings and traveled all over the world, learning brewing techniques. I don't know how he did it, since it's hard enough to speak a foreign language, let alone lip read it. (Richard can speak, but he's more difficult to understand than other deaf people I've heard speaking).

On his return, Richard got his dad and a bunch of friends to chip in some money to start his own brewery. Henderson clan, listen up: some of his brewing vats were actually dairy equipment!

The Emerson operation is quite small--maybe 1,000 square feet. Richard does everything himself, including bottling (in 500ml plain brown bottles that come from Germany--he couldn't get those bottles in NZ).

Unfortunately, Eric and I had to run out on the tasting part of the tour to catch a bus to Christchurch, our last stop in NZ. But we did get to try two beers, the India Pale Ale and the Hefeweissen, a wheat beer. (Interesting tidbit: India Pale Ale, a general style of beer, has a higher alcohol content than other beers because that's the only way its first makers, the British, could keep the beer from spoling when they transported it from Britain to India in colonial days).

The IPAle was excellent; the Hefeweissen was good but we're not big fans of wheat beer. We bought a few bottles on the way out the door and then dashed off to catch our bus.

Christchurch, pop. 400k, was a bit of a letdown. I knew two things about it before we arrived, both from NZ newspapers.

First and most worrisome, Christchurch has been the site of recent racial attacks--fistfights etc. Also, some militant white groups have been distributing leaflets calling for young Kiwi men to organize themselves against other races (most people who aren't white here are Asian).

Second, also from the papers, Christchurch is the home of Miss World runner up, a teen-ager who is famous here because her mother and her agent are fighting over her affections.

Eric and I stayed for only two days. We had no problems on the race front, and we never sighted Miss World. We spent our days walking around town, running more errands, and noticing that the whole town just about dies after 6 pm--except for a strip of extremely yuppie looking bars full of very dressed up, made up young people.

One Kiwi woman we met in a store told us she had just returned from her own world trip, and was disappointed to realize that all Christchurch has going after dark is pictures (movies) and bars.

We tried a bit of both. One night we went to a very busy microbrewery called Dux-D-Lux, which was excellent. The next night we saw Anna Karenina.

We flew out of Christchurch on the 15th. Special treat: Air New Zealand didn't make us box our bikes. All we had to do was turn the handlebars and tape up the chains. Then they put our bikes in huge bags. That saved us about three hours of work.

More luck: we didn't get charged for being overweight. The weight limit per passenger is 20 kilos--our bags alone weighed 35kilos and the bikes weighed at least 26k. I don't know if they don't normally count bike weight, or if they were doing us a favor. Either way, it was a nice way to leave the country.

next: Australia

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