February 21, 2011

Last day on the north island. Another beautiful sunny day and our last chance to enjoy our view of Wellington Harbor:

Days Bay had been a great place to stay, calm and beautiful, but now we had drive around the entire bay to reach the ferry terminal in Wellington.

I realized I hadn’t called the campervan company. Oops. They were supposed to pick us up at the ferry terminal in Picton on the south island and I had never told them which ferry we were coming in on. I called them and the woman on the other end of the line seemed very relieved to get the call. She would be there at the terminal when we arrived.

We had booked the 10:25 ferry. We wanted time to get out of Picton once we were on the other side and also be able to see the great views from the ferry during the day.

It took time to find the rental car agency, and once we found it there was a waiting line to return the car. When it was our turn we were told that the Europcar return parking was full and that we had to drive down to the ferry terminal and deliver the car there. All this back and forth ate up our time buffer.

As we approached the terminal we could see the ferry:

We are used to the ferry from Oslo and Denmark and this was a ferry of about the same size.

We hurried to get all the luggage out and get the car delivered. Inside the terminal was a check-in that looked very much like an airline check-in. We had to check in our luggage and allowance was more or less like on a plane: 2 pieces of luggage per person, only small hand-luggage on board. It seemed a bit strange, given the size of the ferry, but we were very glad to get rid of our large back-packs for the duration of the trip.

After we had caught up with our own breath we realized the deadline we had raced to meet was the check-in deadline. Suddenly we had plenty of time to wait for boarding…

The trip over to Picton takes roughly 3 hours. The weather was pretty good:

It almost felt like being on a cruise ship:

There was even ice cream available:

We crossed the Cook Strait and when we started making our way through the sounds of the south island  the color of the water changed to a magnificent turquoise :

Coupled with the blue sky the view seemed almost artificial. If I had been a painter I would probably have made a painting at this point.

After a fantastic 3 hour cruise with breathtaking scenery we reached Picton. We didn’t spend much time there, but our impression was that of a small not very beautiful coastal village that has been lucky enough to get the ferry terminal.

We were picked up and driven over to the offices of Pacific Horizon to meet our home for the next 3 weeks:

Now where we do we put everything?

The interior reminded us very much of the interior of a small boat made for sleeping over. I guess the design needs to solve the same problems. You need to maximize the use of very little space and also make sure things don’t move around too much when the vehicle starts to hump and bump.

Iseline was thrilled by the combined dining/sleeping/kitchen room:

but found the restroom a bit small:

There was also a bed over the driving compartment:

It took us some time to get everything in place and get ready to leave.

We had spoken to several of our friends who had been to New Zealand and also read lots of recommendations on the web. Traveling around the south island in a camper van was simply THE way to do it. The advantages were seductive:  Stop wherever you want and sleep over in the middle of nowhere. You always carry everything with you and can stop to make dinner or go fishing wherever and whenever you like. We had been sold and had booked one without really thinking twice.

We have never used a camper van before and now we started to quickly realize some of the disadvantages. Anything that was fragile or could move about had to be secured in some way. Storage space was limited and we had to make sure things we needed frequently was easy to get to. Once we were installed somewhere we wanted to sleep over and had taken all our stuff out to e.g. have dinner, we did not have a transport vehicle unless we packed everything down again.

Once we got on the road we realized this large vehicle was about as agile as an overweight elephant. And the g-forces in curves, not to mention the humping and bumping, was way stronger than in a regular car.

We drove out of Picton and up through Marlborough sounds. The road was full of curves and bumps. Everyone was tossed in all directions and Iseline very quickly got car sick and threw up. It was impossible to keep a normal speed with such a vechicle on these roads and we used about half as long as we thought we needed to reach our goal: the small village of Portage.

We were starting to wonder if we really wanted to do this for 3 weeks.

At least the landscape with lots of bays and sounds was gorgeous:

We found a small self-service campsite run by the DoC (Department of Conservation) and settled for the night. The whole system was based on honesty. Calculate your rate based on the prices on the sign:

 

Put the money in an envelope and put it in the cash box. It reminded us of the Norwegian system of self-service cabins in the mountains where you take the food you need and leave payment.

We had a look around. The tide differences are huge here, up to 3 and a half meters (11 feet). The tide was low and we could walk a bit out into the bay (although you cannot really see that from the picture. The next morning this spot was two meters under water).

Firs meal in our camper van:

OK. Let’s try to calm down Iseline, who is super over-excited about being in a camper van. Let’s also cheer up Helene while we are at it:

Now that’s better. Thank you for holding her down, Adrian. Sorry I didn’t manage to wake up Viktor 🙂

We went to bed, full of expectations of discovering more of the beautiful Marlborough Sounds in the morning.

Eirik

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