crazyscot

I had hoped to have posted about our holiday over Christmas by now, but I have had a number of things clamouring for attention.

It was very much the holiday of lost opportunities.

We had very much hoped to be able to arrange a tour of the NZ Tiwai Point aluminium smelter (over 500MW consumed 24/7/365 since 1971) ... but they recently stopped doing tours as the plant's viability is in question and they've laid off the person who runs the tours (amongst others) :-(

We had hoped to look around the Invercargill Water Tower (pictured), which was right outside our motel, but it recently closed to the public as if a quake should happen while you're inside, you're basically screwed :-(

We had hoped to visit the Moonshine Museum in Gore. Our book of interesting things to do in NZ said it was closed on Christmas day, which we took to mean it was open normal hours on other days... so we turned up at 11:58 on Christmas Eve to find that they were closing at noon :-(

On the drive south, we were passing through Oamaru and saw a sign for "Steampunk HQ", so on a whim we diverted to see what it was. We were greeted by this incredible steampunked loco sitting out on the street, adjacent to a whole building promising more wonders. Sadly, we had several more hours driving ahead of us so it would not have been sensible to visit :-( ... but we'll go back some day!

But enough of the negatives. What did we do, aside from spending bleedin' ages in the car?

We saw Southland. It's flat, for the most part. Really quite flat - similarly flat to Canterbury, which surprised me. Invercargill is a small city (pop. 40k) full of descendants of Scottish settlers. Most of the streets in the centre are named after rivers in Scotland and the north of England (Forth, Clyde, Tyne, Jed, ...). People are friendly, perhaps overly so... some random in the street saw C photographing an interesting building and walked over, claiming to be the contractor who painted it.

So having failed to see the aforementioned moonshine museum, we slunk back to Invercargill for the rest of Christmas Eve, mooched around and bought some food. There's a Catholic basilica of impressive height but modest footprint. By the way, the motel was *brilliant* - really nice room, very well laid out, and the owners gave us a couple of pieces of Christmas cake :).

Christmas Day swung along, so we went to Bluff as planned, where we took the ubiquitous photo at Land's End, then drove to the top of the hill to see the smelter from afar. That only took the morning, so we got our picnic together and drove the 1½ hours east into the Catlins to reach the joke-named Niagara Falls (where the water drops about 10cm) and the petrified forest at Curio Bay (which was a bit underwhelming, but we had our picnic on the beach anyhow, and there were some rare penguins). People rave about the Catlins, but I found what we saw of them a bit underwhelming; it was really nothing more than the rolling countryside of Yorkshire or Perthshire.

On the 26th we were back on the road, to Te Anau. On the way we stopped off to see the old Clifden Suspension Bridge, and to prove that Kiwi road signs are lolcat-compatible. (Ohai is a real place, a township built around a coal mine. There's not much there though.)

In Te Anau we went to the glow-worm caves, where we weren't allowed to take photos. It's a bit of a caving adventure. We were guided though the cave on a walkway above the (noisy!) rushing water. Because of the small groups, the guide had us all gather round so we could hear him. After explaining a few points of interest we were ushered into a punt, and the lights were turned off! He expertly manoeuvred us further into the cave system in near-total darkness, to a cave full of glow-worms - a constellation of green glowing spots, like a bunch of LEDs on the ceiling, as if they were stars.

On the 27th we drove to Manapouri, to visit the power station. This is the power station that was built for the smelter - 850MW of extremely reliable generation capacity (reliability is important, as the smelter lines aren't designed to be able to survive cooling down). The station is an hour's boat ride away from the township, then they put us onto coaches. They took us up to Wilmot Pass for the views, then we came back and entered the rather foreboding access tunnel which spirals 2km down into the mountain, beneath lake level . . . But it was all worth it, for we got to see the machine hall (pictured) in all its noisy, hot, humid splendour. Seven large and very blue turbines, pumping out somewhere around 5.1TWh annually among them. The machine hall is kept clean and tidy, with the large status readout giving it something of a Bondesque feel.

The next day (the 28th) we had three hours driving to Wanaka, via Lake Wakatipu, Queenstown and the Crown Range (with this mad alpine switchback and some epic views which clued me in on the interesting challenges facing pilots in that area). We hadn't been to Wanaka before, but it was only a one-night transit stop to see a little of place before another long day's drive home. Wanaka was busy - apparently half of Christchurch descends on it for New Year - but this didn't prevent us from finding a decent curry. The other half of Christchurch was apparently in, or making its way to, the Lake Tekapo / Twizel / Mount Cook area for summer (which we drove through, against the traffic flow).

Maybe next year we'll have a more sedate less mad-zipping-around holiday? Actually go somewhere and just stop for a few days? To quote a certain advertising campaign: "Yeah, right..."