Sweet kiwis and dry wine

First tantalising glimpse of the South Island

The ferry trip to the South Island was very pretty, although the wine from last night's dinner party meant that we didn't have our best sea legs on. It wasn't just a matter of sailing away from one coast and landing at the other: it was about one hour at each end of channels and islets, a complicated jigsaw of land rather like Scotland's West Coast. Much of it reminded me of the ferry journey to the remote Knoydart peninsula in Scotland. The only real difference in the ladscape was that it is covered in trees in New Zealand because, I supposed, the English didn't cut all of them down in New Zealand. It was beautiful. Finally it seemed like we were getting to where this famous New Zealand scenery was.

Queen Charlotte Sound

Nice wee house in Queen Charlotte Sound

Queen Charlotte Sound

Queen Charlotte Sound

Me!

A couple of minutes after the bus was due, I dialed the number you are supposed to dial “if you have any problems” on our New Zealand SIM card. A recorded message told me I couldn't dial premium rate numbers, so Joanne went back across the road to the information place to buy a phone card to dial the “help” number on their public phone. After about ten minutes, she came back raging; phone cards for public phones cannot dial premium rate numbers either. My phone with the UK SIM card couldn't dial premium rate New Zealand numbers either, so I phoned customer services on the New Zealand SIM, incurring the NZ$1 charge, only to be told that there is no “unlock” for premium numbers. Our bus wasn't there and there was no way for us to phone the number for help! We didn't know what to do, so I went into the train station to ask just in case there was a train to Blenheim from the port. There was one a day, but it had left just ten minutes ago. The lady behind the desk at the train station was extremely nice and helpful, and explained that they get a lot of Naked Bus customers very confused, never knowing whether they are supposed to get a bus or a train and wrote a complaint email on our behalf. “You won't get any money back from them, though”, she assured us.

A short time online across the road, at the information place who had told us to look out for the Atomic Shuttle, revealed that we should have been on the train. The text messages we had paid extra for, so that we wouldn't have to print out the instructions, were truncated to one sms length, which meant that some vital facts were missed, like it was not a Naked Bus we would be getting and it wasn't a bus at all. There was no way to contact them on the website and we couldn't phone them, so we just had to give in and accept that we had lost out. We saw now on the website that Naked Bus only actually run on the North Island; on the South Island they contract the routes out to other companies. Luckily there was an Atomic Shuttle four hours later and, since this was our shortest journey in New Zealand, it didn't cost us too much to replace our train journey with this minibus. There wasn't that much to do in Picton where we were stranded so we just waited in a bar.

We only had to phone when we arrived in Blenheim and we were picked up in the hostel minibus. On the way to the hostel, the guy who had picked us up told us that they were having an international night where the guests at the hostel were all cooking a dish from their native country for everyone else to share. It sounded nice, but it would have meant us improvising something Scottish in 30 minutes from the meagre bag of food we had brought with us. In retrospect we could have made porridge, but I don't think it would have gone down very well for dinner. The hostel was really nice and the staff were very friendly.

After everyone had finished their dinner we went to join them for a drink in the “shed” which was a small building detached from the hostel with a darts board and table tennis and, of course, a beer fridge. It reminded me of a school six year common room and I got the impression the staff more or less left the place alone. Everyone else at the hostel was working in the area, mostly as pruners on the local vineyards; in contrast they asked us if we were “just passing through”. They were a nice crowd and the atmosphere among them was excellent after several weeks working together. After most of them had gone to bed the Irish guys we were talking to produced a bottle of Jamieson's from the freezer. I would have thought this to be sacrilege, but they insisted we try it. Apparently a German guy had done the same a few weeks previously and they were totally sold on the idea. It goes down so smoothly they enthused, whereas I like the way that whisk(e)y burns when it's neat. We weren't complaining though.

Not having been prepared for such a party atmosphere, we had under-catered on the alcohol front and the only nearby licensed premises was a rugby club across the road, we were told. None of the pruners had ever been in it but we decided to give it a try. Before we were even close to the door, a girl standing there called to us and waved us over, inviting us in. It was her 30th birthday and it seemed rather empty considering the time. Only a few people remained, so she invited us to sit down with them and got us drinks. She was far too sober for the end of her 30th birthday but, she explained, she had children to go home to. After a couple of drinks, more people left, bringing the number of guests down to four: us, her brother, and her ex-boyfriend, so we thought it might be time to take our leave. On the way out I asked if I could buy some of the stack of beer and she told us not to be silly, insisting that we leave with an armful for free. Kiwis really are nice! We returned to the Irishmen and shared our bounty, as well as the explanation about where we had been. More frozen Jamieson's followed.

The following day we weren't feeling much like it, particularly Joanne, after all the booze the night before, but we were in Blenheim to go wine tasting, so there was no way we weren't going to do it. The excellent hostel had bicycles to borrow for no charge, so we followed the girl's advice on which were the “best two” bikes. My back tyre needed pumped up quite a bit, Joanne's range of gears was extremely limited, and I was missing a few. What on Earth were the other bikes like if these were the best? My navigation took us a slightly longer route than intended to Hunters, the first vineyard, but the scenery was quite pleasant: rows of severely pruned vines and hills in the background.

There were some other people already tasting when we arrived: an Australian couple with a kiwi friend, who seemed to be quite a successful Maori business woman. They certainly seemed much posher than we did, arriving on bicycles, but I was still quite miffed when I realised that the tastes of each wine we were poured was less than half what the others were poured. The whites in particular were very nice, in fact we had tasted the chardonnay in the Wellington sun, which is why we had chosen to do a tasting there. Since they had started before us, we had missed a couple of wines that the others had tasted and they were ready to leave before us. The Maori woman asked us casually which wine was our favourite, then immediately bought a bottle of the chardonnay for us, despite our slight protestations. It's a wedding present she explained. This was the first thing we had received on the trip for our wedding; we had hoped that being on honeymoon would guarantee us upgrades on every flights, but so far we had received nothing. But this was yet more evidence of the generosity and niceness of New Zealanders.

We only made it a hundred yards or so in the direction of the next vineyard when I had to stop thanks to my tyre being completely flat. We hadn't brought the pump with us but, even if we had, this looked like a major puncture which would not have been helped by just a pump. Luckily the girl working at the hostel had given us her mobile number and offered to pick us up if we were too tired to cycle home, but we thought we would be able to get at least one more vineyard in if we changed our plan and headed for the nearest one. On the way a local shouted over the road to us to ask if we'd had too much wine to cycle. Very funny. The wines at the next place were nicer but much more expensive. The brut, which could easily have been mistaken for champagne, was delicious, so we reasoned that since the gift at Hunters had saved us money, it made sense to spend more than we had intended on the wine we did buy. We bought a bottle of the vintage brut and one of the Gewurtztraminer which, we were assured, would be the perfect accompaniment for the curry we intended to cook that night.

The Gewurtztraminer did go very well with the curry, although it's not the style of wine either of us would normally drink, and the sparkly worked reliably as an aperitif. Making the curry had involved working around huge piles of large green-lipped mussels, which were in both ovens and seemed to be in every pot. Soon some Taiwanese pruners appeared and admitted being responsible for the haul. It had only taken them ten minutes to collect all of them, one guy told us. There were quite a lot of people, but there were plenty of mussels each. They gave us a couple each and told us to help ourselves if we wanted more. I was a bit suspicious of the mussels, remembering being told that easy-to-pick mussels are usually there because the locals know a very good reason not to pick those ones. Nonetheless it was only two each and we ate them.

The next morning we were both slightly unwell and I wondered how the Taiwanese people must be feeling after each eating a large pile of suspect mussels. Just before we left to catch our bus about lunch time (getting another lift from the lovely people running the excellent hostel!), one of the Taiwanese guys came into the kitchen for some water, still wearing his pyjamas. They were supposed to have left for work at 6am! I wondered if they were all in bed instead of work.

written by  The Happy Couple on August 23, 2009 from Blenheim, New Zealand
from the travel blog: Michael's Round-the-World honeymoon
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