Picton

Last weekend I took the Interislander ferry across the Cook Strait to Picton, which is on the northern tip of the South Island. Although you can see the South Island from some of the mountains around Wellington and it's not more than 20 miles from tip to tip, the ferry itself takes more than 3 hours since it winds through the Marlborough Sounds on its way to Picton. The Marlborough Sounds (and specifically the Queen Charlotte Sound, which is the one Picton is located in) are absolutely gorgeous!

Saturday was bright and sunny, so I took a small commercial cruise through the Sound. Here are some pictures:










Saturday afternoon was perfect for tramping (which is how the Kiwis say "hiking"). There's a wonderful walking track from Picton along one of the peninsulas called "The Snout," which was roughly translated from the Maori name which meant "nose of the sand worm"--much more evocative than The Snout, if you ask me. The views from here were amazing. If I had one of those nifty panoramic cameras, you might have a better idea of how it looked. But I took some panoramic shots with my little point-and-click, and piecing them together works out pretty well:











The place I was staying was just across the street from the graveyard, and I always like wandering around old cemeteries. The dead in Picton clearly rest uneasily; most of the graves looked like this one or worse. Some people might think it's because of earthquakes, but I think it's clear evidence of zombies.



The next morning I went dolphin viewing! It was SO cool. I wanted to go swimming with the dolphins, which is normally allowed, but since these dolphins had babies we couldn't go in the water with them. We found a "pod" (which is like a dolphin herd) of about 70 bottlenose dolphins and followed them around the Sound for about an hour. Actually, they usually followed us, instead of the other way around. They were very playful and entertaining.



I was supposed to go back to Wellington Sunday afternoon, but I was a lamebrain and missed my boat. I had stopped by the ferry building to check the schedule and thought the boat was leaving at 2:05, so I got there at 1:15. Plenty of time, right? But it turns out that I had checked the wrong schedule: the boat from WELLINGTON was leaving at 2:05, but the boat from PICTON left at...yep, 1:15. The boat pulled away from the dock about 30 seconds after I entered the building. If I had gotten there a minute earlier, they probably would have let me on! The next boat was supposed to leave at 6:30 but was delayed and wouldn't leave until at least 7:30 (it ended up being 8:00).

So I was annoyed, but since I had six hours to kill I decided to do some more tramping, this time up a hill overlooking the town.


The first ferry crossing had been smooth, but this time it was pretty rough. I'm one of those fortunate people who doesn't get motion sick, but many of my fellow passengers were looking rather green and kept dashing off for the bathrooms. They turned up the air conditioning on the boat until it was 15 degrees (about 60 degrees Fahrenheit) because a low body temperature is supposed to help with the seasickness, so then everyone was shivering AND sick. And since the crossing was so rough, it took an hour longer than usual. We didn't get into Wellington Harbour until after midnight (which made it even MORE annoying that I had missed the earlier boat).

Still, Picton was awesome and I'm hoping to go back and do the Queen Charlotte trek, one of the multi-day walks.