Hanmer Springs

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We left Murchison in the midst of a torrential downpour, and just ahead of a 130 kph wind. We turned south and headed over the mountains for Hanmer Springs. Hanmer Springs is a resort town reminiscent of a mini-Sun Valley and kind of McCall-ish, with a bunch of useless crap like mountain biking and golf. I tried to cheat on this part by searching the net for descriptive information about the place that I could cut and paste. Unfortunately, there is little on the internet that isn’t buck-generation motivated, and I couldn’t find anything that didn’t include the usual vapid adjectives like “beautiful”, “charming”, “nestled”, “spectacular”, “picturesque”…you get the idea.

Actually, Hanmer Springs is a small town in the Canterbury region of the South Island. The town is built around a popular hot spring which was discovered in the late 19th century by some guy herding sheep, and saw the steam.

Now it’s a tourist destination, and you pay to sit in its rejuvenating waters while you listen to screaming kids. The town only has a little over 700 full time residents, but being only 90 minutes from Christchurch, with a daily shuttle bus, you do the week-end math. 

The 130 kph winds had been and gone ahead of us that day, and tore the roof off of one of the buildings. At this time of the season, these tourist pits are starving for business, and there is a lot of competition in the lodging biz. We got really great accommodations on the cheap; especially considering the exchange rate (.55 USD).

Views from our room:

Always good advice:

While there, we also discovered that we make an outstanding Pinot Noir:

Visit us at our web site: http://www.lawsonsdryhills.co.nz

Another goofy fence:

It was really nice to get over to some dry country. Even though this area didn’t get hit with the rains, it still screwed all the rivers because guess where they come from. The north facing slopes of the hills are heavily timbered, but just a 20 minute drive up and over the hills just north of town, and it looks like Wyoming. By accident we found the Molesworth Sheep Station. It’s the biggest farm (they call ranches farms here) in the country at 161,000 hectares (418,600 acres). It looked like heaven. We drove for miles. We thought we had actually found a place here where there was freedom in nature. It wasn’t until we were on the way back that we saw the standard 4 ft by 6 ft DOC (Department of Conservation) sign outlining the fact that everything is prohibited on this “public” land. Nothing takes the edge off your buzz like a DOC sign.

Um...what?


Kiwi reforestation

New Zealand has a weird way of replanting blocks after logging. They must lay out strings and plant tress like every ten feet apart in a grid pattern. When you drive down the highway and see blocks like this that have been there for several years, it just looks unnatural.

What it reminds me of is hair plugs. Or maybe more like your little sister's doll. Remember when you were a kid and your sister had these dolls (before Power Rangers, Rob) that had the articulating arms and legs, and the eyes closed when you laid them down? And it had the head that swiveled and you could pull off just to make her cry? It reminds me of that hair.