New Zealand 2000

I’m writing this in March, 2019, a week after a terrorist attack on a mosque in Christchurch, killing more than fifty people.  It was the worst attack in New Zealand’s history, and a total shock to what has always been a peaceful and violence-free nation.  I makes me pause, to reflect back on our trip nineteen years ago, as we wandered carefree through New Zealand’s bucolic countryside with our biggest concern the many sheep on the road.  How our world has changed in that short period of time.

It was winter and we wanted to get away from the rain and cooler days of Northern California and explore a country we had never visited.  We chose New Zealand and decided we’d first see the Cook Islands, roughly 2,000 miles from Christchurch.

We flew Air New Zealand from Los Angeles to Raratonga, a distance of about 5,000 miles.  The Cook Islands consist of fifteen islands in the central South Pacific, with Raratonga being the largest island.  They are a self-governing island country, which has a free association with New Zealand, meaning that New Zealand provides for their defense and foreign affairs and they have citizenship for both Cook Islands and New Zealand.

The island is small and there is a road that circles it and links the many beaches, waterfalls, lagoons and reefs.  We decided we’d rent a car to explore at our leisure.  We had to go to the police station, since a driver’s license was required to rent a car.  No test, thankfully, just pay twenty dollars and you have an instant license.  At the time we thought it was kind of dumb and just a way to get some tourist dollars, but for several years after the trip I would use the license for ID, just for fun to say I lived in the Cook Islands.

We stayed in a small hotel with a room opening directly onto the beach, and spent our days swimming to the reef, enjoying seafood lunches, lounging on the beach and watching spectacular sunsets, cocktails in hand.

We took this trip in year 2000, the beginning of Internet online searching, and Google was less than two years old.  Misti always did our air and hotel selection and made all reservations, by telephone and mail.  Because I worked with computers in our marketing research business, I was familiar with search engines and their capabilities and suggested that Misti try using Google and email for reservations, rather than phone.  At first she was resistant, but when she realized how much simpler and faster it was, she became a convert, and that was the beginning of Misti using the power of the Internet for all future travel plans.

We flew Air New Zealand from Roratonga to Christchurch, on the east coast of New Zealand’s south island, and because we had limited time, about ten days, we decided we’d spend most of it on the South Island.  After two nights in Christchurch we took a train over Arthur’s Pass to Greysmouth where we picked up our rental car and headed south with the intention of circling the island and eventually taking the ferry across Picton Strait to hook up with our friends who lived in Wellington.

From Greysmouth we drove south to Fjordland National Park, considered the most beautiful part of New Zealand.  From talking with other travelers, we chose to explore Doubtful Sound rather than the more popular Milford Sound, and it was a good decision.  The area gets more than 200 days of rain a year, resulting in an intensely green forest with magnificent waterfalls everywhere.  We took a boat tour through the Sound, the only way to see it since there are no surrounding roads. 

From the Sound we drove on to Queenstown, planning to spend a night there.  But we found Queenstown to be overrun with tourists, so instead headed south to Invercargill, on the southern tip of the South Island.  Invercargill is the southernmost and westernmost city in New Zealand and one of the southernmost cities in the world.  

At dinner that night we sat next to a woman who was dining alone, and we struck up a conversation with her.  She said she had been traveling the world for the past year as a reward to herself for retiring from Amazon.  She said she was one of the original employees and the stock she received would support her for the next thousand years.

While our original plan was to circle the South Island, by the time we got to  Dunedin, about three-fourths of the way around the island,, we realized we were running short on time.  So we returned the car and flew on to Nelson on the north coast of the South Island, where we rented a car and drove on to Marlborough, a town noted for it’s excellent sauvignon blanc wine.

After spending a night in Marlborough, we drove on to Picton and boarded the Picton-Wellington ferry across Cook Strait, considered one of the world’s most scenic ferry rides.  We arrived at our friends, Nonna and Adam’s, house early that afternoon and spent the night and next day with them catching up on our respective lives.  They had been living in country for several years, with Adam working on the Lord of the Rings movies, which were filmed in New Zealand.

While we were in New Zealand the 30th Americas Cup race was on with the two leading contestants being Team New Zealand and Prada Challenge, the Italian team that was the winner of the 2000 Luis Vuitton Cup.  This was the first America’s Cup without an American challenger or defender, and the winner was the New Zealand team.  There were hundreds of thousands of spectators throughout the island, it wasn’t possible to predict just when the race would be over and we were concerned that the Auckland airport we were flying out of, would be jammed.  But the race was over the day before we left, so no problems at the airport. 

We spent our last night in Auckland and were able to see most of the America’s Cup participant boats.  That night we learned about the infamous stock market crash and weren’t anxious to get home and find out what impact it had on us and our family.

We left Auckland on a non-stop Air New Zealand flight for our thirteen hour flight to San Francisco and thus ended our Cook Islands/New Zealand adventure.  

March 2019