Barrytown Knife Making

Yesterday, we finally did what I was looking forward to the most in New Zealand: making my own knife at Barrytown Knife Making. If anyone ever finds themselves on the west coast of New Zealand with a day free I would certainly recommend this. You start with a piece of 2% carbon steel, harden it by forging, hitting it with a hammer, then forging again, and finally quenching it.

After shaping the knife how you would like (which is a combination of the random shape you made with the steel and Steven's (owner of Barrytown Knife Making) knife making genius). You cut your knife shape, cut some wood out for the handle then grind everything down to an approximate knife shape.

After that lunch where you get to meet their horses and play on the adult-sized swing.

When you get back, Steve has made the knife look nearly complete, but there is a lot of sanding and polishing left to do.

The second picture is Steve doing his best to make my knife look good, despite all my efforts to mess it up. We were really lucky to only have 3 people making knives so the group was very relaxed and Steve told lots of funny stories which had nothing to do with knives. The group the day before was 15 people, and I can't really figure out how they got anything done. After polishing for maybe half an hour, staining the handle, and giving the handle one last polish, our knives were complete.

The top two knives are mine and Megan's, and yes hers is larger (mainly cause Steve did most of the shaping with the hammer for Megan I think). After completing our knives, I learned how to throw an ax. Apparently all you need to do is throw consistently and figure out where your rotations points are. I think I got mine mostly figured out, but as it turns out I am much better at throwing stars. Here I am with one ax already in the board.

Today we made the drive across the New Zealand Alps and back into Christchurch for our last night in New Zealand. Tomorrow we hop back on the plane and fly home. 

Fox Glacier - on the ice!

Yesterday we ventured onto the ice of Fox Glacier. Although there's a walking path with a good view of the glacier, the only way to actually get on the ice is with a guided tour so off we went at 8am.

Here I am with the terminal face of the glacier. This is basically just the end of the glacier. The U-shaped valley full of rocks is what the glacier left behind as it receeded. I believe that in 1950 the glacier was something like 50 meters further out into the valley... although since 1985 it has actually been advancing some every year.


We hiked for about an hour in the rainforest along the valley edge, and then strapped crampons onto our shoes and made our way onto the ice (via a nicely carved ice staircase made daily by the tour company). Here is Andy with a nice view up the glacier.


We were not actually issued ice axes... the guide let us borrow hers. The glacier was pretty neat. There are lots of streams of water running down it and some of them, though only six inches wide, are about 3 feet deep! There are also some crevasses and caves. They let us climb inside one of the safe ones.


All in all, a very interesting experience. After that we continued our drive up the west coast and managed to find our B&B - which is actually a small farm. They have cows and sheep, and hearty farm breakfasts.

We are just a few kilometers south of the town of Greymouth. In my opinion, Greymouth is a bit of hole but it does have one thing to offer: the Monteith Brewing Company. We headed into town for their last tour of the day and sampled their fine stock.


A nice way to end the day.

Jetboat Video

Here is the short clip of the Shotover Jetboats in action.

Shotover Jetboating

Today we took a Jetboat tour of the Shotover Canyon. Of course we were surrounded by beautiful scenery but it can be pretty easy to miss flying past you at 50 mph.

The bright red boats that they take you out on are incredibly fast and are propelled along by two jet engines, which allow them to do 360 degree spins. As we put on our splash and life jackets we were greeted by one of the previous boats returning.

I think the warning sign on the bottom is a good indicator of what was to come. Megan and I were able to claim the seats in the front and although I think the seats directly behind the driver might have been better, it was an amazing ride. These boats can travel in as little as 4 inches of water and I am pretty sure our driver put  us through as much and as close as he possibly could to the canyon walls, shore, trees, and anything else in our path. I have a small clip of a later jetboat trip from above, but I will need to upload it later once we have better internet.

Megan wanted me to put together a small map showing where we have been so far. Enjoy!


View New Zealand Map in a larger map

Queenstown!

Well we have arrived in Queenstown - or Disneyland as our last B&B host disparagingly called it. Queenstown is known as an adventure sports town - a hub for bungy jumping, abseiling, skydiving, etc. Andy and I actually aren't very interested in adventure sporting but we are going jetboating in a river canyon today.

Yesterday we took some time to orient ourselves and this is definitely the tourism hub for New Zealand. It's the first city we've been to where it's actually crowded with people (although it's still clear that we are in the low season since all the tours are running half full). We did a short walking tour to see the small city and enjoyed the botanic gardens (though not nearly as impressive as in Christchurch). The rhododendron are in bloom.


Then we headed out to see some kiwis at a bird sanctuary. We couldn't actually take pictures since kiwis are nocturnal and are very sensitive to light and noise, but this is what they looked like. We heard an interesting talk on the many kiwi breeding programs.


New Zealand's ecological history is pretty interesting. As a small, isolated island, it's flora and fauna had things pretty easy for most of history. In fact, New Zealand had very little animal life before the English settlers came, just a few flightless birds. Once the settlers came and some of their dogs and ferrets got loose the flightless birds had almost no chance. Before these carnivores came, the only predator was a bird of prey that hunted based on movement... so their defense is to freeze completely. Needless to say, that doesn't work well with wild cats and such. A few times the settler tried to introduce another species to kill off one of the predators that was going wild. Unfortunately each introduced species also found the plump, flightless birds delicious. Now there are many different programs trying to raise baby kiwis to the point where they are big enough to fight off some predators.

After learning about kiwis, we took the gondola ride up to Bob's peak with a great view of the city.


We got to watch a bungy jumper from this point - but it wasn't really all that impressive! Maybe the Queenstown jump is one of the shorter ones. Here is another look at Queenstown. The mountains in the background are known as the Remarkables and are popular for skiing. The lake is Lake Wakatipu. The lower jetting green area is the botanic gardens that we walked around and the upper one is a golf course.


We have finally booked the rest of our accomodations for the trip (including a farmstay!) so now the end is in sight.