Day 75: 20231207 Lyttelton/Christchurch
It’s always a Forest Gump moment when you pull back the balcony curtains in the morning on a cruise ship. This morning, we were greeted with views of scenic Lyttelton harbor with houses spreading up the hillside. Our excursion was scheduled for a 10 am departure so there was time for breakfast. The buffet was a madhouse with no place to sit unless you made your way back to the pool deck, so ordering breakfast delivery on port days seems like a good strategy.
Lyttelton is a working harbor so nobody is allowed to walk off the ship into town. The ship charges $30 for a round trip shuttle into downtown Christchurch, but we are booked on an excursion to see another high country sheep and cattle station.
Lyttelton harbor is the situated in the caldera of an extinct volcano so there is a 2km tunnel through the volcano wall which we drove through to exit the harbor.
While Dunedin is the Scotland of New Zealand, Christchurch is more like England. Its economy is driven by logging, agriculture, tourism and film making.
Between the coast and the Southern Alps at this latitude is the Canterbury plains which are the breadbasket of New Zealand. Dairy is the leading export product with powdered and other milk products being sent mainly to China. New Zealand also exports 25% of the world’s carrot seed production. We drove past fields of wheat, barley and canola. We made a comfort stop in the city of Mt. Somers where we had a chocolate chip cookie for morning tea.
As we approached the foothills, large tracts of sustainable lumber are evident. They plant Monterey pines which mature in 25 years for log exports, again mostly to China. They used to have domestic lumber milling, but that industry has largely off shored so finished lumber products as a major import.
As we began the ascent into the Southern Alps we got a bit of Deja vous, not only because we had made the trip from the Milford Sound to Dunedin through the Southern Alps, but also because we drove by some of the more iconic Lord of the Rings film sites.
The Erewon High Country Sheep Station is over 30K acres extending into a series of confluent glacial valleys. Mt. Somers is an outcrop of granite on the valley floor that withstood the grinding forces of the glaciers, rising 300’ above the valley floor like an island. It became the natural Lord of the Rings film site for the city of Edoras, home of the Rohan people. And around a nearby corner is a very imposing looking glacial valley that became Helm’s Deep fortress.
While the basalt mountains on east coast of New Zealand and on the north island are volcanic, the broken up and tilted schist of the Southern Alps represents the jumbled and pushed up ancient ocean floor caused by collision of the Zealandia and Australasian tectonic plates.
Even though we had visited the Walter Peak Station just yesterday, the Erewon Station did present some contrasts. The Walter Creek station was situated in a grand glacial valley setting, but the Erewon Station seems to be in a much grander setting in the confluence of several glacial valleys. The glacial rivers that crisscross the valley floors pose unique challenges to the ranchers, who have found Clydesdale draft horses uniquely suited for negotiating the river crossings and steep valley slopes. There are mustering huts scattered throughout the station’s sprawling territory, but getting to them with supplies, people and dogs can be challenging. Most would have to be accessed on foot or with a pack horse, but the Clydesdales can get them to more than 80% of these mustering stations, or close enough to be an easier tramp to get to.
We did learn some interesting facts at Erewon that weren’t presented at Walter Peak. Erewon did have some pastures with deer, which are a crossbreed between the smaller Scottish Red Deer and larger American Elk. This produces a larger deer with a more manageable temperment. Interestingly enough, the main product of interest is not venison or deer leather, but it is the antler velvet for the Chinese traditional medicine market.
The Clydesdale horses are also something unique to this station, and they do breed the Clydesdales and sell them, but are now also indispensible in the day to day operations on the station.
The Walter Peak station had mostly Romney sheep for meat production, but different breeds of sheep convert grasses into different proteins. The Romney produce excellent meat for eating, but poor quality wool, while Merino sheep produce the finest quality wool, but poor quality meat. The Erewon runs mostly Merino sheep with over 4500 livestock units.
We also learned more about the mustering or herding process. The shepherds on this station appear mostly to be young women paired up with a pair of working dogs. One dog is what they call the “Eye” or “Heeling” dog. These are classically the black and white border collies who don’t bark when they work. They seem to be able to control the sheep just by posturing or maybe even some kind of sheep whispering mind control. The second dog is a “Pushing” or “Driving” dog, which is a brown and black breed called the Huntaway which was bred with a deep repeating bark, intelligence and stamina required for driving large mobs of sheep. The two different dogs work together with the shepherd through a combination of commands and whistles to gather up the sheep and make them go where the shepherd wants. They can control a mob of sheep with remarkable precision.
They had a team of 8 Clydesdales hitched up to a very large wagon named the “Titanic”, which they loaded all of us onto for a wagon ride. They started off on the driveway, but then turned off road and across a couple of paddocks to where a mob of Merino sheep with lambs were. The lambs were quite young and the dynamics between the ewes and lambs was interesting to watch. There seemed to be units with one ewe, one medium sized lamb and one small lamb. Both lambs were nursing on the ewes. There was nothing subtle or gentle about the way these lambs latched onto the teats to feed. It seemed a bit violent, and the ewes seemed to also find it a bit annoying, but put up with it to some extent.
The ewes and lambs had all been sheared. Merino sheep are sheared with manual clippers that look a bit like giant scissors to leave the hair longer than on the Romney sheep which are clipped very close to the skin. This is because the Merino sheep live at higher and cooler altitudes and need a bit more protection after being sheared. Recent heavy rains had cause quite an overgrowth of the grass which has made the horses fat and given a lot of the sheep dirty bottoms. They did share that running the sheep through the dip trough to deal with parasites and for disease prevention, is one of the most difficult tasks they have to do because sheep really don’t like to get in the water. They described strategies for successfully getting them through it by tricking the sheep into thinking they’re just going through a chute. They do it predawn as well so the sheep can’t see any reflection from the dip bath.
We had a lunch at the Erewon station which was boxed sandwiches, juice, coffee, tea, boxed dessert cakes and fun sized candy bars. It was nothing to compare with the gourmet feast we had at the Walter Peak station, but this excursion was also just a fraction of the cost of that one.
The drive back to the ship was a long one, but with everyone being tired from the long day, and with the weather turning to heavy clouds and intermittent sprinkles, most of us were content with sleeping off our lunches. We made one comfort stop in the city of Rakaia, where they have a 35’ tall salmon sculpture celebrating fishing in the rivers.
We got back to the ship just before the 7:30pm All aboard, but had no troubles getting processed this time. We got back to our staterooms and found chocolate dipped strawberries and an apology from the ship for the delays we had encountered yesterday on returning from our overland excursion. That was nice that they made that gesture of contrition as a sign that they do value us as passengers and respect our time.
We had a late sit down dinner in the dining room. Ciara opted for Baramundi while the rest of us chose the sliced leg of lamb. After dinner, we watched a new comedian Ivor Richards, who is a Welshman with a Liverpool accent who lives in Australia. We had a little difficulty with his accent, but the Aussies in the audience really roared with laughter. He did sing a song at the beginning and end of his act, so maybe at some point in time, he yearned to be Tom Jones, but most of his act was one liners.
Tomorrow we arrive in Picton, which was substituted for Wellington due to conflicts with other cruise ships in that port on that particular day. But it will be a new port of call for us at any rate. Janet and Ben are missing the multiple sea days between ports of call to rest and relax.
