Reunion with the others

The last few days in Castle Hill were quite hot. The sun was burning without a single cloud. Climbing around midday was impossible. We had to wait an other few days because we wanted to meet up with my brother Jochen, his wife Miriam and their daughter Paula. Paula is Finjas twin-cousin, since she's born the same day, with a difference of 4,5 hours!

Finja and Paula on the Road.

We picked them up at the airport and they gladly imported a Tetanol vaccination for Finja. We did a Tetanol-Only vaccination back home in germany and hoped to do give her the second boost in Newzealand. After arrival we learned there's no chance to get this specific vaccination here, only a triple vaccination which wouldn't work. Having a correct medicin in our hands we drove straight to the doctor and this business was off from our todo list.

After some shopping and a long 90minutes drive back to the campsite (especially for our visitors who just happend to sit in a plane for 32 hours) we had an delicous Pasta Bolognaise Dinner and a couple of beers together. Finja was psyched to see an other baby and all was good.
The next day we could only do a quick climbing session since a big storm arrived and brought strong ice wind with hail. It was a good chance for the others to rest and sleep agains the jetlag.

Delicious Dinner in our van.

After two days of some climbing together, Katinka and I had finished our last projects and we had seen enough of Castle Hill. With two campervans we wanted to start a roadtrip to Takaka, at Golden Beach at the northern border of the southern island. But Jochen started puking over night and was half dead for a full day. So we had to leave them alone and hit the road. A reunion planned to happen two days later in Paynes Ford, another climbing area near Takaka.

As we hit Greymouth, a big city at the westcoast we checked our emails and our faces went long ... Instead of a change of flight confirmation we got a message from STA-Travels, we can't change our flight for a planned amount of 200Euros, but we should spent 500-600Euros and travel on a bad date as well. Now there was hurry. We had to change our plans. No more climbing in Paynes Ford, but hit the road faster. 5 days left to arrive in Auckland, then another 3 days to sell our van and then the day of departure to Sydney, Australia.

Finjas last project. A slabclimb in Quantum Field.

Today our roadtrip got delayed again. Katinka catched up the same virus, Jochen had the day before. She's half dead and puking every now and then. At least, after sending some eMails back and forth with STA, we now have a backup solution of another flightdate for the cheap price of 200Euros again. Still not sure if we are going to change our flight. We wanted to spent 14 more days here, this backupsolution would give us 8 days here. We'll see what happens.

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Castle Hill

Since our last restday, we had returned to Castle Hill to do what more of the sport, our trip was dedicated to: climbing, or more specific bouldering.

Castle Hill is a world class climbing destination with beautiful limestone formations. There's only a few holds, and a lot of slippery feet. Even a really strong climber in other places can stuggle here, since it's very unique style of climbing. You have to press and palm a lot, there are many mantles (blank, round topouts, with no holds) and the rock is really polished and frictionless. I do like this style a lot. I had visited this area 5 years ago and seen many other areas afterwards, but this one still remains in my head as one of my favorite areas worldwide!

"Lady Killer", V4 - Flock Hill

The Area is split into several smaller areas. Quantum Field is the most classic one, with more then 2000 boulderproblems located on a hill about 400x500m size. Here are the most smeary problems and the friction is the worst, which makes it really interesting to fight against gravity.

Katinka climbs aV5 in Quantum Field

Just next to it is Spittle Hill, with similar rock. There are an other 1300 problems, some more holds, but of similar style. Both areas have an approach walk of 5-10 minutes from the car park

Flock Hill

And then there is Flock Hill, a giant bloc field of 2km length. The hike leads through a sun burned hill and after 45 Minutes of steep uphill hiking you are in the middle of nowhere. It's really silent (except the road at the bottom of the valley) and remote. Lot of really awesome rock formations and more holds and better friction awaits the motivated hiking climber.

Finja enjoying Castle Hills Beauty

We did manage to climb problems such as "Monkey and the Magic Peach", V8 (Quantum Field), "Joker", V9 (Spittle Hill), "Prince tui Teka", V9 (Flock Hill) and "Interstellar Overdrive", V11 (Flock Hill). Katinka is enjoying a lot of V5 Problems around here and little Finja loves to sit in the green grass and to play with stone. As she listens to us climpers roaring and screaming in joy or pain, she tries to imitate our noises as soon as we sit her down on some slabs.

West Coast

On our way to the westcoast we stopped for a day in Wanaka. It's a small, but beautiful city just next to a beautiful lake. As you would guess we did not stop for no reason. We knew there are some rocks around the city to climb and thats what we did! We enjoyed some Lakeside Bouldering with boulders up to V7 and after a 20km drive along the lake we arrived at the "Main Cliff". The rock was ok, but it did not impress us enough to grab the rope and the quickdraws to do some ropeclimbing. It's always a struggle to go ropeclimbing just by yourselfe, carring one baby and no babysitter around.

A pass south of Wanaka

We decided to stay around the parking lot and did some bouldering there, which was fun and enough for today.

After some dinner in Wanaka, we enjoyed beeing in one of the few places in Newzealand having fast and free WiFi, did some Skype-Sessions and had a glance on some of the photos I took so far.

Katinka climbing a nice V5 at Lakeside, around Wanaka

The next morning we jumped back into our van and moved on. Finja lost her psyche to sleep and sit in the van all day, so we could only do short sessions of driving (50km max), but every now and then we had to stop anyways, because of the beauty of the country. We did some hikes along the westcoast beach which are beautiful and drove north. Sadly it got more and more touristy. Lots of campervans, expensive looking hostels and no camping signs everywhere. And all over a sudden our van didn't like driving anymore. We heard some backfire from the exhaustion pipe and with a speed of 80km/h our engine turned off. It wasn't to bad, since we could just turn it on again, but it started to happen more often. After a while the engine would turn off every 500m and restarting the engine drained our battery. In the end we got stuck in the middle of nowhere, enough gazoline, but no more battery juice.

Luckily we catched a ride with a local we towed us the last 15km until we reached a small garage in Harihari. There were already other travelers having a overheating problem with their van and they had been waiting in front of the garage for the hole day, since the repair man had a lot of cars to fix. Since we have a little Baby with us, he was really friendly to us and even postponed his lunch break to fix our car. It was not a big deal, only the sparkling plugs were worn out and a few parts needed a replacement. 75$ later the car was back on the road and we could end second day driving in Hokitika, sitting at the beach and cooking some delicious pasta dinner.

Chilling at the beach - Westcoast

After the repair we had picked up the german hitch-hiker Torre. He has been in Newzealand since early dezember and his next Destination was Castle Hill. The same destination we picked as a next stop! We had to do some more shopping and internet business, so we could only hitch him to Hokitika, but the next morning we met him at the Craigieburn Campsite at Castle Hill. He could only have a quick glance on the boulders we were trying to climb within the next couple of weeks, since he had to catch a flight from Christchurch to Melboure in the evening. He planned to leave the country for four days and be back afterwards, only to extend his Newzealand visa.

Westcoast

After to days of climbing in pretty warm conditions, a lot of blue sky and only a little wind, we now sit in the library of Darfield, about 70km from the climbing area and write this blog post. We are only getting started here, so read back in a couple of days! We plan to stay and climb here for about 3 weeks now.

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Little Babylon

Luckily the next garage was just 200m from where our car broke down. We could enjoy free wifi inside of our van and we had running water and a rubbish bin just next to our van. The mechanic confirmed our guess of a leaking pipe beeing the problemmaker and he confirmed our hope for a cheap repair. We only had to wait for about 5 hours until the replacements arrived.

With our car fixed and a full tank we headed up north to Milford Sound, one of the most wet places in the world (6500mm rain/year). As expected it did rain, but we found a nice lodge to hang out in the evening. It had an massiv drying room, hot showers and power outlets. All we needed! We met our friend Roman in the very same moment when we arrived at the lodge. It was a pleasant moment, since we haven't seen him for two years now.

Hike through the rainforest of Milford Sound: Little Babylon

The next day we went climbing in Little Babylon. The approach to this crag was quite an effort, having a baby with us. It was a 30 minutes hike uphill through the rainforest with a lot of mud and some two hand scrambling passages.

Getting ready for a fotoshooting

The climbing was really good, the rock quality is amazing, for route climbing it's definitivly the very best I've seen in Newzealand so far! In spite of our lacking endurance (we haven't touched a rope since about two years ago, we usually prefer bouldering) the route were very long but we enjoyed climbs such as the classic "International Turkey Patrol", "Jugular" and "Rua Tahi".

Queenstown Lakes

After two days of climbing, to many sandfly stitches and several layers of wet clothes we felt exhausted and went back on the road. Back to Queenstown Lakes we drove, were we did a quick afternoon bouldering session in the Jardines.

Our next stop will be Wanaka, before seighting the westcoast of Newzealand.

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Heading south wards

With our new van, we went straight to the next supermarket to buy groceries and make our way towards Castle Hill. Castle Hill is a world class climbing area, 90km west of Christchurch which Axel had visited on his last trip five years ago.

Katinka in Quantum Field, the main area in Castle Hill

We climbed there in the afternoon, but realized how much to warm it is to have great climbing conditions (if it's to warm and sunny, you start sweating on your fingertips and there is no more friction to help you fight gravity).

Finja is taking over the steering wheel

We soon decided to leave this area for a later point of time. Instead we started driving south. Enjoying the great landscape of Newzealand we used two days to drive south. We took a quick swim in the cold Mountain Lake Tekapo and passed Queenstown Lakes, a city full of tourism, hitch-hikers and party-people.

Action rest in Queenstown Lakes: Paragliders landing in the back

Now we are stuck in Te Anau, taking a break from to much driving. Sadly this stop is forced by a car breakdown. We have some oil leaking to the ground and our clutch isn't doing anything anymore. We figured our which part broke, and now we're in good mode: Tomorrow it should be fixed! The next garage is just 200m away.

A broken pipe made the clutch stop working

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The journey begins

We did it. It was quiet an effort to clear our flat, survive our

goodbye-party, get our luggage packed and the trip organized. In the end it was way to much luggage, as usual ...

Finally we decided to leave some big things at home. We removed our matresses (since we wanted to buy a campervan anyways) and our tent, and! we removed our ropeclimbing gear. At the Frankfurt airport we  checked in without any problems, as the luggage showed 68,9kg of 70kg allowed in total, even tough the airport scale must have been wrong, since we twisted our bags against the boundaries. Precisely it should have shown about 80kgs. With a smile in the face of our little daughter Finja, we used the chance to check in our ropeclimbing gear (9kg) as well, which meant a total 90kg of luggage.

Finja helps carrying our luggage

After a long flight we arrived in Christchurch, were a friend was waiting for us in front of the airport. He gave us his car and went back to work, while we had a quick look for campervans, before heading home to our friends place to take a shower.

View of Lytteltown from our friend Greg & Jeans Living room

The next morning, after visiting a local Farmers Market, we went back to the Backpackers Car Market, which we had visited the day before. We had success and bought a 1991 Mazda E2000 Extra Long Camper Van with 376.000km's.

Extra Long Mazda E2000 (1991 - 376.000km)

Lets start the roadtrip!

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Adventure Description

They have planned this trip for quite some time, since Katinka hasn’t been to the Australian Continent yet. They want to see a (new) country, reunion with friends met on past trips and combine this with their sport: rock climbing.

They love to be on the road, since every day is a new experience and you never know what’s going to happen next. New Zealand, Australia, Tasmania and Bali will soon be visited. For a couple of months they will be reunited with Axels Brother Jochen, sister-in-law Miriam and their daughter Paula. Finja and her cousin Paula were born on the same day, only 4 hours apart.

Axel and Katinka have been travelling a lot in the past, mostly for sport climbing on various kinds of rock. Both of them started climbing in their childhood and have kept the psyche for this sport since then. They have been in Canada, USA, Australia, New Zealand, South-Africa, Scandinavia, Macedonia, and other European countries before. Since last July they can call themselves parents of little Finja Lotta and they try to do justice to her demands and our psyche to be on the road at the same time. In normal life, Axel just finished his Bachelor Degree in Computer Science and Media. He’s taking a gap semester before continuing with his Master Degree. Besides his interest for sport he is an experienced photographer with several print publications in climbing magazines, guide books and calendars. Katinka is doing Metal Design and furthermore in parental leave in the moment. They are Athletes of DAV Team Baden-Württemberg Sportklettern (www.felskader-bw.de), sponsored by Chillaz (www.chillaz.info) and Evolv (www.evolvsports.com).