Picton and Marlborough

We took a drive up to Picton, on the north coast of the island and at the end of Queen Charlotte Sound, a big inlet bristling with protected bays and nice mountain scenery.  Looked like a great boating area.  It's also where the car ferry from Wellington docks - though there are preliminary plans to move the terminal to a different location (with debatable economic justification), which would all but kill Picton.

Ah, to have a house and a boat in this harbour...

Yep, an absolutely TERRIBLE lunchtime view overlooking the sound...

We walked for a couple of hours, to the end of the "snout" - the peninsula jutting out from Picton.

Looking directly up Queen Charlotte Sound from the tip of the snout.  (Bill will likely notice the geographical marker beside Sarah.)

We then went back to the Blenheim/Marlborough area and drove into hard core wine country... to go to a craft brewery.  Moa Brewery is run by the son of the Alan Scott winery owners, which is across the road from Moa.  A moa is a recently-extinct native New Zealand flightless bird, up to double the weight of an ostrich   Its days were numbered when the Maori arrived about 600 years ago.

Love the cheeky caption, in the middle of wine country

The brewery is surrounded by grapes and wineries

Moa was renovating its tasting room, but was still selling beer on tap and in bottles.  We were most impressed by their limited-run, only-on-tap double IPA - one of the best I've had.

Scrap metal moa sculpture

A glass of beer in the pleasant beer garden - ahh.

Alan Scott always provides wine for New Zealand's Scott Base in Antarctica.  Moa had produced a batch of their black beer to ship to the base as well - bottled in plastic, as is required for all beverages heading to Antarctica (don't know why). Something fell through with this shipment, so they were selling it off by the box super-cheap.  I suspect it was past its prime, or something went a bit wrong during the plastic-bottling process, as the plastic-bottled version was more dull, sweeter, less hoppy and a bit more sour than the commercial bottled version.  Still, at about $1/bottle, poor travellers like us could hardly pass it up.  So we ended up with a case of 24 Antarctic Moa beers.

Someone is too cheap to get a haircut down under; and is clearly unconcerned with his appearance

We stayed in a holiday park featuring a quiet stream with a bunch of pet eels and a pet brown trout.  They were all quite tame - the eels gathered like stacked firewood, poking their noses out of the water like dogs expecting to be fed.  The little fins by their heads looked like mouse ears.  Very cute.

I pulled out the last of HAL's secret weapons that night - the side awning.  It was a pain to set up, and fell over in the middle of the night in a slight breeze, so I doubt we'll make much more use of it.