New Zealand Photos
New Zealand is an amazing country, it’s like being on a fresh and young Earth. We experienced the cold and ice on a monstrous glacier, sailed through fiords carved out by glaciers eons ago, strolled through fields of gold in the warm sun, climbed beautiful mountains, snaked our way through ancient beech forests, ran through valleys, jumped on rocks, fed lots of animals, saw a chocolate waterfall, saw hundreds of real waterfalls, and much more. We had the most amazing time and will definitely return to this beautiful country.
Our first day in New Zealand! Christchurch so far is awesome! But we are leaving tomorrow for Greymouth and Franz Josef on the Tranz-Alpine Railway. Here, we played tennis at Hagley Tennis Club, on grass courts (they had 28 grass and carpet courts!). We also explored the Botanic Gardens, which were manicured and wild at the same time. We ate in Hell, a great pizza place near our hotel. And the sun just now went down, about 10:30pm.
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We boarded the Tranz Alpine from Christchurch to Greymouth and traveled 4 hours from the east to the west coast of New Zealand. This country is so beautiful, it really is the land before time. We passed through valleys, lakes, mountains, over rivers and over gorges.
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We arrived in Greymouth on January 5, day 6 of our journey. We picked up the snazzy Lucino rental car and drove to Hokitika to see the gorge. Driving on the other side of the road and on the right side of the car is definitely weird. But the scenery everywhere is amazing. 40 km inland we found this oasis called Hokitika Gorge. Jojo plucked up some courage and crossed the scary bridge so we could take a closer look at this milky aqua blue water. No idea why it's opaque or what gives it this beautiful color.
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This is by far the craziest thing we've done here! The risk, adventure, and beauty around us just keeps getting better and better. Today we hiked for 8 hours across 13 kilometers of dangerous terrain, most of it was climbing 600 meters of solid ice. Luckily the weather was perfect, very sunny with nice breezes the whole day. Jojo is afraid of heights, so it took all his concentration to walk the narrow ledges above ice falls, to climb the extremely steep glacier face, and to jump across the countless crevices and cracks that delved deep into the glacier. Good job Jojo! This place is just so amazing! The blue ice we got to see at the top of the glacier and as we walked through parts of the glacier was surreal. I couldn't wipe the smile off my face the entire day. The best parts were walking through the narrow cracks in the ice and crawling through ice holes and caves.
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Lake Wanaka was a laid back alpine town. We spent our time here recovering from the glacier hike and from the long winding mountain roads. We went bowling, walked around town, tried local beers, and went to Puzzling World! See the Puzzling World album for those pictures.
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This place was so much fun!!! There was a crazy room where water flowed up and you felt like the whole room was tumbling, there was a room with hundreds of faces that followed you everywhere you went, and a super cool room where one person looks like a giant and the other like a midget. We also spent an hour navigating through a human labryinth, that thing was hard.
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Queenstown is an awesome place! There is so much to do, we were busy from 7am till past midnight everyday and we still didn't get to do all we wanted. We went fishing and caught our lunch, salmon and rainbow trout. Our hotel cooked it up for free. Went into an Irish pub and had some great beer, Kilkenny. When to a bar completely made out of ice, called Minus 5. Also visited many Lord of the Rings locations, but those photos are in the Glenorchy album and the Deer Park Heights album.
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This place was breathtaking! We drove across Lake Wakatipu and up an winding, steep, rocky roads to get to the top of this mountain where they shot many Lord of the Rings scenes. We stopped along the way to feed mini horses, pigs, roosters, peacocks, goats, sheep, bison, deer, llamas, and ducks. The rolling fields of gold were beautiful, and the view of Queenstown and the lake with the Remarkables rising right behind me was awesome. This is one of my favorite places on this trip.
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This was a day for the Lord of the Rings fan, meaning me! We left Queenstown for a short trip to the town of Glenorchy and Paradise. We entered the exact patch of forest as the Fellowship when they entered Lothlorien. Some of the locations we visited were part of the movies, and others were just so beautiful that we stopped on the way to those destinations.
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Milford Sound was another fiord we visited, not as long as Doubtful Sound, but still majestic and wondrous. One of the best parts about this day was the Milford Road, we stopped at so many places along the 2 hour road to reach the Sound. We actually crossed the 45 degree Latitude line, we found some lakes that were so still you could see the mirror image of the mountains behind them, we ran freely in huge grassy fields at the bottom of valleys, we ventured into ice caves, saw hundreds of waterfalls, stood above a chasm, walked through a beech forest, and pretty much had a blast.
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Doubtful Sound was a full day trip starting from Lake Manapouri. We crossed the lake in 1 hour, then boarded a big bus which took us down winding mountain roads through thick beech forests for another hour, before finally reaching our boat at the fiord. Doubtful Sound is amazing, it's a fiord carved out by glaciers during previous ice ages, then flooded by the sea. We sailed for 3-4 hours out to the Tasman Sea and into some of the fiord's arms and came across a playful pod of bottlenose dolphins.
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Great town, wish we could have stayed longer than 1 day. We did a few tours (Speight's Brewery, Cadbury chocolate factory, Royal Albatross Colony), walked around the city, and walked up the steepest street in the whole world, Baldwin Street. Highlight: chocolate waterfall at Cadbury!!! Too bad cameras were not allowed inside the factory.
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Our last day in New Zealand...sad to be leaving, we will definitely come back to this country. We spent the day driving from Dunedin to Christchurch (a 5 hour drive), but ended up stopping at so many places along the way. Nothing planned, just felt like a bit of exploring. Touring the Cadbury chocolate factory was super fun! They had a real chocolate waterwall with one ton of liquid milk chocolate! We also saw the Moeraki Boulders, 60-million year old boulders on the beach shaped into perfect spheres, very cool. Then we saw penguins and spent lots of time treasure-hunting on the beach for New Zealand jade.
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