On to Queenstown!

Hope you're all doing well! We are feeling well-rested and relaxed as we post this from home today. That's right, we came home a little bit early! We made the decision sometime during the continuing rain & clouds of the glaciers. Just reached that point of a little too much traveling and too few comforts of home. And, of course, once we changed the tickets our ratio of sunny to rainy days did increase (per Murphy's Law), so we had a pretty good last week. :) Anyway, here are photos from the first half of that week and we'll post the rest soon.

On our drive from the glaciers over to Wanaka, we tried to get out and do a few walks. Here's one where we had a nice walk through a fern forest to get out to a beach where there were supposed to be penguins. As you can see, we were somewhat disappointed. It was midday, they were probably all out feeding, alas.


To get to Wanaka we had to cross some more mountains and go through Haast Pass. This part of the river is "The Gates of Haast". The fantastic turquoise color of the water doesn't quite come through here, but the amount of water going by was impressive.


We also finally found a good row of what we think were birch trees for Matt to photograph. We'd seen them a lot, but never in the right setting, the right light, etc...


The next day in Wanaka turned out to be gorgeous, so we decided to do a scenic flight. It took us first over Lake Wanaka. The pilot enjoyed pointing out this lake on an island on a lake on an island.


Then towards the mountains...

And over to Mt. Aspiring (9950 ft) which is one of the tallest mountains outside of Mt. Cook National Park in New Zealand. Tall enough to have a few glaciers on it.

Here's a view looking out towards the west coast (where we had been rained on the last three days) and you can just see the peaks of mountains poking through the clouds.

Near another peak nearby out pilot spotted a group of red deer which had somehow gotten up quite high. The mountains were old hat for him, but the pilot was excited to see the deer. :) He took us around them twice, and said he had only seen deer that high up three times in the last 12 years.

And here we are safely back on the ground in front of our little plane.


We also spent some time at Puzzling World because, well, it was there. :) They had a cool room of holograms and some other rooms playing with visual illusions and a bunch of puzzle games you could play in the cafe. And they had this room which used some of the same visual illusion tricks that were used in movies like LOTR to create vast differences in size.

After that we drove over to Queenstown via a road through some more (smaller) mountains that had actually only been paved in 2000. Here's Lisa at the pass. You can see how the landscape changes from mostly tussock grass on the hills back to snow covered mountains as you come to Queenstown.

Queenstown was the site of the first commercial bungee jump, here is one with a very nice view. We had taken the gondola up earlier, can't say that either one of us was up for a bungee jump though...


So we did not do the bungee jump, but they did have a "luge" track up at the top. We rode a ski lift up a bit farther and then raced our "luge" carts down the track. Great views and it was pretty fun zipping down the track on the carts. And the helmets do make us look pretty special.

Queenstown itself had great views, but Glenorchy, which was on the same lake about 30 miles north was one of the prettiest areas either of us had ever seen. Rivers flowing through forest valleys with beautiful mountains rising up on all sides. Many of the "Lord of the Rings" scenes were filmed nearby. We decided to do a horseback ride that was called the Ride of the Rings. Below we have Lisa with her horse "Boris".

It was a very nice ride, and they only go out with five people per guide, so it did not feel crowded at all.

Here is Matt on "Oscar", who was one of the hundreds of horses used in Lord of the Rings. This particular company sent 15 horses to the auditions, but only 5 made it into the movie. They had to be pretty plain looking because for the larger scenes they would be duplicated hundreds of times in the computer. If a horse had a white patch on his nose, you would see hundreds of white nosed horses in the larger scenes.

Some of the horses were a bit antsy during the picture taking, here our guide was trying to move some branches to take a picture because it was easier than moving the horses. The large open field behind the branch is where Isengard (the tower of the Evil wizard) was in the "Lord of the Rings" movies. The tower was either a small model or digitally generated depending on the shot, but all the mountains and scenery surrounding the field were the ones that you see in the movie (except the river plain which was digitally removed and replaced with a grassy plain from another area).

After the ride we did a three part tour that was a 4x4 shuttle bus drive, a hike, and then a jet boat ride. The forests that we went through were quite pretty, primarily beech trees with small green leaves. Apparently Peter Jackson wanted large yellow leaves for the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy, so someone went to the north island and brought back thousands of leaves. He did not think they were the right color though, so the grade schoolers in Glenorchy spent a couple of days painting leaves. Then production assistants tied them leaf by leaf into the forest spots that they were shooting in. Areas of this forest were used as the Lothlorien forest and as the forest where the orcs attack the Fellowship at the end of the first movie.

A shot from the jet boat ride. We also took some video which we will try to post next time. The jet boat ride was pretty entertaining, they only need four inches of water to get the boat over a shallow area, and the boats are impressively maneuverable.

Here is a shot of the group before us on the boat ride.

After our day up in Glenorchy we headed over to the coast to Te Anau, which was the stepping off point to Milford Sound and Doubtful Sound. We had quite a bit of rain while we were there. The first day we were there the road to Milford sound was closed due to avalanche danger. That night though it cleared a bit in time for a nice sunset over the lake.
Next up is Milford and Doubtful Sound...