The Fiordlands!

Our final post! When we left off we were in Te Anau, waiting to see if the road would open to Milford Sound the next day. It did, but it rained solidly all day long.


This is looking out the back of the boat that we took on the sound. The back deck was covered, and the wind normally only blew rain onto about half of the deck at the time, so we (and our cameras) kept moving around a bit, but stayed pretty dry.

As it turns out, all the rain was a good thing, as all the hills and mountains of Milford Sound had waterfalls that are only there right after the rains. There were thousands of places that water was cascading down. The boat in this picture was about the same size as ours, and is in front of one of only two year-round falls in the sound.

Here is Matt in his rain gear...

And Lisa in hers...

The combination of the wind and the waterfalls gave lots of intersting photo opportunities. The boats could get quite close to the sides of the sound (often within 10 or so feet) because the sides were so steep, even underwater. We saw a picture of one of the big Princess cruise ships that comes in every week or so during the summer. It holds 4000+ people and the picture made a ship like the one we are on look like a rowboat.

Moss covered nearly everything, and since there was no real soil, moss clinging to the rocks supported the roots of trees. If one tree fell up high it could take out hundreds of trees on the way down, since nothing could be rooted too solidly.

Here is Lisa, just coming in from a large soaking when they took us up close to the second permanent waterfall, but still having fun...

And both of us after our trip during a brief break in the rain. The photos don't really do the sound justice, the mountains were really quite spectacular.

The next day we set out for an ovenight trip on Doubtful Sound, which was in the same National Park, about 80 miles south of Milford Sound. It was a bit overcast, but we had two days without rain, which was a nice way to finish up our trip. To get to Doubtful Sound we took a shuttle to a boat, across a lake to another shuttle, then up and over a pass and down to the sound. Here we are at the pass looking down to the sound below.

A closer view of the sound from above. The road that we were on was built during the construction of a hydro-electric plant. Before that you could only get to the sound by hiking a couple of days or by coming in from the ocean.

And the view once we were on the water in the sound.

Both of us enjoyed the trees along the side of the sound. We had someone who used to work for the DOC (Department of Conservation) on the boat, and we probably asked what type of tree they were, but that was over a week and thousands of miles ago :->

Our boat for this cruise was pretty small, 8 passengers and 2 crew. The boat in this picture was more like 50 passengers, also an overnight cruise. Gives you a bit of idea of the scale of the sound.

We followed the sound all the way out to the ocean, and near the end of it we saw both a seal colony and 5-6 Fiordland Crested Penguins, which are pretty rare and more photogenic than the seals... (If you've been a careful reader of the blog, you'll note that these are the penguins we didn't get to see on the beach about a week before. :P )

We spent the night on the boat. After anchoring in one of the few bays that was shallow enough to put down an anchor we noticed the sandflies. They are a very small fly, just bigger than a gnat, but they bite like mosquitos. The Maori legend is that they were created when a god saw how people were just standing around looking at the beautiful scenery. A hammer blow shattered a piece of jade into millions of sandflies that would bite anything that was not moving...

The next morning the water was exceptionally calm, providing lots of fun reflection shots.

We spent part of the morning on a couple of kayaks, here is Matt showing off some "Olympic" form :-> That's our boat in the background.

And the last Lisa & Matt self-portrait of the trip (still working on group self portrait composition).

One last shot of the sound before we headed out.

On the drive out we stopped in a couple of different spots, here Lisa gets to see just how soft (and also suprisingly warm!) that moss that holds up the trees is...

And that is it for the honeymoon. We headed back to Queenstown and stayed overnight before catching our flight though Auckland to San Francisco. We had a great time, and after nearly two months on the road we were still talking to each other at the end. A special thanks to Matt's mom and dad for dog sitting and to Lisa's mom for cat sitting. We have been home for a couple of days now, and, other than our fridge deciding to die a couple of days ago, things have been pretty relaxing. Looking forward to catching up with everyone soon!

Thanks for all the nice comments on the blog, and just come visit us if you want the narrarted slideshow version. :->

Love,

Lisa & Matt

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...

It has been a while since our last post, we had some bad weather that meant we did not have a lot to write about or show you, followed by three days that were beautiful, which we did our best to take advantage of by being outside at all times :->. The rain has started up again though, so we are spending a morning catching up on the blog while waiting to find out if they open up the road to Milford Sound (closed yesterday and this morning due to avalanche danger).

A bit over a week ago we were in the Marlborough region, known for its wines. Here is a shot of one of the wineries that we visited, it was quite windy, but rather nice overall, and we had a great lunch at one of the wineries.

From there we headed over to the coast at Kaikoura. The view from our hotel room looked out over a bay to the mountains. California has lots of the same types of terrain as New Zealand, in fact the drive to Kaikoura could have been over on the coast in Northern California. As you can see here though it at times looks like someone took the Sierra Nevada mountain range and shoved it over to the coast.

Kaikoura also had a nice winery that had me wandering around and taking pictures of nearby farm animals and grape vines while Lisa did a tasting. Still can't get used to the color of the water, so many great shades of blue, green, and everything in between...

We tried to do a boat trip to swim with dolphins while we were in Kaikoura, but the wind was too strong for us to go out in the boat. It was a large boat and they must have had 40 people waiting, so we figured it must have been a pretty bad forecast for them to cancel the trip and give everyone their money back... We left Kaikoura and headed for Arthur's Pass, the highest point on a drive across the south island. During the drive we had the most wind that either of us had ever felt while driving. It turns out that a truck had blown over in 100km/hr plus winds near Kaikoura. I guess it might not have been fun out on the water.

The shot below is on the trip to Arthur's Pass. More photogenic sheep and mountains. :)

There is an amazing collection of rock outcroppings just before you get to Arthur's Pass. We were pretty sure we recognized some of the landscape from the movies of "The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe" and "The Lord of the Rings". I'm quite afraid of heights, so although it looks like I'm right near the edge of a cliff I can report that it was in fact quite safe (as was Lisa in the second shot). Definitely not as many warning signs as you would get in the US though.


On the way from the rocks to Arthur's Pass we came across the very beautiful Lake Pearson. Lake Hamre was nowhere to be found (might need to go to Norway).

In Arthur's Pass it was raining and clouds were down low enough that we could not appreciate the scenery, so after checking into our rented hiker's cabin we turned around and headed back the way we had come for half an hour or so to where we had last seen some blue sky. On our way back we were rewarded with a rainbow.

We did a pair of hikes, the first one through dense beech forest, and the second climbing an open hill for a nice view of the surrounding areas. You can see the road where we started to the left of Lisa's cap.
At the very top there were great views in all directions, and we came across a sheep that had not made it. (Not sure how it died, as far as I know there are no predators on the island that are large enough to take on a sheep, so possibly just old age.)

A road shot heading back towards Arthur's Pass...

In Arthur's Pass we picked up some supplies for dinner and were greeted outside by a Kea bird, the world's only alpine parrot. There are signs all over about not feeding them, but based on his behavior I'd say not everyone follows those requests. In some areas they have become quite the pests, biting at any part of the car that they can get their beak around.

From Arthur's Pass we finished the drive over to the west coast of the south island. It was raining and cloudy for nearly all of the trip, so we took in a local museum that had displays about the local history of gold and coal mining. In the evening we made it down to Fox Glacier where we were staying in the Mountain View B&B, and it definitely lived up to its name. It only cleared for about half an hour in the evening, but it was enough to get a nice shot over their pond.

The next morning we went over to Fox Glacier, but decided to just do a couple of shorter hikes rather than a long one onto the glacier (you had to be guided if you wanted to go onto the glacier). Here we are posing in front of the glacier which is one of those things that it is tough to get a picture of that captures just how huge it appears in person.

After the morning at the glacier we headed over to the beach which had an old mining site and a "Miner's Tunnel". I was pretty excited about the tunnel, since it appeared that you had free access to it and I figured we could wander around the front edge and look at all the old mining equipment. In fact we should have taken the name literally, it was a tunnel that had been carved not to do any mining, but to let miners get through a hill over by the coast. So it was a drippy 30 foot tunnel with a view of the coast from the other end. The highlight wound up being the old mining equipment that we had passed a mile or two before, which is seen below...

The next day we headed over to Franz Joseph glacier, which was just a bit north of Fox. Did another couple of day hikes out to the glacier, but the weather did not tempt us into heading out onto the ice.


It was still cloudy when we headed to bed that night, but cleared up during the night. I woke up at 2am or so (not sure why) and looked outside. By the light of the full moon I could clearly see the mountains, so I decided that I should head back out to the lake and take a couple of pictures. The shot below is at 2am, lit only by the moon.

The next morning it was clouding up again as we headed further south and back across the mountains to Wanaka and Queenstown. But it did clear up for a few days while we were there, so we'll post those photos soon!