Tomorrow marks the end of the NZ part of my vacation, and I must say, I am ready to go home. It has been an amazing ride, but holy crap I am tired and want to see everyone at home. We had a few driving filled days, and went hiking on a glacier (which was AMAZING), went on a few hikes and took the TransAlpine railroad to get back to Christchurch... ( Read more... )

Today ended up being pretty fantastic. We headed off to the Puzzling Maze and house, where I got lost in a giant maze for an hour or so and looked at some pretty cool illusions. We also noticed that the weather was GORGEOUS, and the forecast for tomorrow wasn't looking so hot, so we switched our paragliding adventure to today. Simply incredible, we ( Read more... )

So yesterday was pretty cool. Slow drive through patches of sunshine and crazy rain, to the lovely Cardrona Valley, where some appaloosas were waiting for us, and we took a fantastic ride through the valley. Note to self - you can still have muscle memory even if muscles are gone. Second note to self - those muscles will hurt like a bitch after you ( Read more... )

Today was a day trip out to Milford Sound - a lovely bus ride with plenty of stops at gorgeous rivers and gorges to tramp around, and then a boat out through the sound - which is technically a fiord - and was beautiful and intense and just wow. I did learn that 3 pm is a bad time to be driving through Fiordland National Park, as you might get hit ( Read more... )

Today was a pretty nice day, a touch of rain, and a bit of driving. We got into Te Anau, the gateway to the Fijordlands, this afternoon, and then I posted a bunch of pics (finally) on facebook. We went out and saw a Santa parade, which consisted of a lot of boats attached to trucks, with small children riding in them. I didn't see any Santas at all ( Read more... )

Today... today was nuts. We started off the morning with a flight over the Remarkables Mountain range, taking a look at a bunch of sites that were used during LOTR in a tiny little 4 seater Cessna. It was amazing... not so easy to visualize things in the movie, there was so much digital work done, but the scenery was spectacular. From there, we ( Read more... )

Seeing Rachel and D really was wonderful, I didn't realize how much I missed the company of more than just one person. Thanks, guys, I had a great night ( Read more... )

Today was pretty great... we drove down to some volcanic crators and took a dolphin spotting cruise. We saw Hector's dolphins, which are the smallest dolphins in the world I think, and are quite endangered. Very, very cool. We took a lovely scenic ride back and now I get to go have dinner with Rachel and D!! Very excited! Yay!

After posting last night, I went and sat in a hot tub under the stars. Just sayin ( Read more... )

Friday was fairly nice, we went for a great hike in the morning, around a small lake near Lake Taupo, and saw some cool stuff out there - birds and some beautiful ferns. We had a really long drive to Wellington, where we went on the Karori Nature Sanctuary's night hike. We heard kiwis and the morpork owl calling out in the forest, though we didn't ( Read more... )