South Island, New Zealand

The photos uploaded end to beginning and it is a lot of work to switch them all around, so we will just be recounting the journey from back to front.

We ended in Queenstown which is where we are all flying out from, but I stayed a few extra days since  I did not need to be back for the spring semester. Those adventures will be in a separate post! Queenstown is surrounded by mountains and was what I was hoping the entire country looked like, I love the jagged rock peaks, as opposed to the more grassy hills. There is a huge lake in Queenstown too, which was almost perfect for sunset viewing, but the sun went down behind that hill to the right so you couldn't see it touch the horizon.

We visited a sheep farm, it was quite an experience and they triggered my allergies like crazy. I was crying and blowing my nose and rubbing my eyes all day and into the next. The sheep also smell like booty, I could not be a farmer, the smells are just too intense. One of the girls also fainted while we were here because of all the dust we were breathing and the lack of fresh air so that was a wild experience.

We passed through a town that had a cute craft store in the center and outside they had a place to work on a knitting project, I knit part of a row and it was so fun!

We went to Milford Sound, which is in Fiordlands National Park, and it was somehow not raining when we went. However, it had rained the previous few days and in the bay the water was super murky from all the runoff, but then when we got out to the edge of the bay we could see the water was bright blue again.

This area is known for all the waterfalls that it has, and this was on a sunny day! Apparently it is even more beautiful when it is raining as all the waterfalls are active. The most common way for people to come to Milford Sound is by tour bus from Queenstown, so there were loads of buses all lined up going through the park. 

On the way into the park, we made lots of stops at different viewing points, we were all getting tired of these stops at one point though because it makes a 1 hr drive turn into 3, and by the end of the trip we were so over all the long bus rides.

Another Queenstown lake view, we stayed in Queenstown twice, in order to break up the drive to Milford Sound, which is about 3 hours from here.

The oldest bungee jump! I did not partake because it does not interest me to pay money to jump off a bridge...why would anyone want to do this is beyond me. But watching people jump was super fun, there was water below and again it was bright blue.

We made a stop for this special ice cream, known as fresh fruit ice cream where they blend up fresh fruit into an ice cream flavor of your choice. I got mixed berry and vanilla ice cream. The place also had a wonderful flower garden and we saw many happy bees on the lavender.

Another ice cream that I ate on this trip, it was just ok. The texture was strange and they ran out of the flavor that I really wanted, oh well.

In Wanaka there is this tree growing in the middle of the water, it apparently germinated on a wooden post out in the lake and managed to live, and now this is one of the attractions of the city.

The reflection of Mt. Cook and Mt. Tasman on a lake. This was so pretty and reminded me of Switzerland! Love the snow capped peaks so much.

A glacier is up in those mountains, you can maybe see a tiny bit of it. This glacier has been retreating so fast, and only 10 years ago it was basically all the way down the mountain and now it is about 3km up the mountain.

We stopped in Franz Josef for a couple of days, this is where we could have had the opportunity to do a glacier hike, but it's usually canceled due to the weather and it would have made me a lot happier if the weather was bad when we were there, alas that was not the case and the flights went ahead, which was something that I may have been interested in, but alas. 

We had an all you can eat pizza night and they brought out SO many pizzas, and also the brought out the pizzas that nobody wanted to eat, at one point we had like 5 Hawaiian pizzas out and everyone was like ?? why! We were all ravenous though and I ate 10 slices :)

The group of us! 

We went kayaking on a glacial lake, and I was thinking glacial meaning fed by a glacier, but they meant carved by a glacier many years ago and filled by rain water. Not quite as exciting but the activity of kayaking was still fun.

We have gotten served tea so many times throughout this trip, it's very confusing to me. In many places all across the country, at random points, tour guides whip out tea and begin to pass it around. I really like this though and we should do that here I'm all for more tea.

These are all pictures of the Franz Josef glacier...you can barely even see it these days!

We stopped for a night in Blackball, an old mining town with a mine that actually still operates today. It is a tiny town with only a few hundred inhabitants, and we learned more about the history of the town, which is actually where the communist party in NZ was founded. They have a huge history of labor organization and the coal workers union that eventually became quite large in the country was also started here, based off of the model of the unions in the US.

We saw a few street cats that are taken care of by different establishments, and petting them had to have been one of the highlights of the trip. They were so friendly!

Pretty water pictures incoming

We took a water taxi to a beach about 6 miles away from our accommodation in Abel Tasman National Park, and then our whole activity for the day was to walk back to our accommodation via a bunch of beaches and you could choose where to stop and enjoy the sunny day along the way. Never have I swam in such bright stunning water. It was a phenomenal day of relaxing that everyone was looking forward to after the long hike we did in Tongariro.

The boat taxi started on land...being towed by a tractor. Truly was a strange experience.

The ferry from the north island to the south island was about 4 hours long, even though you can basically see the south island from the north island. We snagged a table right at the front of the boat and had a great time looking for dolphins, we saw 2 pods of them!