Milford Adventures!

The whole fam spent Friday at Milford Sound, although the trip there was an adventure in it self!

There were tons of places to stop on the way to Milford and we were lucky we could even get there as there had been a massive storm on Monday and the road had just opened at 10:30 Friday morning!

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If only I had paid attention to the signs! About 10 minutes after these pictures were taken I found myself on my knees in the wet gravel after tripping over a piece of metal sticking out of the gravel-awesome!

From New Zealand

From New Zealand

We made it to Milford in mostly one piece and although it was really cloudy, the Sound did not disappoint!

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Mom and I went on a Mitre Peak cruise of the sound. They have the smallest boats of the many cruise companies so they can get really close to all the waterfalls, which was fantastic! To top it off, there were only 8 other people on the cruise-perfection!!

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Keith, Colleen, and Randy spent their time kayaking of the sound. They were pretty easy to spot as they were they only kayakers out there!

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The cruise was great! It may have been cold and rainy but that meant we got 100's of waterfalls! We cruised almost all the way to the Tasmen Sea, where it finally stopped raining.

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From New Zealand

On the way back to land, 6 dolphins were spotted and couple got really close to the boat! Our skipper said they only see dolphins about once a week!

From New Zealand

From New Zealand

Rudyard Kipling described Milford Sound as the eighth Wonder of the World and it was recently voted the number one spot in the “101 must-do’s for Kiwis”, so hopefully you'll believe me when I say do not miss it if you ever come to New Zealand!

Just the beginning

With the family coming for such a short period of time this week, we really had to work to try to get everything in that we could! They flew into Christchurch and drove down the east coast to Dunedin, and then finally made it over to us in Alex on Wednesday evening.

We started their whirlwind Central Otago introduction at the Chatto Creek Tavern where I hope they got a good taste of the delicious wine, amazing food, and interesting and friendly locals.

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The next day our ultimate destination was Te Anu, but we had a few stops on the way. One stop was adorable Arrowtown.

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The next day we spent in Milford Sound, which deserves its own blog entry, so that's what it will get!

Left to my own devices on Stewart Island

On Saturday Keith got up early to do the Rakiura Track, which is 36 kilometers long. While most people do the track in three days, Keith is not most people and did it in two days. For this reason, I slept in and spent the day on my own instead of tramping as fast as I could through the mud!

Even though I was on my own I was not completely lazy! The rainy morning on the Island meant that I had the day hiking trails to myself, which was lovely! There are a huge numbers of birds on Stewart Island as well as Ulva Island and my favorite bird the tui was all over the place while I was hiking on Saturday and it was hard to think that R2-D2 was following me and to not smile every time I heard them!

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While I was hiking, drizzle turned into rain turned into incredibly windy and pouring down, so eventually I had to go inside, but I really didn't want to miss out on anything on the island!

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Luckily in the afternoon the sun finally came out!

From New Zealand

From New Zealand

That evening, while the sun was still out, I made it up to Observation Rock, which is supposed to be a good place to watch both sunrise and sunset. While I was up there is was clear there wouldn't be a great sunset, but it was so quiet and peaceful I stayed for almost an hour watching the light change. I was shocked that not another person came up there the whole time I was there since the point is only 1 kilometer from the only town on the island, Oban!

From New Zealand

From New Zealand

Hopefully Keith has time to blog his hike soon! But the family (Jean, Colleen, and Randy) are officially in the country and they'll be in Alex tomorrow, so I think we'll be a little busy for a few days!

The Birds

I've always had this fantasy that if I was alive in the time of the great explorers that I would have hitched myself to one of them and sailed around the unknown world. After the one hour crossing from Bluff to Stewart Island, I rescind this fantasy.

The hour long crossing to get to Stewart Island wasn't even in rough weather! It was really windy and there were giant swells and whitecaps, but it was a beautiful sunny day. The first half hour went pretty well but then there was that one huge swell and I almost lost it, but didn't-thankfully! I guess it was just mild sea sickness, but really that was enough! After what seemed like the longest hour of my life, we got to Stewart Island and I never wanted to get back on the ferry ever again!

We got to the island at about lunch time, so after lunch and dropping our bags at the backpackers place we were staying it was time to go out and explore the island. We had hoped to rent a sea kayak and kayak to Ulva Island that afternoon, but the one person who rents kayaks was gone for the day (of course!) so we took a short water taxi ride to Ulva Island.

Ulva Island is a predator free island sanctuary for native plants and birds live in a safe environment. I can't say Keith and I have ever been birding before, but that is pretty much what we were doing-keeping our eyes and ears peeled for the large number of birds that live on the island.

The bird we saw the most (and had come across before) was the weka, that always seemed to be following us as we walked down the beaches.

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We also had seen these little robins before-they also like to get really close to people like the weka do-they are so cute!

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Unfortunately I didn't get a good shot of my favorite bird on the island: the tui. I mainly love the tui because their bird call sound almost exactly like R2-D2, which is just awesome! We saw just about every bird on the island, except the kiwi bird which is nocturnal and almost never seen.

Hiking and bird watching were not the only thing to keep me entertained on the island, Keith also had to show off the guns!

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On the water taxi ride back to the main island we came across three Mollymawks (these are considered medium sized albatrosses) that felt like putting on a show for our boat. This does no justice as to how big these are!

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From New Zealand

So far the trip to Stewart Island was living up to the hype!

The times are a changing

Well, I'm not sure if you could tell, but both Keith and I have been a little down on the reality of some aspects about living here-mainly the weekdays-at least most weekends tend to be pretty awesome. But it seems like things are finally turning around.

Keith has actually been busy at work the past few days, although I'm holding my breath that this will keep up! And shockingly I have actually found something to do too! I have started volunteering at the high school library. I have to admit that I was not really looking forward to volunteering at any of the area schools, since, well, most of you know I'm not the biggest fan of children, but since teenagers don't really want anything to do with adults, this seems to work out pretty well!

Saving the best for last-we are moving!!! We looked at places today and found one that was exactly what we were looking for-rent only $20 more a week than what we're paying now, has a kitchen that is bigger than a closet and a fridge bigger than a dorm room fridge, and has a yard that will be just our yard-instead of living in someone's backyard like we are now. The house we'll be renting is actually in town, which means I'll actually be able to walk to town without my walk back being a epic climb up a mountain-yay!! I'm not going to miss living in our current place that is horribly isolating, incredibly windy, and exceptionally small-but with the fam coming next week and us going to Ranfurly the week after that we won't move until Easter-but that's soon enough!

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Off to Stewart Island first thing tomorrow morning!

Such is life!

After a few weeks of some pretty awesome adventures, things seems to be slowing down a little bit. Well, actually a lot. This past weekend we weren't really up to anything, just a little chillaxing (I will never get tired of this word!) by Lake Wanaka and trying to go to the farmer's market in Cromwell-which we found out ended last weekend! Oh well!

We did spend some time in Ranfurly and Naseby area on Friday. Keith had a meeting at the hospital there and is going to start filling in for the one doc in town for a week every month or so. Keith has been barely working three days a week in Alex and when he's there it's usually boring and since no one seems to want my help here volunteering or otherwise, we're both getting kind of bored and are ready for a change of scenery-even if it isn't that frequent.

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Sorry to disappoint but next weekend will also be boring. Keith is filling in at the hospital in near by Clyde and will be actually be working all this week and weekend. Stay tuned for more adventures the next weekend when we go to Stewart Island!

Feel the Burn!

Over the past three days Keith and I did the Routeburn Track, one of New Zealand's Great Walks and one of the top 11 hiking trails in the world according to National Geographic-so we knew it was going to be good!

We started on Saturday and it was a ridiculously warm and beautiful day! This was our view during lunch on the first day.

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More epically gorgeous views!

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After a not really hard few hours of hiking we made it to the hut where we would be staying the night, the Routeburn Falls Hut, and it had kind of a good view too...

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And here is where everything changes-this is the exact same view at about 8:30 Sunday morning:

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If you want to see all the views we were supposed to see I don't doubt that you can google them and find them! On the second day (in theory) we could see to the coast, instead we could see maybe a few hundred meters in front of us! But still it was beautiful-in a different way!

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Seeing this ghost of a giant mountain right in front of us made me realize that it is hard to say what all we missed!

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In case you can't see the mountain in that pic, the clouds broke-just a little-for us to see it!

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We made it to our second hut, the Mackenzie Hut, pretty quickly on Sunday. Once we were there the rain just came down harder and we didn't want to leave!

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There are really no pictures from the third day. What we thought was 'raining' on the second day turned out to just be drizzle-we found out what rain in Fiordland National Park means on Monday! Which isn't surprising since the forecast was for 250-350 millimeters (10-13 inches) of rain during Sunday and Monday. All the rain meant hiking was a little harder, because we had A LOT more water to cross! And by water I mean raging waterfalls that yesterday were probably just little trickles coming out of the side of the mountain and a trail that was more creek than trail. But that also means we saw a ton of waterfalls, they were incredible!

So what did the Routeburn feel like? The first day it felt warm, with slightly sore shoulders from the backpack-but in retrospect it felt incredibly lucky! The next two days felt wet-with ice cold water squishing under your toes with every step, and pants that are completely soaked through after being on the trail for five minutes. But they also felt warm, with Keith's hand reaching for mine while we're getting across waterfalls, and the magical warmth of a cup of tea and a fireplace, and the comradery of a dozen strangers laughing at how wet and cold the day is going to be for all of us.

Yeah, the weather kind of sucked, but I would do it again in a heartbeat!