Epic New Zealand Trip

Our trip to New Zealand is all over and we are excited to finally post some pictures and updates from our trip!  Our previous post talked about being in Japan and Guam, so this one will pick right up at the beginning of our trip, which was in Christchurch.  

Christchurch is one of the largest cities in the South Island, but was devastated by a large earthquake in 2011.  The rebuilding process is ongoing and it was quite clear that the earthquake definitely greatly, greatly impacted this city.  Our first night in NZ was also our anniversary!

This was the view from our hotel room

The hotel sent up champagne when they learned it was our anniversary, and Mindi broke one of the glasses! 

We went out for dinner for our anniversary and our hotel called ahead and had the restaurant prepare this plate of small desert bites for us!  It was an awesome surprise and really fun!

This was our home during our journey!  After our first night in Christchurch this served as our transportation and hotel the rest of the trip.  This picture of it was taken by Jason.  It was a great way to get around the country and we put several thousand miles on it during our time.

These pictures show us standing on the Moeraki boulders.  This beach is littered with these perfectly spherical boulders that lay in the sand and are unlike anything we have ever seen before!  Some are completely exposed, while these three are buried halfway.  We stopped and saw these on our way from Christchurch down to Dunedin, which is a city along the East Coast of the South Island.

Dunedin sits adjacent to a peninsula, which we stayed out near the end of.  This peninsula is home to a lot of unique wildlife that we don't get the chance to see in Nebraska or Kwaj!  We drove to an overlook of the peninsula and from there we saw Penguins coming in from their day's adventures out in the ocean hunting.  They would come in in these little groups and charge up the beach onto the rocks.  It was pretty neat seeing them waddle up the beach.

Also out on the peninsula we went looking for seals.  It was raining and windy, but we walked along a beach they were known to be at.  We were talking to a couple scientists there studying the penguins when out of the waves this sea lion came charging at us.  The one scientist literally had to defend himself with his bag to prevent the sea lion from biting him.  It chased him for several hundred yards, luckily in the opposite direction we were going!

This is near the city of Te Anau on our way to Milford Sound.  We stopped to take a picture on the shore of this lake with the mountains dropping into it on the other side.

On the way in to Milford sound the scenic spots were plentiful.  This is about 5 minutes after the lake and we had to stop and get a few pictures here as well!

Here we are in a valley that leads into the mountains.  Behind us is the river we follow into the mountains to get to Milford Sound.  This was a very beautiful place!

This picture puts some perspective onto where we stopped.  The mountains climbed out of this valley and it was pretty cool!

Here we are in Milford Sound on our boat tour.  This Fiord was incredible as the mountains came down into the water in almost vertical cliffs in many places.  Also there were dozens of waterfalls falling into the water due to the rain the day before.

Here is another picture in Milford Sound.  When we were here we didn't think that anything could top this place for beauty and grandeur.  It was amazing.

This is Mitre Peak, the centerpiece of Milford Sound.  If you look up a picture of Milford Sound, this is the mountain you will find.  It comes to a perfect point at the top and the picture doesn't even do it justice.  It is a sight to behold!

This is the North Face of Mitre Peak, you can see how it climbs straight out of the water to 6,000 feet!  Our Boat took us right along the edge and even dipped us into a waterfall coming down the side of it.  

After Milford Sound we made our way to Queenstown, which has to be one of the most beautiful cities in the world.  It sits right on the edge of this lake and is surrounded by mountains in nearly all directions.  

These pictures were taken about 30 minutes from Queenstown.  Some scenes from Lord of the Rings were filmed just on the other side of the mountain we are hiking on to the left of the top picture.  

This shows a view from our hike that morning.  If you look just past the right side of the lake in the green area you can see a white dot.  That is where we had to park our campervan because the road, which actually goes through a pasture, couldn't be driven on anymore!  

This is a view of Queenstown from the top of the hill behind it.  We rode a Gondola up to this vantage point and enjoyed the views!  This little town is just perfectly nestled in this spot.  

Here we are over looking Queenstown, the lake, and the mountains around!

Here is a picture from the inside of our campervan.  It worked out really well to campervan through the country.  We are all toasting in this picture because we fished a piece of Fox Glacier out of the river and used it as our ice by chipping off chunks for the rest of the trip!  

Here is a picture of all of us in front of Fox Glacier.  It was really rainy, so our hike up onto the glacier got canceled!  That was to bad, but we enjoyed the views from the end of the hike the next day when it wasn't so rainy.  This was Christmas day, so they were not running any guided tours.

We saw a lot of rockfalls along the trails, so we took this sign to heart during our walks to the glaciers!

We also hiked up to Franz Josef Glacier and enjoyed the hike up through the valley in which dozens of waterfalls fell off the mountains and cliffs!

From Glacier Country we headed up the West Coast and stayed the night outside of the city of Greymouth.  We got into our campsite late that night after dark and awoke the next morning to realize we were parked 10 feet from the beach!!!  It was a pretty amazing sight to wake up to!  We parked in some of the coolest places with our campervan and this little campsite was awesome!  

Here is us on the beach right behind our campervan.

Here is a picture of us in Pancake Rock National Park.  These layers of rock line the coasts and make some cool structures and shapes!

We stopped here in Nelson Lakes National Park for about 15 minutes on our drive across the South Island.  Pretty Views!!!

We stopped during our journey on the side of the road for some appetizers right in the middle of this vineyard.  This was yet another amazing place to stop and take a break from the road!

We had set up our little picnic table right here as the picture above shows.  The mountains in the background rise out of this valley, which is one of the best wine producing regions in the country.  The vines grow right up to the mountains, which are on both sides of this valley.

Mindi and I took an evening away from the campervan in Blenheim, which is in the heart of wine country.  We rented some bikes and biked through the vineyards stopping at different wineries for some samples!  This was a great day!

This shows the make up of the valley and how the vines grow up to the Mountains.  This was our fist stop on our bikes at a vineyard.

This shows the opposite side of the valley and the picture was taken from just outside our room for the evening.  The hotel we stayed out had little bungalows overlooking the vineyards.

Here we are outside our hotel room with an awesome sunset and some great vines to pose next to!

After Blenheim and wine country we proceeded to Picton, where we took the ferry across the strait to the North Island.  The ferry ride itself took us through the Marlborough Sounds and was quite spectacular!  We didn't think that anything could top what we had seen in the South Island and were all a bit sad to be leaving it!  New Zealand has roughly 4 million people living in the entire country, and over 3 million of the people live on the North Island, which meant we were leaving a lot of solitude and heading to a place with more people, though 3 million people in the North island made if far from crowded!  The picture above is us as we are pulling into Wellington, the National Capitol.  A lighthouse, which is blurred in the background, was a cool site to welcome us to the North Island.

This shot of Wellington shows how the city is situated on a Harbor in front of some mountain/hills in the background.  It is yet another picturesque scene in this country full of views!  We spent a night here before moving deeper into the North Island.

Our original plan was to do the a hike in Tongariro National Park after Wellington, but weather prevented us from doing the hike on the day we wanted.  Instead, we drove North into the Rotorua Thermal area and enjoyed a geyser...though it was induced to errupt instead of being natural, which was a let-down.  The thermal pools were colorful and quite neat as there was a variety of thermal activity in a single area.  boiling mudpots and geysers and sulfur springs abounded in this area.  The picture above shows Champagne Pool, the centerpiece of the area.

The next day we woke up very early to go on one of the most exciting hikes of the entire trip and our lives!  We hiked 19.4 KM, which is about 12.5 miles over active volcanoes.  It took us about 8 hours to complete this hike and we were all tired and sore afterwards!  The views during this hike were amazing and the walk was awesome.  The guides had told us that this walk was considered one of the top ten day walks in the world and it lived up to that billing!  The volcano we climbed is the one filmed as Mount Doom in the Lord of the Rings.

The hike up led us over a saddle that involved walking on a ridge that was about 10 feet across in the narrowest places.  Add on to this that there were 30-40 MPH winds blowing across the mountain and it felt like we could be blown off the ridge at any moment.  The day before they closed the hike due to high winds and rain and we could see why they had closed it!  We ran into people turning around because they couldn't make it up the incline with the winds.  This was definitely one of the most intense hikes ever!

The picture above shows us about 3/4 of the way up the ridge overlooking the Red Crater, which is the remnants of on old eruption.  The entire crater is a dark red color and is just plain bizarre, but beautiful at the same time!

This shows Jason and Michelle walking up the ridge toward the peak.

Right underneath the red crater sits the emerald lakes, which are thermal pools of different colors. This one is a deep bluish green in the middle and yellow on the edges.  The other is a darker blue and the third is a yellowish green.  They are quite the weird and breathtaking sight when coming over the edge of the saddle.  This was our lunch stop for the hike.

This is looking back at the red crater from across a valley.  This shows the path coming down off the top of the ridge.  The sun came out just as we came over the top of the ridge, providing spectacular views the rest of the hike.

This shows the volcanoes over which we hiked from a distance.

The next day we did one of the most amazing things during the entire trip: Glowworms!!!  We went into this cave and boarded a raft which was guided down an underground river.  As we rafted the guide asked us not to speak, take pictures, or make any sounds.  We all just stared up at the ceiling which was covered in thousands of glowworms and were reflecting off the river behind and in front of us.  Our jaws were all wide open in awe.  Toward the back of the cave a waterfall falls into the river and the sound of it was awesome as we stared up at the glowing blue lights.  There were so many glowworms that it provided enough light to be able to read a large print book.  There was no other source of light down in the cave except these worms.  Imagine a cave so filled with lightning bugs that you could see around you and you get an idea of what it was kind of like.  This is the same cave in which they filmed the Planet Earth series by Discovery Channel. 

Our next stop was Hobbiton, which is the working set from the Lord of the Rings films and the Hobbit films.  The set was left exactly as it was for filming and we got to see everything from from Bilbo and Frodo's house to other spots they filmed!  We want to build one of these little houses into a hill sometime because they were pretty cool!

This picture shows Bag End, which is Frodo's home in the Lord of the Rings movies.  It was pretty cool to tour this live movie site!

At the end of our tour they gave us drinks at the green dragon.

Here we are dressed up as hobbits in the green dragon, the hobbiton pub!

Our last night led us to Auckland, New Zealand's largest city.  Mindi and I explored the downtown area and ended up underneath this tower, known as sky city.  People actually  jump off of it and are attached to cables to slow down right before the ground.  Looked pretty exciting!!!

We talked to the restaurants at the top of the tower and someone had just canceled a reservation for the time we got there. Normally the restaurants are booked out nearly a week in advance, but they gave us their table so we had dinner from 60 stories above the city over looking the Auckland Harbor and the city!  This was an awesome experience and an amazing meal that we had not expected!!!!

Our journey home involved 2 red-eye flights, from Auckland to Singapore and then Singapore to Hong Kong.  In Hong Kong we had a 10 hour layover so we left the airport and headed to downtown Hong Kong.  We took a ferry ride through their harbor and looked at the amazing skyline!  There are so many skyscrapers in this city that nothing else becomes visible except sky scrapers!  It was certainly a different world from New Zealand.

We are now a few weeks removed from our trip and still look back on it remembering the fun times!  This gives a bit of a glimpse into the trip!  Hopefully everyone's Christmas and New Year's were great and full of Joy!