This is probably the last travel post for a couple of weeks as we’re heading back home for a week or so before heading back to Australia to start working (fingers crossed!). Will be odd being back in the UK and seeing everyone especially little Nicholas, my girlfriend-nephew who I’ve not even see yet! Muchly looking forward to being reunited with my clothes too – will be so nice to have a choice of things to wear again as I am very sick of my blue fleece right now :-)
For info, here are maps of our North and South Island adventures – North Island we went clockwise from Auckland, South Island anticlockwise from Christchurch:
Anyways… catch up time for the last week or so…
From Fox & Franz Jospeh Glaciers we headed down the coast to Haast where the road headed inland again. This was untamed coast and Antarctic waters, but we had another lovely weather day so the sea didn’t look too uninviting (if only the air temperature was above 10 degrees…).
We went up and over the Southern Alps again and stopped the night on the shores of Lake Wanaka – unfortunately the clouds had descended and we didn’t get a glimpse of the peaks that surround the lake :-( We awoke to even more cloud until we increased our altitude as we headed the scenic route to Queenstown via Cardrona and the Crown Range saddle. There had been freezing fog overnight so everything was covered in a beautiful layer of frost and the veiws down onto the cloud covering Lake Wanaka to the North and Lake Wakatipu to the south were quite stunning:
We spent two nights in Queenstown making use of a nice campsite to provide us with heater protection against the chilly temperatures. We did a day’s skiing up at Coronet Peak – again amazing views from the snowfield down on the green, farm-filled valley and lake.
From Queenstown we headed to Te Anau through very wild country with less farmland that most of NZ with mountain ranges in the distance every which way we looked. It was a spectacular journey only then topped by the journey from Te Anau to Milford Sound. The 120km route winds and wiggles through forest, marshland, moraine, rivers and narrow gorges with huge rock faces bearing down from above. We made it 3/4 of the way to Milford the first afternoon so spent the night in a small camping area (gravel patch with drop toilet) and were so so so cold – ice on the inside of the van in the morning brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr. But the views made up for the chilliness:
We arrived in Milford after braving the icy roads and a very long tunnel in time to see a cruise boat leave the harbour grrr, so we had to wait a couple of hours in which time we found some people who knew Sarah from her time working on the boats, and we wangled free cruise tickets, lunch and underwater observatory tickets :-) We had a 2hr cruise out onto the sound passing under some huge waterfalls, enormous rock faces and even saw some seals splashing around in the water and lazing about on the rocks. Pictures are better than words so….
We would have loved to have spent some more time there and done some walks (as with everywhere we’ve breezed through!), but time was not our side so we headed back to Te Anau for the night and then straight off again in the morning to drive the southern scenic route to Invercargill – was not too scenic in the morning as the fog had once more descended… Luckily, once we got out of the hills and closer to the coast it all disappeared and the sun popped out again :)
We passed through Invercargill only stopping to use the internet – just another town… We spent the afternoon driving along the coastline through the Catlins – a very hilly and green corner of the southern most part of mainland NZ and spent the night in the middle of absolutely nowhere – it was our coldest night yet and we even had an icicle hanging from our tap in the morning!
We carried on up the coast passing through muchos farmland and small agricultural towns until we got to Dunedin – the largest town in the South and home to the Cadbury factory! Which we had to visit mostly for the goody bag :-) mmmm chocolate…
Dunedin is a nice little town and has a lot of old-style buildings and looks very english/scottish:
From Dunedin, we headed north along the coast (the sea here did not look inviting) buffeted by wind and rain – our luck with the weather seems to have run out a little… We turned inland again at Oamaru and drove up towards the Alps where the rain turned to… snow! We stopped the night in Twizel and played in the snow and even made a snowman!
From Twizel, we were going to dive up to Mt Cook village and visit the Edmund Hillary Centre which was high on my list of things to do in NZ… but it snowed some more overnight and made the 110km return journey up to the village into a bit of a mammoth task. So we knocked it on the head as we didn’t have too much spare time. We continued northwest through the snow to Lake Tekapo where the views of Mt Cook and the blue lake are supposed to be spectacular. We could see this:
Hmm. So we carried on down from the mountains via Geraldine and Methven and towards Christchurch and the Banks Peninsula. The peninsula was formed by a couple of volcanic eruptions and is a mishmash of hills and bays surrounded by ocean. Bit cloudy so we couldn’t quite appreciate it’s full prettiness but we still had some glimpses of nice views:
Just gonna head back to Christchurch for one night now and then we’ll be UK bound on Monday… so goodbye New Zealand. It’s been awesome :-)
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