Rain rain go away...

Milford Sound


Up close and personal to a waterfall in Milford

On Monday we took a coach and cruise trip to Milford Sound - its a valley which has been flooded by water from the Tasman sea and is several hundred metres deep. We thought the scenery from the coach trip was spectacular but once we were on the boat it just got better and better - sheer rock faces and huge waterfalls everywhere, plus we even got to see some fur seals and penguins close up! The only wildlife which weren't welcome were the sandflies which were everywhere - Nath has already been feasted on a couple of times!!! This is probably the driest day that we've had (although the sun still didn't shine) but typically as we'd booked another trip the following day on Doubtful Sound the weather worsened and we had to hang around another day before we could make that trip!


Stace was very amused at this sign...

So, on the Tuesday we made up for the weather by stuffing ourselves stupid on cakes (mmmm afghan biscuits) and chilling out, which was a good thing because by this time Stace must have bumped her head at least 15 times (mostly getting out of the campervan) so she needed some time to recover.


Can't believe they named a bar after me...

Wednesday looked a lot more promising (still no sign of sunshine but at least it wasn't raining), so we headed on down to Lake Manapouri to get the ferry over to the Sound. For those geeks out there, the difference between the two sounds is that this particular one was actually formed by a glacier which melted thousands of years ago - oooooh!! Again, the scenery was amazing and instead of huge great rock faces, there was a lot more space and tranquility (god, we are starting to sound like new age hippies aren't we????). Again, saw some seals (which was probably the only time Stace ventured up on deck - well, although there was no rain it was absolutely freezing), and a yellow browed penguin. It was a great day (also due to the fact that Stace managed to get her sandfly killing tally to about 20 just on the coach - god we hate those things!)! As soon as we arrived back to land we took a 2 hour drive back to Queenstown for a night on the tiles. However, as we were both knackered (and rubbish) we just managed to stuff ourselves stupid on a three course meal (my god the green lipped mussles are HUGE over here) and did a quick stop off in one of the bars (Neil - we went to Winnies, but they couldn't open the roof because of the rain, surprise surprise)!


Doubtful Sound

The following day we drove to Wanaka, which took us up over a steep mountain range - not the best thing to try with a campervan! Anyway, finally got to Wanaka which was a very picturesque town surrounded by a lake (by the way, when we say lakes were not talking about the pond like lakes we have back in the UK, on these lakes they are massive and its difficult to see the other side, if at all!) . Anyway, we thought we'd spend the afternoon mooching round the town before setting off on a recommended walk the following day (you know whats coming next, yes we ended up spending more money on clothes and bloody snowboarding stuff for Nath "but its so cheap here"!!!). However, you guessed it, it started raining and didn't stop for 3 days (in fact its still raining now and we're in a completely different place now!). We couldn't really spend anymore time in Wanaka, even though we really wanted to do the walk as we were running out of time, so we headed north towards the Glaciers on the west coast - Fox and Franz Josef.

We are currently the village of Fox Glacier, waiting to be told that the helihike trip we've booked has been called off (you can't even see the Glacier due to the low cloud so theres no way the helicopter will be going up), however we have also booked in a 4 hour Glacier hike as a back up which will be cool! We'll update you on how we get on soon (anyway, I'm sure Stace will find it amusing as Nath clings to the side for dear life)....