Christchurch and Queenstown, NZ

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I'm on the last leg of my trip and just finished up a week of travelling around alone on the south island of New Zealand. Its just beautiful here. I really like New Zealand. I flew to Christchurch last Sunday and spent the afternoon looking around the city. Its a bit older than most cities in New Zealand, so I enjoyed looking at all the old buildings. There are no mountains near Christchurch, but it is still very cute with a river flowing through it and neat bridges and parks.

The next day I took a bus to Queenstown which is much farther south in the heart of the mountains! They are just stunning. These mountains are a lot different than the ones in Australia because they are more jagged with snow on top. They remind me more of the Rockies.

I took a day trip from Queenstown to Milford Sound which is a fjord close to the coast. We got lucky and had beautiful weather (apparently its usually raining there which means the clouds block most of the views). I took a little boat cruise through the fjord and we saw New Zealand fir seals! They were really cute and one actually was swimming beside the boat for a while. There were tons of waterfalls running down the cliffs into the water too which was neat.

I spent the next few days in Queenstown. I did a mountain climb one day and the views were just stunning from the top. My legs were burning for about 2 days after that one! The hike was quite steep. Its kind of neat though, because New Zealand really has no large predators... I was smack dab in the middle of the forest alone but didn't have to worry about bears or wolves or anything like that. Not even snakes! They just have a lot of neat birds.

Other than that, I've seen tons of sheep farms (of course) and also some deer farms too! Its weird to see a whole field of deer just hanging around looking at you. They also have a lot of cattle farms too. Now I'm back in Christchurch and I start my next Contiki tour tomorrow!

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