Other stuff

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Ok then, back to the day-to-day stuff. When we left Nelson last week we headed toward Picton but this was a very short drive and the only thing in between the two towns was wine country. So we went wine tasting. This was wonderful and we couldn't figure out why we hadn't done it before. This area has tons of wineries, 25 within a 5 km radius, and is supposedly the place for some of the best Sauvignon Blanc in the world. We stopped by a few of the more highly recommended wineries and were given tastes of a number of their wines. The people working the wineries were all very friendly and the wine was incredible. I haven't had much experience with good wines, but this was certainly some of the best wine I've ever had. The Sauvignon Blancs and the Pinot Noirs were especially delicious. For anyone who feels like looking for any of these, the best brands we tried were Cloudy Bay, Nautilus, and Huia and I think they all export to the US. We ended up buying one bottle which was a small price to pay for a day like this. We got into Picton later for a little live music at a local bar and a movie at our hostel.

The next day we took the ferry back across to Wellington and the North Island. We went to the top of Mt. Victoria which looks over the city and the walkway to the top was used as the outer Shire (the black rider scenes) and the "get off the path" scene but after walking around on the many paths for a while and not finding them we gave up on looking. We spent that night at Brighid's again which was nice and then headed on our way the next morning.

We went from there up to the town of National Park where we stayed for 2 nights and did the Tongariro Crossing, which you all know about now. This hostel had multiple 42" plasma screen TV's and free dvd's so we took advantage of these with Empire of the Sun one night and Dracula (the Coppola one) the next.

After leaving the park we went up to the Waitomo caves for more caving and glow-worm fun. This was pretty cool, but not quite as exciting as I would have hoped. The caves were pretty old and really cool with a lot of stalagmites/tites but it was very commercialized. The ground was paved with cement blocks that looked very high-class, there were shiny hand-rails all over and many electric lights built into the walls of the cave. This made it take some convincing of myself to keep in mind that it was actually a real cave. We got to do a boat trip through underground water and past glow-worms though and this time there were considerably more than in the last cave trip we did. This was certainly worthwhile in doing, but not as spectacular as some of the other things we've done. We spent the night at a small town near the caves, played Yahtzee in the German way and the American way with a couple girls from Germany and Switzerland and a guy from Germany and we watched Kung Fu: the Movie on the oldest working TV that I know of. Pretty fun overall. Alright, I'll leave off here for this post and move on with a seperate post for the nerds.

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Photos

Japanese garden in Nelson
cool idea...dead grass sucks

Oh ya, we went to the site of Rivendell
But it wasn't anything recognizable, apparently just around this bend in the river was the site but most of it was done digitally