Last week and a half of NZ

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I've gone a bit photo-mad on this blog entry and it's also quite a long one. It's been an extremely busy last week and a half with a lot of moving around. After leaving Franz Josef, my next stop was the adrenaline capital of the world - Queenstown. The city and the surrounding area is basically just like a huge playground where you can do pretty much every extreme sport and activity that you can think of. Queenstown has a brilliant setting as it's positioned right next to Lake Wakatipu with snow-capped mountains all around it - it's a great looking place when you see it on a clear day. I definitely couldn't visit Queenstown without doing a bungy jump since the very first commercial bungy was created there. I'd always planned on doing a bungy jump on this trip and I decided that this was the ideal place to do it. There are several different bungy sites in the area but I went for the highest I could find since I thought I'm probably only going to do it once so I may as well go for the biggest. I booked my jump on the 134m Nevis bungy which is situated in a huge canyon about 45 minutes away from the city. Even the ride out to the bungy site was pretty cool as you have to take a 4x4 vehicle up an extremely steep hill and then you have to get in a little cable car to get to the bungy pod which you jump from. I was quite relaxed about the whole thing and was mainly just excited about doing it - until it was my turn to jump and I stepped out onto the ledge. It's so difficult to make yourself jump off - I decided the best way was to look ahead and pretend I was diving into a swimming pool. It was definitely an adrenaline rush! From the 134m fall you get about 8.5 seconds of freefalling and then you also get a few little bounces which provide extra excitement. Even when you're getting pulled back up it's fun how you're just hanging on a bit of rope in the middle of a canyon. You could spend literally 1000's of dollars in just a few days in Queenstown, there's so much to do but it was all just too expensive. The rest of the time I was there I had to make do with the free activities of climbing a couple of mountains and relaxing by the lake.

I left Queenstown and headed for Milford Sound. If you look on a map where the two places are then you'd think that you could get from one to the other in about 20 minutes, but the road to get there goes a very long way round so it takes a fair few hours. Milford Sound is basically an area which has been carved out by glaciers over millions of years and then flooded by the sea. So as a result there is an inlet with very deep water and then huge mountains coming straight out from the water. I was reliably informed that it should be called Milford Fiord and not Milford Sound since a sound is created by a river carving out the rock and a fiord is created by glaciers. I finally got some good luck with the weather - on the two days I spent there I had perfectly clear blue skies and apparently they only get a few days like that each year. It even reached 30C one day which is almost unheard of in that area. It's also meant to be something like the second rainiest place on earth. Even the drive there was absolutely amazing, there is ice everywhere even though it's hot outside and then there's loads of parrots flying around - it's bizarre! Most people who visit the place tend to just go for the day, take a boat cruise and then leave. So, it was really nice to be staying in the middle of nowhere with not many people around in the one hostel that is in the area. On the one full day that I had there (which happened to be the 30C scorcher that I mentioned earlier), I had an action packed day planned where I took a boat cruise in the morning and then in the afternoon I had a mammoth 5 hours of kayaking. The boat cruise was good and I mainly just used it to go out and get some photos of the place, but the kayaking was just incredible. Me, a couple of other people and a guide got dropped off by boat at the end of the fiord (about 2km from the Tasman sea). We then got into our kayaks and paddled almost the whole length of the fiord back to the start. It was great fun as we got to kayak right underneath waterfalls and past seals. Also, since there were quite a lot of waves out there, especially near to the sea, I got to try a bit of kayak surfing which is actually quite difficult. After about 4 and a half hours we'd made it back and we'd kayaked about 13kms. It was probably one of the best things I've ever done I think - you can appreciate the size of the area much better from water level.

Next stop was Te Anau which is situated in between Queenstown and Milford Sound. I managed to get a free lift there off some Australians that I'd met in Milford Sound so that was good. Te Anau is next to another lake and it looks quite similar to how the area around Queenstown looks - except much smaller. I stayed there for two nights and mainly just did a bit of walking around the lake, there wasn't that much to do there but it was a nice place. I came up with the idea of spending half a day swimming around the lake if I could find somewhere to rent a wetsuit, but the weather got worse when I was there so it wasn't really warm enough to do it. After my two nights in Te Anau I was on the move yet again and this time I had a fairly long journey to the small town of Oamaru on the east coast. The main reason why I decided to visit this place was so that I could hopefully see some penguins which inhabit the area. The town has two different types of penguins living nearby; the extremely rare yellow-eyed variety and then the slightly more common blue penguins. The best time to see the penguins is in the evening when they return to their nests from a day out at sea. On the first night I stayed in Oamaru I went to see the yellow-eyed penguin colony and I managed to see about 3 or 4 penguins come in from the sea and climb up the beach. It was great to see them but you have to stand very high up on a cliff and look down on them so it's quite hard to spot them. There's meant to only be a couple of hundred of those type of penguins left so it was amazing to see some. In order to see the blue penguins, there is a place where you can pay to sit in a seated area by the beach and watch them come in from the sea, but they don't let you take your camera and I didn't like the idea of paying to see them and sitting there with hundreds of other people. After speaking to a few people I found out that you can usually see the penguins for free if you go to certain places near the harbour. I was very lucky as when I was walking around the harbour, I saw about 12 or 13 blue penguins all appear at once and then jump out of the sea onto a nearby rock. It was only me and one other guy who were there and they started coming towards us and we ended up crouched on the floor with all these little penguins surrounding us. It was a great experience to see them so close up. I couldn't take any pictures because it was dark at this point and I obviously couldn't use flash, but then a car pulled up quite near to where we were and the headlights shone on some of the penguins so I was able to take a couple of photos. The town of Oamaru itself isn't really that exciting since it's just like being in a little English seaside town, but the only reason I went there was for the penguins so I was happy that I managed to see them.

Right now I'm in Christchurch at the top of the east coast of the south island. I fly out of here tomorrow to go to the Cook Islands via Auckland. New Zealand has been excellent, there's so much to see and do here. It's only a small place but I've been travelling around here for 5 weeks and there's loads of places that I didn't get chance to go to. So, unfortunately there's now only just over a week left of my trip which will be spent scuba diving and relaxing on the island of Raratonga in the Cook Islands.

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Photos

Milford Sound
It's hard to appreciate how big these mountains are from the photograph. The highest peak you can see on the left is the biggest mountain in the world to come directly out of the sea - just under 1700m tall.

The Stirling Falls
I kayaked right under this waterfall

Blue penguins
I managed to get this photo when a car drove up and the headlights shone on some of the penguins.