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Published: October 11th 2006
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August was such a nice month, only a week and half of school and the rest of the time was spent in a car touring around the south island with Mr. Nathan.
We started our adventure at the north/west corner of the north island in a little area called the Tasman. I would say this is my favorite place…well… ever. Able Tasman national park starts at the coast and fills up almost that whole corner of the island. We decided to do a two-day hike, which consisted of being taxied (by boat) to Tonga bay and then hiking out. There are many different ways of doing it, walking in, walking only parts of it, and basically in any bay you can catch a taxi! So convenient. The views during this hike are out of this world! The water is SO blue/green, teal almost, and we lucked out on weather hard core! The night b4 we camped (kinda illegally) but it was sooooo cold our tent froze, literally. That was of course after a nice British guy used a coat hanger to break into our car because SOMEONE locked the keys in the car. But once the sun came out it was
BEAUTIFUL, warm even…look I was in shorts. It was a pretty easy walk, although we missed one of the water crossing and had to go around which added an extra hr ½ to the walk…I was pretty upset.
We then headed to GoldenBay where we stayed at the cutest hostel run by an old man who made fresh bread for breakfast! The weather turned on us un-fortunately, so through the rain and freezing southerlies (winds off Antarctica), we tried to see one of the nicest beaches ever…I hated it! You could not even open your eyes the wind was blowing the sand so much, and then it POORED and we both got soaked, our clothes took almost 4 days to dry in our car!! (smelly)
We then headed out through Nelson and down the west coast through grey mouth, made a quick stop to take the Monthe’s Brewery tour…GOOD beer, Lots of samples after the tour!!, and stayed in Hokiteaka…Greenstone/jade capital of new Zealand, picked up a few items and headed to the glaciers!
I am in love with glaciers, they are just sooooo amazing. We visited both the Franz and the Fox glaciers (like 30min apart from each other).
Able Tasman
Sun star fish!!! Ive seen these in aquriums but never real life..i was very excited We didn’t hike on them BUT for my birthday we are going back to do the full day hike, IM SOOO EXCITED!! It was nice just to hike around them and look from a distance. Around the Fox we walked around this lake that on calm days is a perfect reflection of the glacier in the water, it was not perfectly calm but I still think we got some nice photos.
The next stop of Wanaka and Queenstown, winter paradise for snowboarders. Reminded
me a LOT of Tahoe during the winter, I mean it was nice but I was not up for skiing and all the ‘crazy adventure’ things were WAY too over priced. But the views were amazing, the lake surrounded by snow capped mountains…see just like Tahoe.
Invingargill was an unexpected stop, it is the very very bottom of the south island, also the start of highway one (the end depending on where u start) that runs all the way to Cape Ranga in the North Island (which I have also been to! Hehe). Invincargill is also the jumping off point for Stewart Island (technically the south south island). We were going to go hiking for a couple
days there BUT Mr. Weather was not on our side (again) so we just hung out around the little town and went to the world most southern brewery. We could have just taken off and headed on but while dinning at Subway I was the 10th customer so I got two free tickets to the Otago/Southland rugby game! Unfortunitly the game kinda sucked due to the lack of seats, even bleachers, and drunken bafoons.
After a relaxing time we started heading north again towards Dunedin, home of the worlds steepest road, Cadbury world, and Speight’s brewery. We had a day of tours, starting at Cadbury world…LOTS of chocolate, but no working machinery..why? no one would tell. And from there we went and had beer! Beer and chocolate…what about chocolate beer?! That’s right speight’s teamed up with Cadbury and sure enough came up with a chocolate beer, needed to be more sweet, too bitter. Just like Monthe’s had a nice taste test after…lots of beer again… AND THEN Nathan treated me to the most romantic, and probably best food at the Speight’s Ale house for dinner, with more free beer! Hehe. Well it was a nice way to end out trip.
Ate cheese cake for breakfast(which we couldn’t finish at dinner) and drove all the way home in time for me to finish a paper and start school again!
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