NZ Amazing Scenery

Now that we are on the south island of NZ, we have been getting up every day before sunrise. That is an easy thing here, since the sun rises at 8am and sets before 6pm. It’s like being in Alaska or something.

This is a pic of Elise in Milford Sound. It was rainy and overcast that day.

When we arrived in Christchurch, I said to Paul, “Ahhhh, back to civilization.” It is so easy to travel here. We picked up our minivan from the car rental agency and away we went. Paul did pull out on the right side of the road but quickly corrected himself at the first roundabout, where people were honking and yelling at us. The bathrooms are clean, (I mean in grocery stores, gas stations, mom & pop restaurants, national park toilets – hey we’ve got 4 kids and did a ton of driving, they go on the side of the road too.), we can charge everything, the roads don’t have potholes everywhere, and we can drink the tap water. Like I said, civilization. The drawback is, that it has Western prices, it’s expensive.
We drove over 1400 miles here in 8 days. That’s like driving from Chicago to Salt Lake City, but we can’t fly down the highway doing 80mph because: a) the roads here are all 2 lane highways, b) we drove through a lot of winding mountain passes, and c) there are lots of one lane bridges (more than two lane bridges). The one lane bridges don’t have lights, you pull up cautiously, look across and then decide if it’s safe to go. It basically depends on the drivers’ courtesy.

Since Jacob did a nice summary, after Queenstown, we went to see Franz Josef glacier on the west coast and then drove to Christchurch, where we are now.

What can I say about NZ? The words: striking, stunning, majestic, and amazing come to mind. The driving has really been something, around every turn is another gorgeous lake, surrounded by beautiful mountains and only a few ranches and sheep in the valley. It is really scenic. We think it resembles the Colorado Rockies at times, Switzerland or the big island of Hawaii at other times. The most amazing thing is how unspoiled and not developed it is. This island is like the size of California and has this rich, natural beauty and all the different landscapes: lakes, rivers, mountains, waterfalls, beaches, rainforest, fjords, but there are only 1 million people living here. I mean, just picture yourself driving around California for 8 days and seeing all the gorgeous scenery there, with only 1 million people living in the whole state. That is what this island is like. Queenstown, which is the "adrenaline capital of the world" has a population of 13,330. It’s this cute little ski town, like Vail or something, set in the mountains on a lake with barely any people living there. Gorgeous. This picture is of Otago Peninsula which is on the east coast of the island.

Paul’s mom made a funny comment about our accommodations, “Well, at least when you get home, you’ll appreciate not cooking a meal in your bedroom.” We’ve been staying in holiday parks here. They have everything: tent camping, RVs, cabins and motel rooms. We’re staying in the motel rooms so that we have a bathroom attached. If we were in a cabin, it would be cheaper but then we’d have to use the shared bathrooms. Anyhow, my only real complaint are about the heaters. The heaters are set on one hour timers, so at night they go off and it is absolutely freezing, since we aren't getting up every hour to turn the thing back on. Ridiculous. We thought it was because we were staying in "cheap" accommodations, which the timer thing is part of that, but we just came back from having a very pleasant dinner at a friend of my cousin's (who is here on assignment) and she said the same thing. NZ gets cold and Kiwis do not know how to heat their homes. In their newly built rental house, they don't have central heating. They have these space heater things and there are no heaters in the bedrooms! Maybe a visit in the summer would be better for this country.