Finally the New Zealand post!

Well, it’s been a shockingly lovely weekend considering the weather lately and the forecasts, but I don’t quite have the energy to head out to Bondi today to catch some sun and make sure I come home with that Christmas-time tan to make you all jealous, and I do have to get this blog post done before I forget what all of my New Zealand photos are, so I’ve taken my laptop out to the nice, sunny, harbour-side park that’s just a few minutes walk from my place. It’s a bit hard to see the screen in the sun like this, but I’ll try my best. I take these moments when I can get them! Blogging with the sounds of people at Luna Park screaming their heads off in the distant background.

Before I get into the photos – and guys, I have about 200 I just realized, so you’re not going to see all of them here but it'll still be a long one – just a little bit about the New Zealand accent: it’s quite similar to Aussie, but still different and there are some more distinct changes in vowel sounds. Like they say the “e” sound in “left” like I would say an “i”. And they say the “a” sound in “map” like I would pronounce an “e”. And this wasn’t all over, but there was one region where the “i” in “pint” sounded more like an “oi”/”oy” – I figured that one out before my parents did and was trying to translate the bartender for them. Anyway, I imagine it would be very difficult to navigate if you were lost with a New Zealander: “Chick the mep – we go roight, not lift!”

But anyway, onto the pretty pictures. So, we saw lots of pretty mountains and pretty lakes, and sometimes pretty mountains right by pretty lakes, like so:

And from inside the church by that same lake, looking out to the same view:

Pretty reflections:

Impressive cloudy peaks (Mount Cook):

Sheep!

Fancy castle grounds! (Lanarch Castle at Dunedin):

Dunedin, don’tcha know, is apparently Gaelic for Edinburgh and this was a bit like a poser imitation Scottish town, and they had a haggis ceremony and read some Burns and made my dad dress up in a silly wig and cap (and I think a kilt over pants? My memory is bad) and hold up a sword until his arms were tired, but I unfortunately don’t have a photo because my mom and I both forgot our cameras that evening.

But anyway, seals!

There were a bunch of them hanging out on the rocks down there which I couldn’t see at the time without binoculars and just took a photo in the hopes that I’d see them on the full-size version, and I do! Also, this little guy climbed up from the rocks, waddled up this green slope and took a nap. I have a video of his journey which I don’t have the patience to upload, but here he is part of the way up:

And after he made it all the way up there and the rest of us on this tour were like “look at him go!” ten minutes later, my dad goes “Hey, there’s a seal up there on the grass!” And he always calls me out for being unobservant….

Penguins! This was on a penguin tour, which was where we also saw the seals above:

Here I’m not going to bother uploading the photos, but we also went on to see Baldwin Street – the steepest street in the world which we were supposed to be very impressed by, and also stopped in a little town called Gore which is apparently filled with fans of country music and giant fish. And stopped at Lake Manapouri which was pretty but no prettier than the lake up above.

And then we went up this crazy narrow winding mountain road, and saw more pretty mountains:

Waterfalls:

A few funny, friendly, clever, devious mountain parrots known as “Kea”s:

Went down a crazy, crazy mountain tunnel that is not worth showing photos of because it’s just dark, and then got to THE CHASM! This thing was epic, I can’t even tell you. I tried describing it to one of the guys from work and all I could do was make large arm gestures and facial expressions of fascination. I don’t think the pictures will fully capture it:

Milford Sound, where we went on a boat trip and saw lots of pretty even though the weather was pretty awful, and also more seals, and then when it was raining too much I decided to get some “artsy/impressionistic” photos from inside through the rain-splattered windows.

And then we went to Queenstown, and on our first night there (the only place we stayed for more than two nights), we went up on the gondola and ate at the Skyline Restaurant on the top of the mountain:

There was also a mixup at the hotel at Queenstown which I will not go into here because it will only make my parents bitter again!

And we went to a little bird museum where we saw kiwis (no photos – they’re nocturnal) and OMG, family of baby ducks, awwwww!

And Queenstown was the only place where we (“we” meaning my dad and I – mum skipped out on this one) did anything remotely New Zealand Adventure Adrenaline Rush, which was the jetboat through Shotover River and you think it’s just a boat? No this thing goes zooming down through the canyons, and the driver glides right up against the walls just to mess with you or he’ll be heading straight for a wall at full speed and then turn away at the last possible second and I was like “dude, I’d be having fun without you almost literally killing me every five seconds, you can cool it now!” but I survived.

And then we went to Fox Glacier which was a bit of a lame town, but you know, there was this big ol’ glacier…

And this seems like a good time to mention how the road signs and warning signs and stuff are a bit different in New Zealand and sometimes hard to interpret – like I still have no idea what “guy walking with a white block for a hand” is supposed to mean, but I got a kick out of the warning signs at the glacier, and I think the meanings are fairly obvious:

Beware: Rocks will fall on your head

Beware: you might encounter swimmers flailing around because they were dumb and didn’t realize how cold it would be until they got in

Although, also! I refilled my water bottle up at the glacier directly from a pure mountain spring flowing down from a waterfall, and I drank it and didn’t get sick. Wonderful, and quite refreshing.

Dad and I also took a walk that night to go see the glo-worms and again, no photos because glo-worms are really damn difficult to catch on film. My dad got one where you can see a few distinct glowy dots, but I just got blackness. And we were just told “go when it’s dark” with no mention of flashlights and had we not run into a nice group of people with flashlights right away, we would not have made it. Pitchblack, honestly. I don’t think we would have been killed, but we probably would have walked head-first into some trees or twisted our ankles. Although, yeah, maybe we would have been killed. Dad compared the feeling of walking through that path to the Blair Witch Project, and I totally saw where he was coming from. But as I said, we found a friendly bunch of people with flashlights and instead of encountering an axe murderer in the woods, we were the scary people lurking in the dark going “Can we follow you?”

And I mentioned on my initial “back from NZ” post that West is lame compared to East, and the reason for that was that up until Fox Glacier, we were in the East. Fox Glacier was alright but the weather was lame and the people who wanted to go on a helicopter trip to the glacier couldn’t, and then the rest of the time we were in the West, the weather was lame, and when we were doing our train ride back from West to East back to Christchurch to go home, I kid you not the weather was appalling and then we went through this magical tunnel and came out further East where the weather was gorgeous.

Then back to Christchurch, felt a little earthquake, headed back to Sydney the next day – two more days of touring which I may get to in another post (I have pictures of me with koalas and kangaroos, I guess I can’t not share that!)

OK, I think I now have to go back to my apartment so I can actually see the pictures before I post them and make sure I’ve chosen the right ones and not missed anything fabulous. I’ve just checked my tan lines to make sure I’ve been out here long enough, and while there isn’t much significant change on my top half, I do have a bit of a weird line forming from my shorts, so off I go. Also, bugs have just started attacking me. I’m no longer welcome here.