Tracy Carolyn Photography

Wanaka is a quieter, more understated version of Queenstown.  It’s a little more mellow, a little less adrenaline packed, and a bit less touristy.  It was an excellent place to spend our last moments in New Zealand, enjoying mountain and lake views from the living room of our awesome hostel (it was a tad windy and cold for too much outdoor exploring.)

How would you like to cruise around on this house boat?  Pretty killer views.  Not that there is a dearth of beautiful views around Wanaka.  I feel like a broken record, but New Zealand is seriously stunning.After a short spell in Wanaka we headed back to Queenstown to spent one last night before catching our flight to Sydney.  After being in “travel mode” for three weeks, we were ready to be in one place for a while.
New Zealand has a fantastic reputation with travelers all over the world, and I can certainly understand why.  Beautiful, clean, friendly and easy to travel, New Zealand doesn’t leave you wanting for much.  It was this great reputation that had us initially planning to spend 4-6 weeks here.  We shortened our stay mostly for financial reasons (it’s not very budget friendly around here), but in the end I’m actually glad our stay ended up being shorter.  Sure, we could have spent a ton more time exploring all the beautiful areas of this country (there was so, so much we didn’t get to.)  But culturally New Zealand is very much like the US, which made it a little too easy on us – there isn’t much need to learn and expand when everyone speaks your language and you already know all the cultural norms.  I’m sure later in life we’ll happily travel here again and be grateful for the ease, but for now we’re up for a little more adventure.

New Zealand definitely served as a good first world power-up after the craziness of Central America.  After our upcoming stint housesitting in Australia I suspect we’ll be ready for more challenging travel again in Asia.  But first – Sydney!

When we travel, John and I tend to split up tasks.  I am usually the planner, and John usually runs ground ops.  That basically means that I do all the pre-research about where we are visiting, decide on what’s worth seeing and how to get there, and try and learn what I can about prices and such in advance.  John goes into action when we arrive at our location, finding us places to stay, talking to cab drivers, getting money, etc.  So I felt rather remiss in my duties when we discovered our misstep at Franz Josef.  Fortunately, Fox Glacier was only a 40 minute shuttle ride away, and our dream of walking on a glacier was not dashed for long.

Like the Franz Josef Glacier, Fox Glacier is surrounded by rainforest and waterfalls.In the above photos it probably doesn’t look that impressive, but this glacier is huge.  Look at the photo below – can you find the people?  That will give you a sense of scale.  It’s large.Intrepid Ice Explorers!  Who look like they’ve borrowed their dad’s rain gear!  Yes, we look puffy and our jackets are oversized (the tour company provided our gear for us.)  But we’re walking on ice, man, cut us a break!Look, everyone else is wearing it, too.  And our guide up front has a pick axe that he’s using to cut the path for us.  As the Kiwis say “Sweet as!”  (I’m not sure I used that correctly…)I think the cloudy fogginess makes the ice seem more mysterious and awesome, much like at Tikal.The ice in this crevasse is really that blue.  No Photoshop color enhancement.Hike a glacier has now been checked off our list…nice.

I had bad intel about Franz Josef Glacier.

There are two large glaciers within an hour of one another along New Zealand’s west coast – Franz Josef and Fox.  After missing out on walking on a glacier in Argentina back in 09, we were both interested in doing a glacier hike at one of these spots.  When I did my travel research, I read that you could walk on the glacier in both spots, but that Franz Josef was better for a smattering of small reasons.  Based on this, we took a longer bus trip, passing by the Fox Glacier in favor of visiting Franz Josef instead.

So imagine my frustration when the very nice visitor center lady informed us that you could not walk onto the glacier anymore because it had an unstable melt pattern that made it dangerous.  The only way to walk on the ice was to take the helicopter tour that dropped you off higher up the glacier – and came with a $329 per person price tag.  Ouch!

We didn’t have spare cash in our travel budge for the lovely helicopter drop off service.  Even if we did, the weekend was so cloudy and rainy that the helicopters couldn’t take off anyway.  (This unstable melt pattern had apparently happened in the last six months or so, and was killing the tourism industry in Franz Josef.)  A little disheartened that we now needed to backtrack, we booked a shuttle back to Fox and signed up for the half day hike on the next day.  In the meantime, we could at least walk up to the face of Franz Josef so we could catch a glimpse of the glacier we had gone out of our way to visit.

Odd as it seems, the walk to the glacier is mostly through rainforest.  (Also, I did not set up those rocks, I found them that way.  I don’t know why I feel the need to say that, but I do.)  The weather in this area of New Zealand forms glaciers because of the very high amount of rainfall and rather steep mountains.  That rainfall collects and freezes,creating the glacier.  The parts of the valley where the glacier has receded are full of rainforest.  All that rainfall also means – you guessed it – lots of waterfalls.

I think the waterfalls at Franz Josef were actually more spectacular than the glacier.  You can’t see much of the ice from the hike because it has receded so far into the mountains, and it is covered in rocks and dirt.  The thick layer of fog doesn’t help either.Hey, it’s us again!  (Are you starting to get an inaccurate idea of how big our heads are from all of these self portraits?  I promise we look like real people, we just use the wide angle lens to take these kind of images, which makes our heads look bigger.  We do not look like living bobble heads.)Satisfied that we’d seen the Franz Josef in its (partial) glory, we headed back to town.  The following day we headed to Fox Glacier to walk on the ice like the intrepid explorers that we are.

Or something like that.

New Zealand is a bit of a show-off.  Isn’t it enough that the countryside is full of stunning views, the people are over-the-top friendly, and the whole place feels pristinely free of  trash and pollution?  No, New Zealand apparently isn’t content with all that – it has to show off even more by having places like Milford Sound.

Milford Sound is one of the most beautiful locations in New Zealand.  It’s an epic day trip from Queenstown (12-13 hours on a bus and boat.)  Essentially you drive through the massive national park, take a cruise through the sound out to the ocean, then turn around and come back.  It makes for a long day, and the scenery is overwhelmingly gorgeous the entire time.

Being trapped on a bus at the mercy of the driver meant I couldn’t stop to take photos in all the places I really wanted to, but that’s just the nature of a bus tour.  We’re actually lucky we were even able to get through on a bus.  For many days before and after our trip the roads in the national park were closed due to rock slides.

This was our super classy tour bus.  Misspelling words is one of their quirks.  What do you think, does the pinup girl on the side rescue it from being ordinary or push it over the edge into completely absurd?  Yeah, I think so, too.These lupins are everywhere along the route.  The purple, pink and yellow variations pop against the lush greens. Don’t even get me started on how clear and blue all the streams and lakes are.  It’s a little hard to tell in photos, but the water is bright teal underneath the white caps.  You can drink the water from the rivers, they are so clean.  (which is more than I can say for the tap water in Central America.)I have no idea what these guys are, but they’re fuzzy and cool.Milford Sound gets an enormous amount of rainfall during the year.  Since the mountains are almost entirely comprised of rock and have no soil to absorb the water, the runoff creates hundreds of waterfalls all over the park.  We were there on a rain-free day, so there were fewer than usual.  Which means we could still see dozens just from the road (if you hike in you can see lots more.)This is the view from the end of the Milford Sound, where we boarded our boat for a two hour cruise out to the Tasman Sea.Snow capped mountains and rocky walls = more waterfalls.
Are you ready for the excessive waterfall photos?  Here we go…Halfway through our cruise a group of dolphins swam up alongside our boat to escort us around.  The water was so clear and blue you could see them really well, even when they weren’t jumping out of the water to impress the tourists.At one point, our boat pulled up close to the waterfall below.  The spray of the water created a double rainbow above the ocean water, through which the dolphins were jumping.  Really, New Zealand?  It’s like an embarrassment of riches around here.  You might want to stop showing off and making all the other countries feel bad.

More beautiful New Zealand still to come.