Yesterday we decided to go for a massive drive up to Farewell Spit.  On the way we stopped at the clearest fresh water springs in the world, which is pumping out a massive 14000 litres per second…. pretty impressive.  We continued on to the beach at Golden Bay, and right up to Farewell Spit.  We walked down the beach until we got to the enormous sand dunes which make up the Spit.  We trekked cross country to the dunes and walked right over so that we could simultaneously see the west coast and Golden Bay.  It was very cool.  We walked so far that we had to follow our footprints back – it was exactly like a desert, freaky to see in NZ.  It was an amazing day and an awesome way to end our South Island touring.  We still have a day or two down here but it still seemed like a perfect ending.  Our photos are here.

We’ve spent the last 4 days in Nelson and then Abel Tasman National Park.  Finally we have some days in a row with sunshine, it is a welcome relief from all the rain we’ve had in the last week.  In Nelson we just walked around the beaches and went to the Nelson Markets, which was awesome.  We then spent a day walking around the National Park, and a day kayaking around the National Park, which have both been very pretty.  We were able to walk right out to some white sandbars at low tide and also watch the sunset.  We kayaked around to Split Apple, a massive round rock which has split in half, and also over to an island.  We got really close to lots of Spotted Shags which was cool.  If you want to see our photos they are here.

We stayed a night at Rob and Gill’s and then a night at Jemma’s, and caught up with Amelia and Zane in between so have had a good couple of days catching up with family.  Jemma lives in Punakaiki so we stopped to see the Pancake Rocks too.  They were much more impressive than we thought, we walked around them for quite a while as there were so many rock formations, seemingly all stacked up like Pancakes with the wild west coast ocean behind them to see.  You can see our photos here.

We will now continue on to Nelson for a few days.

We drove from Franz Josef and spent part of a day at Hokitika, and we finally got to see Kiwis.  It was really cool to finally see the birds we have been trying to find over the whole country!  They were bigger than we imagined and quite noisy.  Unfortunately we didn’t get any photos but it was really cool to see them.  We then spent time finding greenstone on Hokitika Beach.

We also stopped at a possum place where they have everything made out of possum, including pies, burgers, all of the seat coverings, a good use for them.

On our third day staying in Franz Josef, the rain stopped, we realised our motel actually has a view of the Glacier (rain was too heavy to see it before), and best of all we walked up the Glacier.  We are so pleased that we waited for the rain to stop before going up the Glacier as the rain cleaned the ice and also obviously a fine day is much more pleasant to walk around in.

We were totally in awe of the beauty of the amazing Glacier, the walk up there was well worth it.  The pristine white and blue ice formations really were amazing and we were able to walk through a few narrow crevasses.  We walked quite high up on the Glacier, up into the really blue ice so it was really awesome.  We took heaps of cool photos, to see them click here.

Today we walked up to Fox Glacier and got within about 50 metres of it.  We were suitably impressed – it was all blue-green, jagged, and huge.  When you are right at the bottom of it, it appears dirty, but it’s not it’s just some rocks that the glacier is bringing down with it that gives it that appearance.  You can see that further up it is really white/blue/green and pristine.  After that we drove to Lake Matheson to see the reflection of Mt Cook in the brown lake.  The lake is brown because the tannins leach out of the beech leaves and so it looks like tea.  It was an amazing walk with moss and lichen covering every surface imaginable.  Most of Mt Cook was covered in cloud so we couldn’t actually see much of it, but still got a good idea of how cool it must look on a clear day.  Click here to view our photos.

Our first day in Wanaka we did a massive maze which took over an hour to complete, and went into the illusionist buildings with excellent holographic art and optical illusions.  It was actually really fun.  The next day we did 2 long walks, one up Mt Iron with amazing views over Lake Wanaka and the Southern Alps.  That one had good views but the walk itself wasn’t anything special, and the icy wind didn’t help.  The next walk we did now takes first place for the coolest walks we’ve done so far, we climbed Mt Roy up to the Rob Roy Glacier, it was 20kms and very very very hard work to get up there, but it was so magnificent when we finally did.  The beautiful blue-white glacier, the snowy mountain peaks around it and the blue glacial stream were absolutely beautiful.  We drank lots of water out of the stream, it was so good.  We didn’t have much to time to stand around and admire it for too long, as we were battling time a bit to get back to the car before it got dark.  The road to and from the walk was about an hour and a half, with over an hour on a rough gravel road where we had to cross about 10 Fords.  Most of them we actually had to drive across arms of the river bed with deep-ish water flowing through them, and also about 15 cattle stops, so Dre reckons he has officially driven our car off-road now.  When we got back to Wanaka we were both so knackered we could hardly walk, and we had the best dinner we have had in the whole trip, we were so hungry that we both ate 3 big courses with side dishes. YUM.  It was the best food we’ve had in ages.  You can see our photos of the glacier and walks here.

Yesterday we did a cruise on Milford Sound.  We were very lucky that it’s been pouring with rain for the past week, and the night before we went there was a massive storm and it bucketed down.  This meant that as well as the massive main waterfalls, there were about 1000 smaller waterfalls, making it an amazing sight to see.  We were lucky as it kept raining right up until we walked onto the boat and then stopped only after the boat left.  All of our photos can be seen here.  The massive waterfalls were really impressive, pumping out masses of water after the rain.  We even saw a little water spout starting, it was very cool.  The wind was so strong it was pushing the water on a lot of the waterfalls upwards or sideways, so that it almost looked like smoke.  You can see this if you click though to our photos.  It meant that the big waterfalls were falling downwards, the medium ones were sideways and the small ones were going upwards – wow, what a sight to see.  We chose a small boat so that we could go right under the waterfalls, needless to say we got wet, but it was so worth it.  Probably the coolest thing we’ve seen so far.

Yay the first sunny day we’ve had in a while now.  We arrived in Te Anau and walked around the lake which was really pretty and watched the sun set through the mountains.  Today we’re going on a cruise on the Milford Sound.

We have spent the past 3 days on Stewart Island, staying at a funny little B&B which definitely added to our Stewart Island ‘experience’.  The introduction to Stewart Island was the Foveaux Straight Ferry, aptly named ‘Stewart Island Experience’ – it sure was an experience.  We have never ever seen seas so rough and wild before – wow it was probably the worst hour of Karen’s life.  Most people on the boat were sick (apparently this is normal) and lets just say that we were pretty pleased to get off the boat and back onto land.

We did see loads of birds on Stewart Island though, which made our trip worth it.  The first day we went on two massive walks, one out to the tip of the island and we saw lots of Albatross flying around the fishing boats and lots of muttonbird burrows.  We also got to sample lots of the local seafood at the hotel, which also smelled of fish because of all the fishermen hanging out there.

The next day we took a water taxi to Ulva Island, a bird sanctury which DOC has successfully removed all predators from, so the birds are flourishing.  The water taxi was pretty rough as well, the driver told us ‘you better hold on tight!’ as we hit the small patch of open ocean between Stewart Island and Ulva Island, and he wasn’t joking.  It was about the size of a Dinghy and the swells were metres high.  But when we did get there we saw Stewart Island Robins, Saddlebacks, Kaka, Native Wood Pigeons, Kakariki, Rifleman, and we even saw a Kiwi beak mark in the ground, it was quite distinctive but unfortunately that’s the closest we got to a Kiwi.  (Dammit).

The rest of the time we spent walking around in the rain and the freezing cold wind, and hanging out with Andy, the rough-as guy who ran the B&B we stayed in who had lots of stories about when he was in the war in Vietnam among other things.  When it came time to leave the Island (which we were quite ready to do), our ferry was cancelled because the Foveaux Straight was too rough, and the morning ferry had taken an hour and a half to get over from Bluff rather than the usual hour.  So, we were stranded.  We tried to get a flight back to the mainland but all the flights, including the additional flights for the ferry passengers were full.  After going on standby and pleading for a pilot to make an extra flight for us, and 5 or 6 trips back to the flight people, we finally found out at about 4.30pm that we were going to be able to get off the Island, as a pilot agreed to take us back to Invercargill.  It was worth every cent to go on the flight, which was in a 5 seater plane but only took about 10 minutes and was far, far more pleasant than the ferry.  This is how big our plane was (we were sitting at the very back):

We even got some really good views of the sun setting over the ocean and several smaller islands.  Then we had a mission to get back to our car in Bluff, only to find that the carpark was locked for the night….. but after some pleading with a man on a bus (another story for another day) we managed to get our car back and drive back to Invercargill for the night.  You can see our photos of Stewart Island here.

Today we will continue on to Te Anau and tomorrow go to the Milford Sound.