South Island – West Coast & Queenstown & Milford Sound

October 13-16

First stop on our ten or so hour drive down to Queenstown was a detour to Nelson. This is home to the famous Nelson hops that are used in lots of hoppy beers all over the world. Below is where you’ll see rows of hops later in the season.

They love hops so much they make their light fixtures hop shaped.

Then it was down the west coast.

Buller River:

These bushes are really similar to some we saw in Ireland. Bright yellow flowers with huge thorns. All the super green fields and the sheep also are quite similar.

Cape Foulwind:

We thought we saw some kiwi run into these bushes but they ran away before we could confirm.

We saw some of these birds later. Not a kiwi although I really wanted it to be:

Crow Bay:

Greymouth where we stopped for the night:

We found where Andy is from originally. Now we just need him to share his gold.

Lake Ianthe below. Tell me that isn’t an insane view.

Franz Josef Glacier:

Fox Glacier:

Thunder Creek Falls:

Some awesome sheep:

Lake Hawea:

We were planning on hiking Roy’s peak when we got into Wanaka. Turns out, they close this hiking path for a little over a month each year for lambing. This required me to google what “lambing” is.

Apparently it’s when lambs are born.

It actually makes a lot of sense. So we got stared down by some saucy momma lambs and then we drove away.

Plan B: sit by Lake Wanaka for a bit and enjoy the scenery. This was a better idea than climbing 5 miles up a mountain anyway.

We made it into Queenstown and loved the town. It is basically just a ski resort town. Great restaurants and cutesy shops. Plus the views are great.

We also had the second best meal of the trip. It was at a place called the Bunker. Scallops and boar and hare and snapper and a tom yum broth.

So good.

We said we weren’t going to do any more tasting menus because it’s too much food and we get so sleepy, but here we were doing it again. It was a huge success. Second best – after our lunch in San Sebastián with Johnny.

We took a day trip out of the city to the Milford Sound.

Gorgeous drive down, of course.

Funny about this… the Milford Sound is not actually a sound. It is a fjord that is misnamed. But apparently when the European explorers came here they weren’t familiar with the word fjord. They knew sounds and they knew inlets. So they chose the closest word. Sounds are river carved. Fjords are glacier carved, like our fjords in Norway that we visited with Liam and Sofia. Actually, a lot of New Zealand reminds us of Norway.

Below you can see a u-shaped valley which is consistent with a fjord. Rivers carve sounds in a v-shape.

It was really windy and pretty cold.

This waterfall is from that scene in X-Men Originals Wolverine where he dives off a waterfall.

We dipped under the waterfall a bit, so Michael and I got hit with some glacier melt.

You can see some seals lounging on the boulder above.

Super beautiful.

Now we’re driving to Christchurch for the last seven or so hours of our New Zealand road trip.

We popped back into Wanaka even though it was a little bit out of the way. Apparently the first time we stopped to check out the lake we filled up our gas tank and forgot to pay. Hmmm… Apparently this isn’t an issue in New Zealand. They called the rental company who shot us an email asking us to reach out. We were obviously embarrassed and wanted to resolve the issue immediately but they told us just to swing by whenever we had a chance. When we went in to pay they were largely unconcerned. I don’t know what would have happened in the US if we did this, but I can’t imagine it would have been the same outcome. The woman behind the counter simply said, “It’s a small country. We can find you.” Fair enough.

On the drive to Christchurch we saw some more beautiful sights.

And we finally got a glimpse of Mount Cook. It’s the highest mountain in New Zealand.

It’s this one:

So that’s it. Tomorrow we fly to Tasmania. Two weeks is not nearly enough to see New Zealand. But it’s a start! We’ll definitely be back here at some point.