The Wild Wild West

It's a sunny day in Queenstown and we are watching the adrenalin junkies jumping from the sky, passing by on the fast boats, climbing into the caves and the rest while we are lazily soaking in the sun. Queenstown is a lovely little place surrounded by mighty mountains and fronted by a crystal clear Wakatipu lake. This is the home of bungy jumping and place where adrenalin runs high but somehow we are not affected by it.

On the road to Queenstown we have passed countless beautiful bays, beaches, waterfalls, forests, mountains and other geographical marvels. It got to the point where it almost become too much that we started to miss the concrete, noise and pollution (not sure if this fresh air is good for us). But to tell the truth New Zealand can be so beautiful that it literally takes your breath away.

After chilling with the hippies in Karamea and listening to heavy metal played on the pirate radio station in the hostel by a young German passer-by while drinking beer next to the log fire we headed to the Oparara basin where we saw giant limestone arches and climbed into crazy paving caves filled with spiders and glow worms (http://www.karameainfo.co.nz/opararbasin.html).

We then headed south to Punakaiki and it's pancake rocks and blow holes where we had some pancakes, well you have to don't ya?! After a good night sleep we continued on our way south to the mighty glaciers. We walked hours to the face of Franz Joseph glacier and then laid our hats at the Fox glacier. As we are taking it easy we have spent one day there just watching the sun go from east to west. First from the Gillespies beach (miles and miles of empty sandy beach) and then at the lake Matherson (famous for it's beautiful reflection of Mt Cook but it didn't want to stay still for us). The next day we tried to be more adventurous and took a heli-hike to the Fox glacier. A small four seater helicopter dropped us off in the middle of Fox glacier where we got booted up for an amazing hike over the glacier. We hiked through ice caves, crossed mighty crevasses and slithered through small ice tunnels. It was unbelievably cool! We took so many photos that our camera run out of batteries so you have hundreds of photos of ice to look forward to :)

We left Fox for Queenstown which brings us to this sunny day watching the world go by. Sorry that this post is so long but trust us - this is just the highlights.