Last Day in NZ

It's hard to believe that the first leg of our trip is already coming to an end. We are in Christchurch, and tomorrow we head to the airport to fly to Cambodia (after one night in Bangkok). Our last several days in New Zealand have been fantastic. A quick recap:

After Wanaka, we headed to Queenstown. We contemplated a tandem paraglide (Queenstown is the home of bungee jumping and other such extreme activities), but alas, it was not in the stars, as the weather was too windy. So instead, we headed out of town on a rigorous hike that took us almost 2,000 meters above the town and gave us views of both the lake and town below and the snow-capped peaks that surround that area.

The next morning, we headed back out to the coast to visit Fjordland. We did two different cruises of the fjords - the first on Milford Sound, which was unbelievably windy but strikingly beautiful, with vertical cliffs rising out of the sea and tons of cascading waterfalls. The next day, we did a full day trip to Doubtful Sound, which was also amazing. Gus spent a lot of the trip fretting that the tour was going to miss the big West Arm hydroelectric plant. But a very dark trip down into the mountain past lots of rock to the "turbine room" was as exciting to an engineer as could be hoped. As often happens on adventures like these, we ran into an American couple whom we had met a few weeks ago at a winery. After the cruise, we joined the two of them and their Kiwi bed and breakfast hosts for a few glasses of wine and some good conversation... and of course an earful from the New Zealanders about the current U.S. administration (pretty par for the course around here, we have found).

From Fjordland, we continued our journey around the southern tip of the South Island and up to Dunedin. Dunedin is a great city - home to a big university and so full of life. We spent a day on the nearby Otago Peninsula, watching for penguins (to no avail) and walking through sheep fields (New Zealand's standard hiking terrain, it seems). In our trekking around, we did stumble upon a beautiful, nearly deserted (aside from several very large, very lazy sea lions) beach & enjoyed a quiet walk there.

And now we are in Christchurch and soaking up the last bit of New Zealand (and knowing that this is the last bit of mostly familiar territory that we are going to be in for quite a while). We did a mountain bike ride today ("that looks like a nice trail" - whoops, we're on one of Christchurch's most popular technical downhills) and have spent the afternoon wandering around; we happen to be here for the World's Buskers Festival, and have consequently witnessed more juggling of fire and assorted objects than we ever would have expected to see on our travels.

Our next post will be from somewhere in Asia... so stay tuned!

On top of Ben Lomond with Queenstown in the background. We took the gondola up the first part to get a jump on the hike and scramble.

Sarah is blown-away by the beauty of Milford Sound.

Gus standing in his new New Zealand jacket at the southernmost point on the South Island. We hiked through sheep (as usual) to get here.

Gus standing on the winner of our "best beach visited." Yes, we are recycling our clothing from day-to-day.

Mountain Biking in Christchurch with a great view. The bikes we rented weren't quite as good as our own at home so the rest of the Kiwi riders mainly thought of us as speedbumps.

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p.s. We were missing one of our favorite pastimes so much that when we stumbled across a completely empty karaoke bar in Dunedin, we couldn't resist going in to belt out a few tunes, much to the amusement of the fairly bored staff. See American Idol impersonation below: