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Sydney
Climbing for Dawn
Photos from Sydney
The Land of the Long White Cloud
Christmas
Jumping high, jumping higher
My birthday
North to South
2nd December 2005 - posted from Queenstown
You can do a lot in two weeks. For the last entry I was in the wonderful city of Wellington, after collecting Matt from the airport. Today, I am a long way from there, in Queenstown, adventure capital of the world. We've been here, there and everywhere on the way.
I didn't manage to convince anybody my strawberry instant pudding was nice. An Italian man called Luigi tried a bit and said he was impressed it came out of a packet, but it still tasted terrible. He works for Air Italia, so takes a few weeks off at a time, gets a stand-by passenger ticket and sees where he ends up. This was the second time he'd been to New Zealand, he loves it. We talked about Italy, ice cream, pizzas, Alfa Romeos and China.
After a day or two in Wellington with Matt, we headed to the south island. New Zealand is split down the middle with a 20-mile straight, called the Cook Straight, in the middle. The north island contains the most populated city, Auckland and has a total of nearly three million people - almost 3/4 of the entire population. The south island, by contrast, has just over 1 million people, 1/4 of the population - but a lot of mountains and lakes to make up for it.
We arrived, and after taking a day out to see the countryside on a quad bike, we headed into a national park called Able Tasman. We tramped for three days, with some river crossing taken at low tide to save some time. The whole park goes along the coast of the Tasman sea. Typically, you walk one way and get a boat to take to back again. We had two beautiful days of weather, but the third was unfortunately rather miserable. Luckily, we got picked up by an earlier boat than we expected and made our way back to a hostel quickly.
We headed down the south island, deeper into the mountains. We arrived at a small town next to a large glacier called Franz Josef. Andy and I took a helicopter up to view it from the air, as well as hovering around Mt. Cook - the tallest mountain in Australasia. The novelty of being in a helicopter never really wore off as you are continuously sidetracked by the stunning views around the mountains. We were taken down for a landing at the top of the glacier, in between many great peaks - in snow! The day after we took a trek up and onto the glacier, complete with special things for you boots so you don't slide about. The power and size of the glacier is quite immense.
Milford Sound was the next stop, one of the most popular destinations in New Zealand. We went on an overnight cruise to see it all. We saw penguins, seals and dolphins - which were playing around with the wake of the boat and around the bow! Photos up soon - it is quite stunning.
Today we arrived in Queenstown, where we're going to be staying for just over a week. We've got plans to do a few bungee jumps, a bit more sky diving and some partying on my birthday next Tuesday.