April 20. We've spent the last week on the west coast in the southern part
of the country. This area is about as geographically diverse as you can imagine.
The area is predominantly rainforests, yet there is a large mountain
range here, as well as glaciers and the coastal beaches on the Tasman sea.
We've been to places where the rainforest runs right down to the beach, and
to other spots where the glaciers run right through the rainforest. We
last left off in Tasman, which is a few minutes from the Abel Tasman National
Park. There, Lalenya and I learned how to sea kayak and went on an all day
sea kayaking trip. We covered about 15 kilometers. The kayak trip
started with a boat ride up the coast of Abel Tasman National Park. We passed
quite a few dolphins, who were very playful and kept approaching our boat
and riding in the pressure wave under the bow of the boat. Once we were
in the kayaks, we paddled out to a seal colony and watched the young pups play
for a while. Then we kayaked south down the coast to a lodge in the park,
where we were picked up by our boat for our return trip. The first 15 minutes
of kayaking were a bit sketchy, but we quickly got our groove and made the
trip with no problems at all. After leaving Tasman, we traveled to the
west coast and headed south. We stopped for a night at the Punakaiki ("Pancake")
Rocks and Blowholes, which is an amazing rock formation carved out of limestone
by the ocean. The rocks are in layers, like pancakes, and the ocean
has hollowed out a few tunnels underneath the rocks. At high tide, water
rushes up these tunnels and gets expelled through the holes. Pretty neat
stuff. After that, we continued our journey south, to the Franz Josef
glacier and the Fox glacier. We spent a day hiking up to each glacier, and
we were able to get pretty close to both. Because of the large amounts
of snow fall in the past 5 years, and the fact that they are located in a temperate
rain forest, these two glaciers are two of the fastest moving glaciers in
the world, up to a few meters every day. They each get between 150 and 250
feet of snow per year at the top, and 15 feet of rain on the lower parts of
the glacier. After spending a couple of days hiking around the glaciers,
we hit one of the 50 sunny days they get each year, so we decided to take a 1/2
day heli-hike. We took a helicopter up about 4000 feet onto the glacier,
and hiked for about 3 hours. It was spectacular, to say the least.
We hiked through ice caves and walked on 8 inch wide ice croppings with bottomless
crevasses of death on either side. A little scary, but no one died and
it certainly got the heart pumping. The flowing water was crisp and clean
enough to drink. The glaciers are in a pretty remote area, and our journey
then took us further south into a completely unspoiled and essentially uninhabited
part of the country. There, we spent three nights at the Wilderness
Lodge in Lake Moeraki. There was not even a road here until 1965, and
the Lodge is the old camp that the road workers built to sleep in when they were
constructing the road. The Lodge is surrounded by rainforest and is also
about a 30 minute walk to the beach. The Lodge gets all of its supplies
from Christchurch, which is 7 hours away. We took a few hikes through
the rainforest and on the beach, and also took an evening view of the glow worms
that inhabit the area. We got amazing views of the night sky again, and
you can definitely see the Milky Way with the naked eye. We left the Wilderness
Lodge and spent a nigth in Wanaka. Our next stop is Queenstown.
We have a little more than a week left here, then we are off to Australia.
We hope all is well with everyone back home! |
