New Years!

Happy New Year!

First of all, about 110 or so photos of New Zealand are in these two facebook albums, which you should be able to view by copying and pasting these addresses into your browser-
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2344115&l=ae058&id=10223429
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2346201&l=a22be&id=10223429

Jen and I are in Te Anau after spending time in Queenstown and Fjordland National Park following our Christmas stay in Wanaka. Highlights from the past week have been sailing a two person catamaran on Lake Wanaka and a sea kayaking trip on Milford Sound in Fjordland National Park.

It was Jen's first time sailing and I don't think we could have been in a better location than Lake Wanaka with its deep blue water and the glaciated peaks of Mt. Aspiring National park towerering overhead. We had just the right amount of wind to have some fun on the lake without risking flipping over. Wanaka is my favorite place in New Zealand so far and up there with my favorite places on earth. It is a small town with a lot of soul and more hiking, mountaineering, skiing, kayaking, biking, and climbing than anyone could do in a lifetime. Best of all, although there are tourists there, it still a town for the locals and it has a strong community.

Queenstown was nice, but too hectic for me personally. It is a lot like Aspen, with very expensive hotels and butiques along with incredible scenery, but having to pay for absolutely everything (parking by the hour pretty much everywhere, etc) isn't really our style. Instead of shelling out to stay in town, we drove down the lake a ways and camped for free.

After Queenstown we drove around to Te Anua, whiich is a close second to Wanaka as a favorite place for me. What Queenstown is to Mt. Aspiring National Park, Te Anau is to Fjordland National Park. Te Anau is also on a lake sourrounded by mountains, and the Kepler and Milford Tracks (two of the so called great walks) both start right near here. Milford Sound is only two hours away, and that is where Jen and I were for the past couple days.

Milford is one of the top tourist destinations in all of New Zealand because of its dramatic scenery. Verticle walls of granite rise strait for up to a verticle mile right out of the thousand foot deep fjord. Each day in the summer thousands of visitors come in on hundreds of tour buses to cruise around the fjord on cruise ships on scenic boat trips. It is probably one of the most incredible places I've ever laid eyes on, but the number of people can be a bit overwhelming. Jen and I were looking for a way to experience Milford Sound without all of the tourists adulterating the experience, so we booked a 5 hour kayak trip that started at 4pm.

Most of the tour busses and people leave Milford sound by 4 pm, and almost all the people are gone by 7. Along with our guide one other customer, we were the only people on the water for several hours- just our two person kayak and the guides. We started about 15km out from the road (right near the exit of the sound and the Tasman Sea), and the wind and waves were pushing so strongly that we could only paddle back towards the road. However, on the way back we were able to see all of the sound (actually a Fjord since it was carved by ice and not a river).

Two of the coolest things were paddling unerneath a 150 meter (~475 foot) waterfall and paddling right up next to a 4000 foot overhanging rock wall- so large that it would literally dwarf El Capitan in Yosimite. An interesting thing happens in Milford sound. The landscape is so dramatic and large that it plays tricks on your mind. Instead of seeing things as huge and far away, your mind makes you think they are just very large, but closer. It is really quite deceptive. At one point, I thought we were about 200 yards away from a thousand foot cliff, but we were really over a kilometer away from a cliff that rises more than a verticle mile right out of the ocean- the second tallest cliff to rise out of the ocean in the world. The verticle granite wall continues 1000 feet into the water, making it actually over 6000 feet tall.

On the way in we had to paddle through 4 to 5 foot waves. We had to be careful not to capsize our normally stable sea kayaks. Finally, before getting into the harbor right before 9pm (still daylight), Jen and I were the last two people on the main part of Milford Sound for the evening. It was truly incredible.

We are now back in Te Anau getting ready to go out on the Kepler Track for the next four days. There is supposed to be a fireworks show tonight, but it has been raining nonstop. (It rains a lot here- the costal fjords get 10 meters, yes 10 METERS of rain a year!) Either way, Kepler should be a great time. Happy New Year!