nz4 (goats & donkeys)

We didn't do any bungy jumping. I'm not against ever doing it at all, but $165 seemed a lot for not being close to a must-do for me. I think for Naomi it is a must-don't.

A much more reasonably priced attraction included

GOATS


Lots of goats




and DONKEYS!



Yaks too!

These animals in this park above Queenstown have it pretty good. They're in a beautiful location and don't have to worry about food because people roll through in cars and hand feed them.

We hung out at with the goats for quite a while

They've filmed a few movies at this park. One of them involved a Korean prison. Here's Naomi's audition picture for the sequel.


They also filmed parts of the Lord of the Rings there. Apparently this tarn was used in the 2nd and 3rd ones a couple times.

They used several other parts of the park for LOTR filming as well.

They also had some cool alpacas




and a crazy red deer that was loose and was serious harasser. He just would not leave you alone. He loved attention, being pet, and food from your pellet can.



These huge other kind of The Hartford deer were a little bit scary. I walked up to them with some food, but the kept motioning with their huge racks to put the food on the ground. Once they got pretty close I thought that was probably the way to go.

And check it out Shane, they had buffalo too.





There are Lord of the Rings tours and activities everywhere. On our way out of town we drove past this:


It is LOTR dorks dressed up in partial costumes and getting pictures of their group taken on each persons' camera by their tour guide.


We headed to Wanaka next.

After a hard time finding a place to stay around there, we figured out that the map was wrong and there was a government campground nearby so that worked out.


We had dinner at the Mexican place Phil Murphy recommended. It is for sure better than Evi's taco hut.

There's a hike at the end of a long gravel road to the west of Wanaka to Rob Roy Glacier. If you're around this area, check it out. The hike is pretty short, maybe 1.5 hours up and you get to some pretty spectacular scenery.


It is too bad it wasn't clear when we were there.




There were lots of keas up there.


You have to drive through several dry fords on the way up there, so I was glad it didn't rain and strand us up with the sheep.



Next, we drove over to the west coast.


I was not really very impressed with this area of NZ. If you're in the country for less than a couple months, I think I'd leave it out. It is kind of out of the way compared to everything else you might want to see, and there really isn't that much to see. I'm sure the coast is beautiful, but you never see it. The road is almost always inland and there aren't really any towns or roads at all to the coast most of the way.


These were our only glimpses of the coast between Haast and north of Franz Josef (in a town that sounds kind of like Encharito).




Franz Josef Glacier was an exception.



The glacier comes all the way down to about 500 feet elevation.

A chunk broke off the glacier and washed down the river:





The plan was to backpack up the Copeland Track nearby up into the mountains and to a hut with a nearby hotspring. But, the weather was bad and the ranger told us that you have to ford the river when it rains the river becomes impassible. So we decided to maybe do some hiking in Abel Tasman Park or something and just get out of the bad weather as quickly as possible.

Hours and hours north of Franz Josef, you get some views of the coast, south of Hokitika. That area is kind of a big Willipa Bay like mudhole zone all the way up to Graymouth, which is at least as depressing as Aberdeen. They apparently refer to shopping carts as trundlers:

Then we headed inland to camp in a sandfly infested zone. Sandflies are little flys, maybe a couple times the size of gnats, but they bite and itch. They are to be avoided.
Next, we went to Nelson, in the north of the South Island.

Nelson is not a bad place. It is still a pretty small city (50k) but big for the South Island. It is right on the coast and has several nice beaches. It was mostly cool and cloudy while we were there so we only really walked around town.