Milford Trek

Us at the highest point of the pass.

Turquise blue glacial waterfalls.

The lake water is this color from glacial rocks rubbing together.

We flew to the south island to get to Queenstown to begin the Milford Trek. After a 10 hour bus ride through mountains and turquoise blue glacial lakes, we got ready for the 5 day guided hike. We have been ridiculing the tourist buses filled with old and/or Japanese people that we see everywhere, but before we knew it, we were on one! Being the youngest participants by far, we were regretting being on the guided tour, but found that having a hot breakfast prepared for us at 6:30am was well worth the cost. The hike was incredible, and night sky was brilliant, we saw galaxies and constellations only visible from the southern hemishpere. Our fellow hikers were actually very nice, and while the Japanese didn't speak English, Alix had fun stretching with them every morning before hiking. The rivers were crystal clear, we even saw a few big trout our first morning on the river. The first 3 days we had great weather, and on the last it poured night and day. However this wasn't too bad besides the wet hiking boots, the waterfalls started pouring down from everywhere. We saw more waterfalls than you can imagine that day, probably numbering in the thousands, it was the full Milford experience.

First Impressions of New Zealand

Simply put, New Zealand is awesome, and with the current enchange rate of 2 to 1, it is awesome, and cheap. Our first couple nights in Auckland we couch surfed in a house full of college students, who we will probably stay with again on our way out. We love Kiwi music, so we bought some new CD's a great music store so we would have some local music to listen to while we explored country. The next place we went was the Coromandel Penninsula, which we could have spent weeks at because of the beautiful beaches, including one ranked in the top 100 in the world. It was very nice but our favorite was hot water beach(above), where at low tide you can dig your own hot spring in the sand! We headed to yet another town that we could have spent weeks, Roturoa, where we had an amazing day of mountain biking on challenging but beautiful trails (Alix ran into a few trees). Our hostel had a geothermal spa, so we spent the end of our day relaxing in it before going to the local pub, Pig & Whistle, to enjoy some live music. It wasn't until we had a few pints that we remembered it was our seven year anniversary, (Sam remembered first by the way) guess we were having too much fun to be caught up in trivial things like that (subtle sarcasm). A little late, but at least someone remembered!
We arrived in Hawkes Bay to another couch surfing host, we didn't believe the house we were staying in at first, we had to go back to the car and double check the address because it was the nicest house on the street with the one of the best views of the bay in town, and it was inhabited by five guys in their twenties, all working at the one of the golf courses Sam has dreamed of playing. We had one day to spend in Hawkes Bay, we had a beautiful day planned out, golf at Cape Kidnappers, and a Fat Freddy's Drop concert at a winery. Of course, it poured rain that day. Golf was cancelled, so we spent the day indoors, watching movies and going bowling with our couch surfing hosts. They snuck into the concert with us and we danced in the mud, bottles of wine in hand, Sam ended the night in jail, nothing bad, we'll explain upon return.

Road Trip to Melbourne

After a lovely dinner in Katoomba of pizza and our favorite red wine, and a miserable night sleeping in a parking lot and freezing our butts off, we headed to to Woolongong. A bar tender at the local brewery told us it was the local basketball team's last game... ever! After a few jugs we decided to go to the game and had a fun night. We kept heading south working our way towards Melbourne, stopping in boring little towns that you've never heard of. One night our van was accosted by a big kangaroo, Alix was looking out the side window and didn't see it jumping across the road until it almost slammed into her window and she let out the most bone chilling scream... ever! We decided not to drive much further that night because the kangaroos were a bit jumpy. We stopped at the wetlands pictured above for sunset and some delicious canned chili... The mosquitos were fierce so we retreated to a parking lot in the next town for a good nights sleep. We headed to Wilson's Pomonatory National Park the next day, but we had to turn around because it was literally on fire, then finally made it to Melbourne to stay with Brigitte, a high school friend of Alixs' mom.We did the typical tourist track in Melbourne, Botanical Gardens, beaches, monuments, pubs, more pubs. Waking up in Brigitte's driveway was a glorious moment, stepping out into the morning sun, in our underwear, to be greeted by the shocked and awed stares of the bourgeois modernites that Melbourne seems to be full of. Our last few nights we spent couch-surfing with Tim the engineer in Sydney. We watched street theater and wandered through more botanical gardens, then hit the pubs before catching a train, which we fell asleep on, fortunately Tim lived at the end of the line so when the conductor jostled us we were right where we needed to be. Tim was a great host, and even made us pancakes at 4am before driving us to the train station to catch our flight to New Zealand.