New Zealand Christmas 2010

Well, we've been pretty busy since the last time that I updated.   Of course, I'm only like 8 months behind!  I swear I just can't keep up! I need to post about last Christmas so I can get to this summer's trips.  Bear with me. :)

We wrapped up the end of the busy first school semester in December 2010 and then spent a few days in Korea, just relaxing, spending time with friends, shopping, etc. before we headed to New Zealand for two weeks for Christmas in the summer!  I'd been to NZ before when I was in college, but it was always during their winters, and I've always wanted to take Michael there and go in the summer.  We decided Christmas break would be best since we had 3 weeks vacation and since we are practically in the same time zone, it really made for minimal jet-lag.  We flew on Christmas Day and got an awesome surprise by being bumped up to business class for the first leg of our trip to Kuala Lumpur.

It was great, we had our own in-flight entertainment machines and just plate after plate of delicious food including Malaysian satay!  Mmm!  It was a treat.

We flew into Auckland and had an amazing Christmas feast at the hotel we were staying at that night (after they first tried to tell us that all of the restaurants were completely reserved all night--we ended up getting a table...though the waitress kept calling us by the wrong names so we sort of felt weird, like we were lying about who we were!! haha anyone seen the movie Date Night?? ;).

The next day we flew to Christchurch (just narrowly missing the earthquake that morning while we were in the air) and rented a car to drive around for the rest of our trip, up the south island to the north island.  We went to many places and saw many things in two weeks, so I am going to try to do a quick photo recap with just a few photos.

We got to see the Christchurch Cathedral before it crumbled in the subsequent earthquake.  So sad about that.

 

Then from Christchurch we decided to head to the western coast to Fox and Franz Josef Glacier and do a glacier tour, which we were sooo excited about.  We'd never gotten to see a glacier before...when we were on our Alaskan cruise for our honeymoon, we were supposed to see the Tracey Arm glacier but unfortunately for us there was too much fog and we couldn't see it.  :(  So we were really looking forward to a whole day of hiking up and on the glacier and seeing some amazing views.  We set out for Fox and Franz Josef by way of Arthur's Pass.  In NZ, everything is so mountainous, especially the south island, and there is pretty much just one road in and out of places.  So the most direct route was to go a few hours northwest, through the pass and then south west towards the glaciers.  It rained pretty heavily on our way up to Arthur's Pass and was just a pretty nasty day.  When we got to Arthur's Pass, we discovered that the road was blocked out of there and we couldn't get through.  So we stopped, went inside the information building, and discovered that all the rain had washed 6 meters of the road out, so there was no way through!!  If we wanted to get there we'd have to take a completely different road, back to Christchurch, then a different direction, a LONG way around, and it would take us about 12 more hours.  So, we decided to cancel our wonderful glacier hike and instead head northeast to the beaches of Kaikoura for a few days of relaxation instead.

We did get to see some beautiful sights along the way though.  Here are a few.

 Ubiquitous New Zealand sheep.

I really loved these rock formations on the hill, so I made Michael get out and take photos with me using the tripod and self-timer.  This first one was nice...

but it was so windy I tried to wipe the hair out of my face and ended up poking poor Michael in the eye!  Oops!!

More sheep.  I love the look on the guy's face on the right.

Here is our rental car:

So we ended up spending 2 or 3 nights in Kaikoura (honestly can't remember) and did some lovely hiking along the coast.  I enjoyed taking photos of birds with my new camera.  We saw lots of fur seals sunning themselves.  We also went whale watching which Michael really enjoyed since he'd never done it before!  We saw two "mighty sperm whale."

 Here's the view from the front of our hostel:

Down along the beach.

After leaving Kaikoura, we headed up to the town of Nelson for one night.  We really wished we had headed to Nelson sooner and spent more time there.  We stayed in the most amazing guesthouse I've ever been in...our room was HUGE and it was a lovely old Victorian house up on a hill.  Nelson was just such a lovely, quaint little town on the northern coast and it was laid back and just so cute. Unfortunately, we didn't really take many photos there so none to post here.

We then headed to Picton and took the Interislander Ferry across the straight to Wellington on the N. Island.  It was a nice three hour ferry ride which we enjoyed.  We went over on New Year's Eve, and we had made plans to go to a big NYE bash in Wellington along the water...but then we were just so tired we ended up staying in our motel and watching Drop Dead Gorgeous...Michael's first experience with that horribly funny movie.  It was kind of pathetic, we knew...but we didn't care. :)  We were on vacation!  I'll finish this post now (I'm tired and just want to finish!) and I'll pick up in the next post with our time in the North Island.