New Zealand New Year 2011

So, we started the year 2011 in Wellington, New Zealand. 

 We spent a few days there wandering around the city, as well as taking a Lord of the Rings movie tour.  That was actually quite a fun experience.  They took us to several different locations around the city where they had filmed parts of the trilogy and showed us the scenes in the movies and then where we were and how they did it.  Michael especially liked the part where they showed the Alfred Hitchcock effect of zooming in the camera lens while backing the camera up, as they did in a scene in these woods in the first movie.

We also got to sit in the same tree as Frodo and Sam did in one of the scenes.

Then we reenacted the rider on the horse in the same spot where it was filmed...however it was filmed at night so it looks a little different.  I was the horse's head.

 It was a nice day, and they even took us to a few beautiful lookout spots.

We left Wellington and headed for Waitomo to see the Gloworm caves.  One of my favorite parts of this trip was bring able to stop anywhere along the road and look at the lovely scenic spots and take photos.  We saw these signs and decided to pull over and check them out.  We were so glad we did—the scenery was just gorgeous!

 So, we went to the Gloworm Caves in Waitomo.  It's kind of hard to get good photos of gloworms because it is pitch dark in the caves besides the worms (and the occasional headlamp to point things out).  It was such a magnificent sight, though!  So beautiful to experience. Here are a few photos:

Inside another cave where there were lots of stalactites and stalagmites.

This is what a restaurant brought me when I ordered an iced mocha.  Oh My Goodness YUM!!

We left Waitomo and headed to meet up with our friend Nicole!  I will post a separate entry about our visit with our friend whom we met our first year in Korea.

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.