Te Anau

Te Anau, who's pronunciation baffles us still, is totally awesome!  It is about 2 hours South of Queenstown, and is the gateway to Fiordland National Park.  Te Anau the town is small but really cool with some great shops and pubs.  It is right on Lake Te Anau with incredible mountains behind it.  We actually stayed in the much smaller "town" of Manapouri, situated on Lake Manapouri (again with an incredible backdrop).  Most of New Zealand's great walking tracks are around this area and Maegen and I did the last 6 kilometers of the Kepler Track.  The next 7 pictures are from that walk.  Not to focus too heavily on Middle Earth, but the canoeing scene at the end of the Fellowship was filmed on that river, and the forest was used for scenes of Lothlorien.  We had a sweet cabin right across the street from Lake Manapouri.  You could climb up the chimney and poke out the top to get a great view.  We renamed Fraser's Beach, "Viking Beach" for Gunner due to the yellow and purple flowers all over it.  We now have to figure out what tracks we want to make reservations for, and how we are going to explore Doubtful Sound, probably by sea kayak.  It was absolutely beautiful, we had a great weekend.  

Cheers, Johnny

Allen's Beach

Hey Everybody- These pictures are of Allen's Beach, where Johnny and I went last week.  The beach was just gorgeous, it seemed to go on forever.  Johnny and I climbed around on the rocks which had little rock pools and hidden seal lions.  The sea lions always scare me because they blend in with their surroundings and then they hiss at you as you walk by.  We also had a huge white bird (Johnny's convinced it was an albatross) dive bomb us because we were near her/his nest.  He made awful noises at us that sounded like a propeller.  I thought Johnny was going to get his head taken off by the bird swooping over him.  The weather has been really nice lately, and it was so exciting to be on the beach with the sun shining.  After Allen's Beach we drove up the peninsula and waited until dark for the blue penguins to come out of the ocean.  We got to see around 30 penguins.  They come out of the water in groups of 10 to 15.  Then they climb up the beach and waddle to their nests where they have their partner and chicks waiting for them.  In the picture you can kind of see his blue feathers, and they were only about a foot tall.  The penguins walked only about 4 or 5 feet away from us.  It was really neat, but unfortunately at that point it was to dark to take pictures of them (can't use the flash because it hurts their eyes).  Tomorrow we are taking a trip to Te Anau and Doubtful Sound, where we will hopefully kayak.  We'll let you know how it goes- cheers maegen

Tunnel Beach

Rumor has it that the farmer who owned land nearest to tunnel beach dug the tunnel you see Mae in so that his daughter could get down to the beach in the next three pictures.  The surf is really strong here and as a result of the beach access, the daughter drowned.  A pretty sad story, which made Mae a little uncomfortable walking down the tunnel to the beach.  We came across this enormous sea lion down on the beach so we climbed back up and watched it struggle across the beach and glide into the water.  It would duck four or five waves at a time on it's way out to the open water, it was really cool to watch.  There are just so many incredible landscapes all so close to us here, we are so lucky.  You can see how big the tunnel is in the last picture with the little pink spot on top being Mae.  It is also incredible how empty all these places are, even being so close to the second largest city on the South Island, it kind of reminds us of Wyoming.  Now it's back to a week of work.  Happy Guy Fawkes/Election day!

Cheers, Johnny