Hey everybody!
Sara and I just got back from Millford Sound tonight. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milford_Sound) It is a Fjord on the west coast about 4.5 hrs from Dunedin. Sara and I rented a car on Friday and took off. We cut our way through the interior and got to Te Anau at about 5 pm. Te Anau (or Te Anus as i like to say) is a small, shit of a town on lake Te Anau. We thought it would be a fun mountain/lake town. We were wrong, but it is the closest place to the Sound (2 hrs) that we could get a room. We booked our ticket at the hostel we stayed at. The hostel was a weird experience. It was the first one I have ever stayed at, and I really don't know what I was expecting, but it was not this. We were in a room with 4 other people, and were expecting to hang out with them, but I think the entire night they said maybe 20 words to us. It could have been the fact that there was a huge language barrier, but who knows. We woke up at 6.30 am and took off up to the Sound. It was pretty dark until we got there, but on the way back we could see just how beautiful of a place the west coast is. Mountains, lakes, and glacial waterfalls everywhere. Words and pictures do no justice to how beautiful it was. When we got to Millford we got out of the car and from out of the woods strolled a Kia. Kia's are endemic mountain parrots of NZ. They are curious birds who have a knack for destroying and stealing things. It was so surreal that one just waltzed on up to us out of the forest.
Sara and I got on the boat and went on possibly the most awe inspiring 2 hour trip of our lives. If anyone ever has the chance to travel to NZ, Millford is a must. We left soon after the trip was over, and since it was light out, we could stop at different points along the way to take pictures and soak it all in (literally, it was raining the entire time, not a bad thing, but to be expected since we were in the rainforest). We were planning on heading to the Catlins (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catlins) next, but when it started to get dark, we decided to head on back to Dunedin so we could check out the peninsula all day tomorrow and hit up the Catlins some other weekend. That was by far the longest run on sentence ever.
It was a great weekend, and I cant wait to show all of this stuff to my parents when they come in Sept. Driving was easy and rather quite enjoyable. Not hard at all to pick up (they drive on the left). The only hard thing is that there are no interstates here. Only 2 lane highways that twist and turn their way across the country. The speed limit is 100 km/h (60 mph) and half the time you are going half of that to make it around the corners to keep from flipping the car. But while it takes and obscenely long time to get anywhere here, the scenery is amazing. Nothing like Iowa.
Ive been up for almost 19 hours and 8 of those were driving so I'm off to bed.
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