Archive for December 16th, 2010

It’s much more challenging than I had thought it would be to upload photos from the road.  Getting a couple of days worth of photos up can take 4-5 hours on slow internet connections and it’s expensive to have that much time on the web.  So I’m going to have to switch to uploading highlights to the blog and getting albums up much more slowly.

Here are a few from our jetboat/geothermal expedition.

Jet boats are awesome!

You had to stay on the walkways because the ground is so unstable

And here’s one of the view from Mt. Victoria – in Wellington.

View of Wellington

After our very pleasant day in Wellington we got the ferry to the south island.  It was a smooth ride (apparently it can sometimes be very rough) and we got some really pretty views coming into the south island.

First Views of South Island

So far, the south island has been wonderful.  We spent two nights in a very nice campsite (with hot showers!) and have done several hikes.  The scenery is incredible.

Justin views the scenery

Golden Bay Beach

The roads here are generally much slower than roads in the USA because they were built to go with the land.  And the land is very dramatic!  They range from this:

Gravel

To this:

Nice, but Windy Road

Ok, sometimes they are straight – but it was definitely optimism, not reality that caused them to make the top speed on our van 160 km/hour!

Tonight we’re in Blenheim after an awesome tour of the Marlborough wine country.  We went for the posh route on this one and had a van pick us up at our campsite and take us to the wineries.  Much, much, much cheaper than this type of thing in the USA and worth every penny since we got to taste lots of delicious wines.