Alright! I've finally gotten around to posting a little about the trip. I thought the first day was a good place to start. And don't worry, I'm not gonna get all detailed...I'm mostly doing it for some of the pictures.
This first one is from the
Moeraki Boulders, which are on the beach only an hour north of Dunedin. We got a bright and early start Friday morning, and amazingly, it was absolutely gorgeous out, so a stop at the beach was perfect. I won't bore you with all the details, but these boulders were always spherical - they're called concretions - so the water didn't have anything to do with shaping them. It just wore them out of the nearby cliff.
Our next little stop was in the town of Springfield, home since July to a giant pink-frosted sprinkled donut. Sadly, there's no movie theatre in this town...a population of 219 will do that. Just goes to show how far the people at the Simpsons Movie were willing to go to promote their film.
Soon we started to climb into the mountains, leaving the terribly flat Canterbury Plains for the Southern Alps. We did well going into the mountains, though, thanks to our trusty rental van...we may have had 7 of us packed in there like sardines, but she was a trooper. All in all we drove just around
1,300 miles in her, and I got to drive almost 1,100 of them. And all but maybe 100 feet on the left side of the road! Not bad.
The village of Arthur's Pass - the highest elevation settlement in New Zealand, at around 3,000 ft - was really cool. Its population is about 50, but it could have been as low as a dozen, since that's all it seemed was necessary to run everything in town - the
Mountain House hostel we stayed at, the store next door, the restaurant/tavern across the street, the DoC...not sure what else there was. The hostel was phenomenal, and the manager (who was from Calgary) gave us all a hard time for studying in Dunedin, saying he would turn off the heat in our room and give us puke buckets in our room because that's what us Otago students are supposed to be used to. Crazy.
After we settled into our bunks a little bit, we went for a quick hike to the Devil's Punchbowl waterfalls, a 525 fall. I took this picture at the bottom of the falls, in some of the rapids. I'm a big fan of this one - the sun going down made it come out this way. Incredible. Next up is the Dragons Cave in Greymouth and the Pancake Rocks in Punakaiki.
This first one is from the Moeraki Boulders, which are on the beach only an hour north of Dunedin. We got a bright and early start Friday morning, and amazingly, it was absolutely gorgeous out, so a stop at the beach was perfect. I won't bore you with all the details, but these boulders were always spherical - they're called concretions - so the water didn't have anything to do with shaping them. It just wore them out of the nearby cliff.
Our next little stop was in the town of Springfield, home since July to a giant pink-frosted sprinkled donut. Sadly, there's no movie theatre in this town...a population of 219 will do that. Just goes to show how far the people at the Simpsons Movie were willing to go to promote their film.
Soon we started to climb into the mountains, leaving the terribly flat Canterbury Plains for the Southern Alps. We did well going into the mountains, though, thanks to our trusty rental van...we may have had 7 of us packed in there like sardines, but she was a trooper. All in all we drove just around 1,300 miles in her, and I got to drive almost 1,100 of them. And all but maybe 100 feet on the left side of the road! Not bad.
The village of Arthur's Pass - the highest elevation settlement in New Zealand, at around 3,000 ft - was really cool. Its population is about 50, but it could have been as low as a dozen, since that's all it seemed was necessary to run everything in town - the Mountain House hostel we stayed at, the store next door, the restaurant/tavern across the street, the DoC...not sure what else there was. The hostel was phenomenal, and the manager (who was from Calgary) gave us all a hard time for studying in Dunedin, saying he would turn off the heat in our room and give us puke buckets in our room because that's what us Otago students are supposed to be used to. Crazy.
After we settled into our bunks a little bit, we went for a quick hike to the Devil's Punchbowl waterfalls, a 525 fall. I took this picture at the bottom of the falls, in some of the rapids. I'm a big fan of this one - the sun going down made it come out this way. Incredible. Next up is the Dragons Cave in Greymouth and the Pancake Rocks in Punakaiki.
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