Tomorrow morning I fly home after having lived abroad for almost 4 years. I don't really know how to feel so instead I will just show photos of the second week of our amazing roadtrip around New Zealand!
My favorite things to take photos of was the snowcapped mountains, dad had to remind me to turn around and take photos of the green valleys in between the mountains.
In Dunedin we visited the world's steepest street! Neither one of us was brave enough to actually drive up the road.
These weird ball like rocks are the Moeraki boulders. I read the wikipedia article of how they formed and still have no idea what happened.
Its just so strange that these are only in this one part of the beach. Why only here?
After we left the boulders we continued up the East Coast to Oamaru. I loved this little town. It had a really cool Victorian precinct that had kept the charm from the Victorian period when the buildings were built.
Another cool part of Oamaru is that it is a center for steampunk. We went to a steampunk museum and let me just say dad was super impressed.
Our main reason for visiting Oamaru though was to visit the colony of little blue penguins. These sea lions sitting on the rocks were just a bonus.
We were not allowed to take photos or videos of the penguins so I'm not sure how this person got a video but here you can see how cute these little guys are swimming to shore! They are the smallest penguin and are only about a foot high, yet they swim over 25 miles everyday in search of food. They go out before dawn and return just after dark swimming to shore in groups called rafts.
The penguins shown in the video all live in the controlled colony. There they live in man-made boxes and are fenced in on the land so they are protected from predators. There are however some of the penguins who choose to live outside of that area so on our walk back to the campground we saw these little guys. You can just make out the little penguin hiding behind the trash can and this other guy was waiting to waddle into a warehouse on the shore.
Dad found construction equipment everywhere! This machine was used to build the dams in this this area that are used for hydroelectric power.
This mountain is Mt. Cook or Aoraki, the tallest mountain in New Zealand.
If you look closely at the far end of the lake you can see ice, that ice is the terminal face of the Tasman Glacier.
And these are icebergs that have fallen off the face of the glacier into the lake.
Our final activity in New Zealand was going on a farm tour. It was such a cool way to end out trip meeting this sweet old couple. First the man demonstrated how the sheepdog herds the sheep.
He then showed us how to sheer a sheep and explained how the wool is sorted, washed, and processed.
It was a really good way to end our trip and dad finally got all his farming questions answered that he had been asking me the whole trip.
We had an absolutely fantastic time on this trip. I am still not sure how I feel about going home but this was definitely a good send-off to my travels!
My final two weeks before I return to real life and the US was spent on a roadtrip around the South Island of New Zealand. This was the first time my dad has ever been out of the country and the first time he flew by himself.
This photo was taken shortly after we both stopped crying, me because I was happy to see him and him because he was so happy to have arrived and not have to fly or navigate airports by himself again.
Our first stop on our roadtrip was to this field called Castle Hill. We came here because part of the Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe was filmed here.
I really wanted to climb up to some of the big rocks and went only about a quarter of the way up before I realized it would be very tricky to come back down. So I turned around and needed dad to come back up and help me down.
Dad was not confident enough to drive on the left side of the road at first so it was his job to be the photographer. And this is the kind of photos we got of the beautiful mountain pass the first day.
This photo was taken by me when I pulled over at a stop. The first day was driving from Christchurch, through Arthur's Pass, and to the West Coast.
We made a couple of stops on the way to hike to a waterfall and then our second stop was to see the Pancake Rocks at Punakaiki. These rocks are really cool how it looks like someone stacked them up!
Our campervan we rented actually ended up being a lot more comfortable than we thought. Luckily was also had a heater as it got quite cold at night!
One of our favorite things on the whole trip was visiting places with bright blue water! This was Hokitika Gorge. The blue comes from suspended rock flour that comes from melting glaciers.
The cow photo and this beautiful photo with a finger through it are courtesy of dad.
For Father's Day we gifted dad a helicopter ride up to see one of the glaciers. We were very lucky and got an upgrade on the ride to see both Franz Josef Glacier and Fox Glacier.
This was honestly the perfect place for dad to go on his first adventure abroad. There was no end to the amount of tractors and construction equipment around.
This was a photo of dad shouting at me to take a photo and me saying of what? He apparently wanted a photo of the sea, which happened to be on his side of the car.
He also got very excited when there was a straight stretch of road which was not very often. We spent most of our time driving on very curvy roads and we went through the mountains.
This might be my favorite warning sign of all time. 11 people will cause death and destruction.
This was the view from the mountain top down into the city of Queenstown.
This beautiful map shows all the switchbacks dad had to drive to get down that mountain into Queenstown. Thank goodness I didn't have to drive this road.
Our first stop after that fun road was to the historic town of Arrowtown just outside of Queenstown. In the town there was a historic Chinese village. Dad thought he would do really well living in one of these tiny houses. We also had to try the famous Fergburger in Queenstown. It was really good but I'm not sure its good enough to be world famous.
Queenstown is known as the adventure sport capital of the world. Its also where bungy jumping was first invented, but bungy jumping is way to scary so I decided to try skydiving instead.
This was the scariest part hanging out of the plane and not knowing when you are going to fall.
Its hard to know how fast you are falling because everything is so far away. I jumped/fell from 12,000 feet. But as you look at my cheeks on these photos you can see how fast I was falling by the air pushing my cheeks into these weird shapes.
It was so exhilarating and I would definitely do it again!
After skydiving it was onto Dad's adrenaline adventure, a jet boat. The jet boat was super fun especially the 360 spins but I would definitely recommend going on a jet boat in the summer. I was soaked and very cold by the end.
After Queenstown, we drove to Milford Sound. It poured the entire day which made hundreds of waterfall streaming down the mountains.
Thankfully the next day it was perfectly clear and a beautiful day for a boat trip out on the sound.
In our first week we went all the way down the West coast to the Southern most point of New Zealand.
Our last stop on the southern coast was Curio Bay. In low tide you can see a petrified forest in the rock on the shore. It is so weird to walk out and see stumps and tree trunks that are completely turned to rock.
