New Zealand

New Zealand is full of spectacular scenery and outdoor adventures... but it's expensive by our shoestring budget standards! So, we rented another station wagon and spent our time on a South Island Road trip (New Zealand is broken up between a North and South Island). Altogether, between Australia and New Zealand, this made almost two weeks sleeping in the back of a car! Sleep deprivation aside, it was worth it!

We began the trip by heading South to Mount Cook in a mountain chain known as "The Southern Alps." They are stunning! You have probably seen these mountains in the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy. New Zealand has a climate which is similar to Seattle or Portland, but it gets a lot more rain (seven meters per year in some places). When we arrived in New Zealand it rained every single day, and because it was fall here (the seasons are the opposite of Utah), we often awoke in the morning to see the mountains dusted in fresh snow. Over thousands of years, this huge amount of precipitation and snow accumulates in the mountains and has formed thousands of glaciers. We chose to visit the Franz Joseph glacier to hike and climb on it.

Franz Joseph Glacier from a distance:

Checking out a glacial crevasse:

Kelsi Climbing up a vertical ice hole using crampons and Ice picks (A good refresher of our climbing in Nepal!)

After exploring the Franz Joseph Glacier, we spent several days hiking through New Zealand's lush, tropical rain forests. Many of them abut beautiful fjords, and the views were beautiful! The picture below doesn't do justice to the view we saw (asking other people to take a picture for us doesn't always work out the best).

The grand finale for our trip was swimming with wild Dusky Dolphins. They aren't coaxed, fed, trained, or caught... they are completely wild! Dusky dolphins are naturally gregarious and very curious, and when we got into the water with a pod of over 300 dolphins, they circled and swarmed around us to see what we were up to. Dusky dolphins are very playful and are often seen playing with whales and seals, so they probably thought we could be potential playmates. Unfortunately, the waterproof housing for our camera leaked while we were out with the dolphins, so we only ended up with a couple of short video clips before our digital camera was destroyed. All the same, this image from Google shows exactly what we were seeing: