New Zealand

That's Mt Cook in the distance

Lupins are the wildflower here, nice shot!

Enjoyed a 4 hour hike with ice spikes or "clamps" attached to the hiking boots trekking over the ice glacier at Fox Glacier. The guides stayed well ahead with axes to chip away at man made steps out of ice. The blue colours through the ice were gorgeous and found hearing about the formation of the glacier so interesting..it gains 1 metre a day! The following day was spent in Franz Josef another glacier town, where it was time to splurge and take a half hour helicopter ride to the top of a snow covered mountain, for a helicopter landing and an opportunity to get out and walk around on the snow, it was a chance to sing out 'the hills are alive with the sound of music' but I resisted! Starting to love riding in a helicopter!! Where we landed was directly across from Mt Cook, the tallest mountain in Australiasia, rising above them all at 3755m.

Half way up Fox Glacier

After landing on top of mountain by helicopter

Glacier from the helicopter

I had been pre warned about Queenstown, that I'd love it, and how true. The Remarkables were named that for a reason, still plenty of snow on their tops, not enough for skiing but aparently there's the extreme skiiers that are still up there getting helicoptered in for a few short runs. Well took advantage of this adventure capital with a luge ride down the mountain, followed by the Shot Over jet on the Kawarau River, a helicopter flight to the top of the river and white water rafting back down it. Our raft fortunately didn't top over which I was happy about but I was the only one that fell out however I still had a strong hold on the boat and managed to fling myself back in. Queenstown is just magnificent, its very trendy and full of cafe's and bars and shop after shop of adventure booking companies. My only regret is not doing the bungy.

Queenstown

Shot of the town and the Remarkables

4 days and 3 nights of trekking the Milford. What a wonderful experience, and one of the best yet. The track hugs a stunning turqoise river for the first 2 days where you are surrounded by beech forest, moss covered stones and plenty of small river crossings and waterfalls. The weather was perfect, not a single cloud for the first 2 days. I was told that 2 days of the month are rain free days, the rest rains every day, so we were all very lucky to experience weather like that! The clear river was just so inviting that I donned the swimmers and head over for a swim however that river water was fed from mountains, so really it was melted snow, so got the ankles wet and that's about all, oh, and the sand flies nearly ate me alive so was out of there pretty quickly!

Day 3 and it was all uphill to the top of the 1200m high mountain. With a 25kg pack and the pouring rain this was going to be a challenge! At the top there was a small hut for all of us independent hikers to get shelter from the elements..what a sight to walk into a tiny hut full of rain soaked trekkers holding mugs of coffee! It was blissful. Down hill was pretty dangerous, you wouldn't find a track quite like it in Queensland there would be handrails at every corner! The trail was steep and the track was mainly loose rock where in many parts with water cascading over it, I only fell 3 times I thought it would have been way more than that. Seeing that hut at the end of the day was such a relief, I had eaten half a packet of Nurofen to take the pain away from my knees so my dinner of rice and instant Mongolian Lamb was just scrumtious!

Final day, day 4, we all awoke to an earthquake at about 4.45am. I had never experienced that before and admit feeling pretty scared laying in my sleeping back with the hut shaking. But that was the alarm clock for the day so it was a very early start. Passed so many huge waterfalls on the final day that I was taking them for granted. Day 4 must have been that second sunny day that we were told about, it was perfect, and finished the 18.5km last day hike around 1pm in plenty of time to take all the wet clothes out of the pack and lay them in the sun waiting for the 2pm boat to take us all back to the mainland ready for the cruise around the Milford Sound.

Here is the link to prove that we all did wake up to a 5.9 earthquake: http://www.geonet.org.nz/earthquake/quakes/2829153g-maps.html

Clinton Valley

River that ran parallel to the path