There Are Penguins In New Zealand: Los Photos

Howdy all,

Here we are, the pics you were all waiting for, maybe...ok, it's the pics that mom has been wanting to put up since we left on Tuesday.

So, now it is Friday evening and we got to Queenstown about 3 hours ago; we ate supper (tea, as the Kiwis call it) at "The Cow" which was a pizza/pasta place. Not sure how that relates to a cow, but whatever, it was delicious, and the garlic bread was ginormous!

Tomorrow we go on our Milford Sound tour, which by some tourists companies is considered the number one tourist destination in the world, so it's a pretty big deal apparently...!

Here's a low-down of our last few days in photos:

Here is Mom's interpretation of the Marlborough Sounds, as we came over on the ferry on Tuesday morning

A representation of my feelings driving a car, on the left side of the road, with the wheel on the right side; I still turn the windshield wipers on whenever I try using the blinker, and I accidentally drove for about half a block on the right-hand side of the road in Franz Josef before Mom screamed and I realized my mistake...oops!

Lake Hotoiti, and some duckies

Mom on New Zealand's longest swing bridge in Buller Gorge; some little girls got on it and started jumping up and down and Mom almost soiled herself (I think the bridge scared her a bit)

OF COURSE I had to stop and get my picture taken with this sign! Sadly, we saw no real penguins at that time; it was kind of dark out, if you couldn't tell

So, like the last post said, we REALLY wanted to climb the glacier, but it was POURING out! They canceled the trip :( It was raining in a rain forest, imagine that

Instead, we went to the Hukawai Glacier Centre and learned all about glaciers, how they're formed, and anything else you would want to know. Also, Hukawai has the only indoor ice climbing wall in the Southern Hemisphere, pretty sweet, eh?! Naturally, I had to try it; I figure I enjoy rock climbing, so why wouldn't I like this as well? It was fun, and really tiring, AND I even made it all the way to the top on my first run (the second I didn't because Jono, my belayer, decided that I needed to try an overhang...he had too much confidence in me)

Since we couldn't go on our Franz Josef Glacier, we went down to the nearby Fox Glacier. We couldn't get any closer to the terminal face than this because that trail was closed due to a rock/ice slide, but it was pretty awesome nonetheless.

Today (Friday) on our way to Queenstown; the day started out pouring rain again, but as we went further south, the sun came out and Mom started making me pull over at every single stop so she could take pictures. There was a lot of pics to choose from, so we only picked a couple for your viewing pleasure

On the way to Queenstown, we were going to stop in a town called Wanaka to get some lunch, and right before the town we discovered this fun thingy called "Puzzling World" and we ended up spending about 2 1/2 hours there, and only got ice cream for lunch, but it was a good trade-off. The Puzzling World was a place full of optical illusion things and a giant maze that took us about 1 1/2 hours to get through!

The photo above; is it an illusion, or is she really taking a dump with some Roman dudes in a giant latrine? Hmmm...?