NEW ZEALAND

Hey everyone! I just got back from New Zealand, and it was an awesome trip! Adam and I toured the south island for 6 days in a camper van, and we put in about 2000 km to get around to some of the highlights the island has to offer.
After picking up our van on Saturday we started driving west from the city of Chirstchurch. This is considered to be the most scenic drive in New Zealand, and along the way we stopped at a few places, one of which was this group of huge limestone rocks.
Sunday we hiked on Franz Josef glacier, as in we followed a guide up stairs cut in the ice and tunnels bored through the ice.
We chose to do the half-day hike instead of the full-day, and I'm really glad we did. Hiking on the ice was a lot tougher than hiking on ground. Although you get crampons to keep you from sliding around, you're still on difficult steep terrain and after just a couple of hours I was ready to take a rest.
We kept driving south, and camped at at the Boundary Creek campground. The next day we drove into Queenstown, where I did a bungy jump!
This was a lot of fun, and VERY safe. It was at Nevis Valley, which is the highest bungy jump in the southern hemisphere.
We continued south from Queenstown, and then went west and north, taking the circuitous road to Milford Sound. The campground we stayed at here was the most remote (it didn't even have a water faucet) but was scenic as always.
Milford Sound is perhaps the most famous tourist destination in New Zealand. It rains 7 meters a year here, but there are gorgeous fjords and amazing waterfalls.
We took a boat cruise around this amazing place, and got a fantastic perspective of the landscape, and of a few seals.
The seals make me think of Magic with flippers. They looked very lazy.
From Milford Sound we retraced the road back to Queenstown, then continued up to Mount Cook Village. This village is not on most bus lines, so if we didn't have a campervan we wouldn't have been able to get here. It ended up being my favorite part of the trip.
On three sides of this little town are the tallest of the Southern Alps. We only had time to do two of the many hikes accessible from around the village, but the two we did were spectacular.
Below is Mount Cook, the village's namesake and the highest mountain in New Zealand.Adam's flight left two days before mine, so I spent two days at a youth hostel in the town of Lake Tekapo, where I hiked around on the many trials before catching a bus back to the airport. Lake Tekapo is a glacier lake, so the water is bright teal from the sediment and stuff from the glacier ice.
One of the highlights of this little town is that it has the best night skies in all of New Zealand. For this reason the U.S. Navy set up an observatory on Mt. John right next to the town, which it turned over to NZ in the late 80's.
One of my hikes took me by Lake Alexandrina, which has two little towns of holiday homes (mostly for fishing) along its coast. This region is also part of central Otago, which was the location for the filming of much of the Lord of the Rings.