Milford Sound and Queenstown

So, I believe when I last updated, our van had just been fixed after I tried to drive it over a wall. That night, we walked down into Queenstown for a bit, had dinner, and then crashed early.

The next day, we were set to go to Milford Sound, which has been called the eighth wonder of the world. We walked down into town and caught the bus. Except for having a carsick child in front of us, the bus ride was pretty enjoyable. It was nice to sit back and let someone else pick the route and manage the twisty roads. We stopped several times -

Once for a sheep crossing! We kind of hoped/feared that this would happen once, and it was kind of cool. Here's the best picture I could get from my vantage point on the bus:



We also stopped several times to take pictures. This is one of the prettiest spots - the Mirror Lakes.



After about four hours of driving, we arrived at Milford Sound and boarded the boat for our 2 hour cruise. Rebecca and I went up on deck to take some pictures and it was really astounding how beautiful it was. Gorgeous blue water, huge mountains, snowcaps in the distance...we sailed out to where the sound meets the sea and then turned around. We got quite close to a waterfall that was three times as tall as Niagara Falls, and then before we knew it, the trip was over. Here are a few pictures of what we saw - the first one is kind of washed out, but has a boat in it to try to help with scale.







We also had an unexpected benefit of seeing some seals sunning themselves on a rock, which was pretty cool.



The bus ride back was fairly uneventful, except that we saw the moon for the first time since we arrived in New Zealand. I'm not sure why we kept missing it even on clear nights - probably a combination of early setting and the mountains - but it was nice to see it again.

The next day was going to be our adventure day. We wanted to go jet boating and bungy jumping, but it worked out that we could only do one, so jet boating won out. We actually met some people from Snellville and Doraville while we waited in line! Here's a picture of me next to the Shotover River before we got on:



And here's a picture Rebecca took of the boat before us:



The driver got us extremely close to the canyon walls before veering off to do 360 degree turns (we even did one 720!). It was really exhilirating and I highly recommend it!

That was the end of Queenstown for us. We hopped back into the car to go to Christchurch. One last picture for today - we drove through Cromwell on our way to Christchurch, and they had this giant sculpture of fruit as you drove through. I just had to share!