So we are on the South Island now, home of rain, glaciers and Hobbits. Three hours by ferry from Wellington and we landed in Picton at Marlborough Sound ( white wines are superb here ! ). It’s like entering a new country , the nature is almost untouched here. There are many famous walking options here, but we didn’t have time to explore it as it takes 3 to 5 days each. As an alternative we planned visit at Abel Tasman National Park. It’s the smallest NP , but after 20km morning walk in the rain forest close to the coast with unlimited access to the small golden sand beaches , just yummy… only the sandflies are terrible ! We spent Xmas in a small city called Hokitika, the 4th largest town in NZ during the Gold Era in the 1860s, but today famous for a greenstone used for the decorative jewellery and great French café where we could celebrate Xmas Eve ( picture with us and delicious local made fish@chips served at piece of paper is taken at fast food we found at Abel Tasman). Westland is a part of the west coast having two famous glaciers Fox and Franz Josef. Do you know that:
- it rains a lot here, up to 5000mm ( 5m )/year;
- glaciers getting around 30m fresh snow every year;
- they are very speedy glaciers, around 1,5m a day, but 5m happens as well;
- front of the glacier is only 250m above the sea level;
It’s unbelievable that we could walk 5h via deep , green and wet rainforest having tons of white snow just 100m away from our trial. It rains today so we moved to Queenstown - place where bungy has been born… I said something like: in case the weather will be fine…:).
PS
Hobbits – they must be somewhere here !
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