2 Glorious Weeks In N.Z.

I was stocked !! In January 2012 I ran away to N.Z. with Miss 16 to go hike 'n' bike for 2 weeks.

We had a FAT time !!

This is the view from the plane going across from Brisbane to Christchurch. This is sunset as we had an evening flight. The sunset was incredible and to say I felt like a kid in a candy store is a HUGE understatement. I snapped away mid flight but really the orange horison line was more burgundy, it was the best sunset I've seen yet.

NEVER EVER SELF PORTRAIT (guess who took the photo)

We slept-ish in Christchurh airport as we only had 6 hours between landing and getting picked up by bus, it just happened to be between the hours of 1:30am and 7:30 am. Sleeping wasn't really possible as we were so cold and an airport floor isn't really the most comfortable. At 4:30am security came around and woke everyone up so the cleaners could vacuum (we were part of about 60 people staying in the airport that night), so we moved across to the departures terminal where, much to our delight, it was heated with lots of food (and noise) so we wandered around for a couple of hours enjoying the warmth before heading to the cold, windy bus-stop.

We went up to Queenstown on the Newmans Coach Service which we booked online and were easy to deal with. The driver was fantastic and the bus had a pick-up in Christchurch city also so we drove around in a large circle to avoid the city centre, which is still closed due to their devastating earthquake, and arrived at the pick-up point. It was sad to see all of the earthquake damage, it must have been a terrible event.

Anyhoos, after leaving Christchurch we stopped in a town called Geraldine, and holy cow it was cold!! Pretty but freakin cold. We were glad it was only a 10 min quick stop then we went up non-stop to Lake Tekapo for lunch.

See how good a photo can be when one DOESN"T self-portrait.

This place is seriously amazing. The colours of the lake were a quilters/painters dream. There isn't much here that we could see except the lake and some accomodation, oh yeah, acres of lupin flowers.

These flowers were gorgeous,

From here we then headed up to Queenstown but I'll blog that next time.