Taylor in NZ

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In case anyone checks this site still, or finds it on search for me or some other unlikely circumstance, I've got a better, fancier, or at least newer blog here.

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A Sign That Would Frequently Come In Handy

Taylor's Mistake is, not unlike my own mistakes, a beach near Christchurch well-known for its surf break. And obviously it's my new favorite beach. The mistake Taylor made apparently was thinking it was the entrance to a harbor, which it wasnt, resulting in much hilarity and shipwreckitude. Anyway, it's a cool sign. Not quite as cool as this one though:

You cant really see in this photo, but I'm just offscreen to the right in full Warring Taylor Regalia, battleaxe drawn, wreaking havoc on Wellington. Much like this giant robot was doing:

Of course I realised later that it said Waring Taylor, not Warring. And I am naturally Wary, so that's appropriate, I spose. But the damage was already done.

And as long as I'm discussing signs, we came across this one:

I believe it was suggesting not to do that.

But my favorite sign in all of New Zealand was this adorable ad:

Just look how adorable and precious that little girl is! bless her little heart.

So I'm sad to say that I just arrived home this afternoon. The New Zealand adventure is over. And I'm really tired after my 12 hour flight into the past, so I'm not writing any more now. There's still a lot of awesome trip I didnt get to on this blog though. I'll try to do a wrap-up post tomorrow after returning home from work. fancy that. work. yay

In Which I Encounter A Lake

"Well what have we here? Looks like a lake on a glacier. Isnt that pretty?"

"Ill just take a closer look here... careful now... tippy toe"

"AARGH! Okay, a bit too close. Now I seem to be standing in a glacial lake. Things could be worse.. its quite refreshing actually.. I'm tough. I can handle this. Sure I can! Yup!"

"Okay no I cant handle it.. Cold cold cold cold cold cold!"

So anyway: We spent a couple days staying in Franz Josef, on the West Coast of the South Island, visiting both the Franz Josef and Fox Glaciers. The first day I did an all-day guided hike up the Fox Glacier, which was pretty fun. We got to wear crampons, to prevent us from slipping. And I was mature enough to avoid making any jokes whose hilarity would result from the rhyming of crampon with a certain feminine hygiene product. Plus we got sweet walking sticks, so I could do all kindsa explorer-poses and feel real hardcore:

Of course not as hardcore as Matt, who had to show me up by going ice climbing of all things:

Looked like no fun at all to me, though Matt seemed to enjoy it. Weirdo.

The next day was even more awesome because we took a helicopter to midway up the massive Franz Josef glacier:

In that second photo you can see maybe half of the thing. It was enormous. And full of massive pinnacles of ice and amazing ice caves and crevasses and tunnels and all sortsa stuff. Every now and then youd see a huge tower of ice break apart and collapse. A nice reminder that the whole thing was flowing, even though it felt pretty stable most of the time. At its steepest parts, Franz Josef moves something like 7 meters a day. Not a very glacial pace! badum-bum!

It was really fun tramping around on top of it in my crampons, pretending to be an antarctic explorer. The ice was so blue and pure, and in such bizarre shapes. Really interesting, beautiful scenery. Here's a couple more pics, but check out my flickr page for a lot more:

Also check out Matt's (far more pretty) photos here, which I've been culling from liberally on this blog.

This One's For All The Hydroelectric Engineering Geeks Out There...

... or all the James Bond villians out there. I know I've got some of both in my readership.

I forgot to mention this during my Doubtful Sound post. On our Doubtful Sound tour our bus also went inside the West Arm power station a couple hundred meters below Lake Manapouri. Yes, below the lake. It's not a dam like most power plants.. Lake Manapouri is a few hundred meters above sea level, so they just pipe the water out up top through this thingy here:

And then drop the water down to sea level through pipes dug vertically down into the bedrock. At the bottom it shoots through that room in the first picture, the turbine hall. Great place to plot nefarious deeds. Then it flows through these enormous tunnels out to Doubtful Sound like 10km away. There was an exhibit about how they blasted and drilled all those tunnels. Lotta work. It's a pretty crazy operation they're running there.

It's even crazier because all that electricity generated is only used by a single aluminum smelting plant in Invercargill, like 100km to the south. That's a lot of work to go through to smelt aluminum, but I guess they need a lot of cheap power.

As the saying goes: "He who smelt it... first needed to build a ridiculous subterranean hydroelectric power plant joining a mountain lake and a fjord."

Hahahahahahahahhahahahaha. I kill me.

Anyway, it was pretty cool to take a huge bus down this little tunnel spiraling down deeper and deeper beneath the earth. I guess you sorta have to like geeky machines and stuff. I thought it was cool. Not all my posts have to be all pretty pictures and buttercups. So there.

Fjordland Ho!

That's us in our awesome Munchkin kayaking outfits. I really thought the bright orange brought out the highlights in my eyes. And the tight thermal underwear really brought out the sexiness in my legs. But my opinions went uncorroborated.

Astute readers may note that I have not posted here for almost a week. I apologize profusely for any anguish this may have caused. After Queenstown we travelled through a series of impossibly tiny, remote townships which had little or no internets, so it was difficult to post to this blog. Now finally I'm in Christchurch, which is like a real city, and have a fancy speedypants internet cafe here, so I can post at will. I just uploaded about a billion photos to my flickr page.

So I'll try to catch up with where we've been: Our first stop after Queenstown was Te Anau, a tiny little town which is the gateway to the Fjordland Wilderness. As the name implies it's pretty much all just fjords and wilderness. Fjords everywhere. Wilderness everywhere. Awesome. Fjordland is actually a World Heritage site (along with most of the west coast of the South Island), which means it's illegal to build anything there at all. And it really deserves to be one because the landscape is amazingly, mind-bogglingly beautiful and awe-ispiring:

That's a view of Doubtful Sound, which we visited on a boat tour. Milford Sound is the famous New Zealand fjord, but Doubtful Sound is its more remote, more pristine, less touristy, more awesome big brother. You can only access it by taking a boat over the (also amazing) Lake Manapouri, then a bus over a tiny little mountain road before finally reaching the Sound itself. It's a really immense incredible place, and the pictures I have cannot do it justice. Really. It's epic and huge and majestic and grand and any other superlatives you may choose to use:

You really have to see it and be surrounded by the vastness to comprehend the place. The steep cliffsides covered with temperate rainforests. The waterfalls. It was fantastic. I loved it. We saw dolphins:

Im very glad we went there instead of just doing a boat tour on the famous (and more accessible) Milford Sound, which is what every other tourist does. Of course, Milford Sound was equally amazing, but also crowded with a billion tourist boats and helicopters and seaplanes and whatnot. So we opted to take a nice calm kayak trip on it, which ended up being really peaceful and awesome in its own way.

The day was also much more cloudy, which gave the whole thing a mysterious atmospheric feeling.

Milford Sound is beautiful. Totally worth seeing, even if Doubtful is the grander of the two. But I got to dress like a fat little orange man: So it was obviously totally worth it.

So anyway, that was our two days of fjording. Next: Glaciers! And me getting frostbite!

Im a total Luger!

I only made that joke about 200 times yesterday.

I guess it wasnt so much a luge per se.. more sorta a fancy gokart which reminded me of this. But they called it a luge, so that makes me a true luger. Not as huge a luger as Matt though. Here's him eating my dust:

Queenstown is like the adventure-sport capital of New Zealand. There are about a billion adventure companies here trying to sell me a trip rock-climbing, or skydiving, or canyon-swinging, or jetboating, slingshoting or any of hundreds of other methods of falling, getting wet, or tumbling down mountains. I've witnessed people bungee jumping and paragliding, and apparently paying money to do so. Obviously I needed to try some sort of eXXXtreme sport while in Queenstown, so I opted for the awesome speed and raw power of these glorified gokart luge thingies. It was actually pretty fun. And actually a bit steeper than it looks in those pictures. Really. I swear. Im Exxtreme!

The best part about the luge thing was that it was up on top of the gondola on Bob's peak, overlooking all of queenstown.

And the view was amazing from up there. Plus they had this ingenious luge/gokart chairlift which I thought was pretty awesome.

But it hasnt all just been luging. During our time in Queenstown we've done all sorts of other extreme things like visiting a bird park where we saw kiwis and this extremely huge pigeon:

And Matt and I went on a very grueling bike ride:

And I skipped some stones:

And we went on a couple big hikes and climbed a big mountain:

So all in all we've met our extreme sports quota, I think.

Tomorrow we're leaving Queenstown for the very remote Fjordland Wilderness and the suposedly awesome Doubtful Sound. I'm pretty excited to get out in the middle of solitude and nothingness.

Also, if you're interested, my flickr page for this trip is here and rebecca's is here. Check them out!

Queenstown

This is the view from my room in Queenstown. Seriously. It's awesome.

So once again I am travelling, and once again I'm writing in this blog. It was pretty fun doing this blog when I went to Europe a couple years ago, so I'll try to do it again. This is only a three week trip, though, so it wont be as extensive.

Also I actually have friends to travel with this time, which is new for me (no, not the having friends part. (okay, yes)). I'm here with two friends from San Francisco, Matt and Rebecca:

(matt's on the left)

And we've met up with our friend Emily from college, who lives in Queenstown now. Here she is driving on the wrong side of her car:

So since I'll mostly be with people, I probably wont be spending quite as much time sitting pathetically in internet cafes pleading for social interaction as I did the last trip. But send me comments and maybe you'll encourgage me! I'm never above pleading for social interaction!

Anyway, so we arrived in New Zealand after an incredible flight into the future which somehow left on Monday and arrived here on Wednesday, but was only 12 hours long. We flew into Auckland and immediately boarded a harrowing flight to Queenstown, which had to land by circling down between huge mountains into this beautiful valley.

And let me just say that Air New Zealand rules! On the cross-pacific flight, the food was really good. And when they asked me what I wanted to drink I did my usual meek "oh I'll just have some orange juice please" routine. But then my seatmate (who I had dubbed Mr. Sniffles), was like "I'll have a beer" and got one. Without Paying! Whaa? What was the nature of that transaction? I was confused. And then later the stewardesses came parading down the aisle with full bottles of various choices of red and white wine which they served in little glasses made of real glass. For free! Why certainly I'll have a Chardonnay. That sounds simply delightful. Please have Duckworth fetch the Rolls dear, I have a headache.

Not only that but every seat had its own personal video system that had a really current, extensive, collection of movies and TV shows. What better way to spend a 12-hour flight to New Zealand than watching the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy? I opted instead for a crazy Japanese game show that I couldnt understand (but involved models and puppies somehow), and then watched The Last King of Scotland which was pretty good, and a bit of Pan's Labyrinth which I'd already seen but really like a lot. They also had lots of old classics and childrens films (no Dreamworks ones though). I'm looking forward to the flight back on which I plan to watch:

because I'm weird like that. (No, not really (okay, yes)).

I'll have more on our activities in Queenstown and general jet-lag grogginess in the next post. It's been a really fun trip so far. Please comment!!