Taylor in NZ: 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.