As well as we though we had all of our bases covered NZ decided to throw us a little curve ball....what you might ask???.........snow. Apparently the word “summer” here is only a loose description of the actual weather! when we arrived in queenstown the temp was 2 degrees C (about 33 F) and snowing!!!
Other than the weather everything has been great we were able to locate our hostel with ease and even got our own private room, not too shabby. Thursday was our first day on the big STRAY bus and we made the trip from queenstown through twizel and tekapo with the final destination being Christchurch. The landscape here is absolutely beautiful. Lots of mountains and water everywhere. The water here is very cool too, the bus driver tells us that the glaciers breakdown the rock beneath them into very small particles that get suspended in the water. When the light hits these particles they give off a very bright turquoise color that makes all of the water look very bright and opaque. Its very cool, you cannot see through the water because of all these particles it almost looks solid! My pictures don't give it much justice. Defiantly check out joe's pictures for a better view. This Stray bus turned out to be a great idea. Were getting little stories about everything that we are seeing and he's taking us into the back country as opposed to the more congested major routes. Thee buses are nice and make frequent stops for coffee and “toilet” its funny when they say it!
Christchurch was just like every other city of 300,000 I've ever been too, but i was surprised at the Asian influence here there were sushi/Thai/Chinese food places on every corner and i only saw one McDonalds, KFC, and Burger King in the whole city! Our hostel was nice...again a private room lucky us. We decided to go out for some “suds” ie beer and did a little shopping, which is actually somewhat difficult here considering they don't have “everything” stores here. You have to go to 5 different stores to get everything you need. This is somewhat unrelated, but we saw a sign at a bank advertising housing loans with a rate of 9.5%...that is astronomical!!! It does explain the lack of big beautiful houses like you see in the states!
Today we are headed to Kaikoura where we will stay the night, unfortunately it will be wayyy to cold to swim with dolphins or seals so i'm not sure what adventure we'll get into here?!?
