The South Island

So when I left you last I had just arrived on the south island. We picked up rental car (no pics, we are pretty bummed we forgot) and proceeded to our next destination: Nelson. This is Melanie's favorite area in her mission for lots of reasons, but this is where she met lots of amazing people. I got to serve my mini-mission when Mel took me with her to check up on a few of her old investigators who are still dragging their feet. That was fun. We stayed with this really nice lady and her son and they spoiled us, then we set out on our journey to tour the south of the south.....we got a bit of a late start because Mira and Michael made us this 3 course breakfast so we wouldn't starve while we were gone....and we didn't. We traveled down the west coast and it was absolutely beautiful, but we had to go kind of fast so we could make our tour bus that took us down to Milford Sound. So of course we got stuck behind this guy:

Just in case you didn't notice, we were driving on the left side of the road, and yes the steering wheel is on the other side too. Luckily the peddles were the same or we would have been in a world of hurt, seriously, I never got the hang of the turn-signals so our windshield got cleaned more often then was needed. For all of you who have experienced my driving skills, I don't think you need much imagination to sympathize with Melanie when I was behind the wheel (in my defence I only ran over three curbs and nearly scraped the side of the mountain only once).

Oh we need to back -track just a little. I forgot one very important picture from the north island and I don't think it can wait until we go back to the north at the end. The day before we caught the ferry we had some time to kill so we were walking around and came upon this interesting design on the road. Mel said it means that this is where you are supposed to cross the street, but I am pretty sure it is from a crime scene (I didn't do it but I am almost certain this guy was an Australian and from the looks of it, he was trying to steal the Corned-Beef Cow):

Now back to the south. On our way down to Queenstown we saw some cool things like a glacier, it was moving pretty fast, but in the wrong direction for us to see if we could win it in a foot race...lousy global warming. Speaking of holes in the ozone.....we heard that the great ozone hole is directly over the north island in New Zealand, I didn't get sunburned but I suppose I may still see some side effects......I am pretty sure I am growing an extra toe, but there is no proof it was caused by the ozone-gap and I have been recycling all my plastics lately so I think that should take care of it.

And this is me and Mel at the base of the glacier, we had to make our way through some really ugly rain forest to get to it, so I guess it was alright anyway (and by ugly I mean it was super cool):One of the chances we took was to spend the extra money to take a tour bus from Queenstown to Milford Sound. We did not regret this because we didn't need to worry ourselves with things like time, or space, or motion, or wizards, or road conditions or trying to find cool facts about the country side in our little book we brought, all of those things were done for us. And Mel, don't think I have forgotten about the bill, I know you think I am going to forget but I just wont. This picture was taken in the national park we went through on the way. If you look really closely you can see Gandolf riding his big white horse in the distance. They are pretty strict about what you can take in or out of the park. The governments doesn't like the natural habitats to be disturbed, but they don't mind if you fish because the fish aren't native to the area, thank you settlers of the great NZ wilderness. We didn't fish though because I forgot my pole.

This was a spot we stopped in the National Park where there were some nice rock formations that were formed by the water.

We went through some pretty amazing forest and drove though the mountain (I tried to hold my breath but it was way too long).....but I don't have any pictures from this, I also drank the water from the stream that is filled with yummy water (I don't remember what was cool about it, but it did taste very good, so good that I stuck my face in the stream for a good long drink, I will have to see if Mel has that picture somewhere). When we got to Milford Sound, there was a boat waiting for is to take us around and generally batter us with wind and beauty. Here are a few pictures from our boat ride:

I told you there would be some more of these great portraits, and but luckily there was that nice waterfall in the background to make up for my lack of photographic talent.

We didn't see any whales, but we did see a skittish pod of dolphins, our tour guide informed us that they weren't being very friendly today so not to expect them to come play like they usually do. We were sad that they didn't come up to the boat so we threw rocks at them instead.....kidding, we didn't through rocks, but we did try to persuade the to come over for a little photo but there was nothing doing it.

After we got back from Milford Sound we got back on the bus despite our tour-guide's frequent hints and suggestions that the helicopter ride back was really the way to go and only an extra $500. We then went back the way we came and with one stop for dinner where Mel and I got ice cream and people on the bus laughed at us because it was so cold outside (probably about 60 degrees, we were crazy....crazy for really good ice cream). We then went back to our car and proceeded to drive to the next town were we spent the night again in the cozy confines of our car. There are many partial pictures of our car, but we never got one of the whole thing so I thought I would include this one just for memory sake. We swore never to speak of our journey from Queenstown to Christchurch, so I won't even mention how a great deal of this drive was on Interstate 84 which as you may recall is actually a right handed road that runs through Idaho rather than En Zed.

When we arrived at Christchurch, we got in a little late in the evening and decided to take a detour to a little french village called Akaroa, rather than get lost and frustrated in a very large city. In this picture, we were driving to this quaint french village and we found ourselves on the ridge of a mountain where we were almost blown clear over the edge of the earth. You can see evidence here that it was my turn to drive once again. Notice the hitchhiking position of my friend Mel. She didn't get picked up, although there was a couple of friendly local truck-drivers that would have if they would have caught up in time.

Instead of being picked up by the local fellas, we made our way down to this place in the heart of Akaroa:

I assume that on these boats are more immigrants from Old Zealand.

This guy is one of the local heroes who taught the people that you do not need canvas to paint a beautiful picture, but really it didn't get him very far because just look what they did to him!Chewy is not going to like this:

And this is just another picture that was pretty cool:

And so was this one:

And in this picture you can see the clear confusion on the face of our friend Mel who had just read this sign which read: "This way to Burley" we couldn't figure it out at first, but then we remembered about the thing we had just sworn never to speak again and just walked away.

Ok, then we left this little town and headed back to Christchurch where we paid too much for parking and ate really good food for a not so really good price. We drove a couple of towns down and stayed the night in the car again, accept this time it was really cold and we had to get up a few times to turn the car and and warm up. When we got up in the morning and stopped at the local petrol station there was black ice on the road and we probably almost died. We drove some more toward our next destination which was actually back to Nelson where we were to catch the ferry back to the North Island. We stopped along the way and got breakfast in this little town that had a few little shops, including a clothing shop that had featured in its window a wedding dress from 1988, you remember the ones with the puffy sleeves and the big rose in the middle. We were too groggy to remember the camera so we just had a good laugh and ran back to the car before we froze to our very death.

We continued on toward Nelson but we got to drive along the coast again before heading inland again, so when we arrived at the water we couldn't help but jump out to greet the water look around on the rocks. Melanie was the first one to the rocks:

Directly after this picture was taken Melanie jumped town to the lower rocks and slipped and fell and probably pulled both of her arms out of both of her sockets. I rushed down to see what I could do to help and we sat there while she decided if she needed medical attention or not. Turns out that Mel is a real trooper and she was really soar but intact. For the next portion of this story I included one of my documentary films, if you have any further questions regarding this matter you will need to ask me in person:




Since we never got a still picture of Mel with her friend Moley, we took one in the next town we came to:

Then we went to the pebble beach where I am pretty sure the pebbles were imported from a factory full of rock-tumbler that produce about a billion smooth rocks every millisecond. I went in the water too, it was very cold:

Next we drove up the street because we read somewhere that we could go whale watching from a certain point around this coastline, but we weren't sure where it was. I started out just trying to find our way out of this beach and ended up in a seal harbor......these seals were everywhere, but they kind of looks a lot like the mole we found earlier, suspicious. This is where I found the instructions of how to behave around such wild and ferocious animals:

As you may recall from the documentary footage, we were nether 10 meters away nor from a seal, two ingredients for rabies. And this is where I showed a similar sign to Mel so she will know how to act properly with our mole friends in the future:

After learning the proper distance to stay from the sea creatures, Mel and I wondered around the beach to see what else we could disturb. I found a starfish! This starfish was not big as the ones we found in Oregon, but it was still my favorite creature I found:

Next we went back to Nelson and spent the evening with a few of the member families and then with Mira and Michael again for the night and left for the ferry to go back to the north island in the morning. We rushed around to meet some other people and avoid others (this is the sketchy part of the story involving an old man who fell in love with Melanie so I will let her tell this part of the story herself someday) and then it was off to the north part of the island to have some more fun and stay with one of Mel's converts. While we were there we did get to see a real Kiwi Bird, but we were not allowed to take pictures. It was in captivity which is pretty much the only way one can see a kiwi bird because they are nocturnal and very hard to spot. Since I didn't get a picture I took one of the next best thing:

While we were visiting Mel's friend Dennis and his wife, we went to one of Dennis' Rugby games which was really fun to watch and then we went to the thermal attractions:

And then he took us to his private family hot spring-heated hot tub which was great because we had been cold for the past 50-hundred hours, and it just started to rain.

The next morning we were scheduled to go SKY DIVING.....although the sky diving never happened, we did find some pretty cool hiking that was still enjoyable and we found some other decently fun things to occupy and console us while we morned the loss of good weather, this was some strange mushroom I found on one of the hikes, at least I think it is, it almost looked plastic but not really, maybe it was just garbage, but I thought it was worth taking a fuzzy picture of anyway:

Here is some more beautiful fungal growth:

And then we found this cave so we went in to see if we could find any more moles:

We didn't find any more moles and sky diving was officially off so we decided to take a jet-boat ride instead. It took us up the river and then to this waterfall, this is what it looked like before we got on the jet-boat:


So the jet-boat ride would have been fairly fun, but we had a little run problem called: we-stepped-into-a-boat-full-o-Australians, they were supper annoying and Mel took this picture to emphasize what the general feeling was:


This is also where I gained my hippy-hair, after this ride I looked like I hadn't washed or brushed my hair for approximately 6-27 months, and I looked that way for the remainder of the trip, pretty gross. We then got back on the road to head out to Hamilton to met up with one of Mel's companions. We spent the night and headed out for the temple. We didn't think we would have enough time to do a session and make it for our flight so we just took pictures and called it good:


Next we got back on the road to travel back up to Aukland to turn in our car and check-in for the flight back home. In one of the towns along the way we stopped for my first meat-pie. Was this pie of meat good? Absolutely it was......and I would eat one every day if I could:


And then in another town we stopped for our last hokie-pokie ice cream, I actually got some other flavor that was really good, but I don't remember what it was, possible mango, or mole:

Just another one of me eating ice cream.....seriously, this stuff is really good:

We made it to Aukland and turned in our car....that was sad. And they shuttled us to the airport where we checked in. At the check-in counter we found out that our flight was delayed 4 hours.....so I guess we did have time to go to the temple, but we didn't have our car any more so we were kind of stuck in the airport. Here is the final film of the journey:

So that is it! After we had some free food using the complementary vouchers, sent some frantic emails trying to figure out how to get to our connecting flight that we would surely miss, we settled down to a nice marathon of Flight of the Conchords to keep us company as we waited out the storm that kept us on the ground. We finally heard our flight being called for boarding so that was that.......12 hours of high-speed, high-alititude flying happiness. We landed at LAX and quickly found our luggage so we could run to see what we could do about getting the next flight back to SLC, the had one going in about 30 minutes so we hurried to check our bags and get on the plane. It was pretty close but we made it. The rest was pretty uneventful, I got a 35 on brain-age and Mel beat me, then we landed in SLC at around 9pm and went to Mel's house and she drove me home the next morning. All around, it was a pretty fantastic trip, I would reccomend it to anyone.