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I stayed in Queenstown just long enough to look around — nice place, but way too tourist oriented. They have a gondola up the side of the valley, with a bungi jump site at the top, I spent a good deal of time getting photos of the bungi setup, and yet more time taking photos of the view.

Tech bit: I did a panoramic HDR shot, it’s going to take some considerable effort to put together, and some ingenuity to get the HDR thing to work. The allignment is the simple bit, but once I export it as a multi layer photoshop file, I’m not really too sure what to do with it. It must have been a good 30 shots at 3 diferent exposures to get diferent stuff in DR. I took a load of bungi jumps from the same viewpoint as well, so I should be able to stich one of them into it as well.

Up the gondola:

I took a look around some of the more interesting parts of Queenstown, and sat on the beach (pictured above) to take sunset photos, the results wern’t spectacular, but worth posting:

The road north, including a really large center pivot irrigator:

Aouraki Mt Cook, I’m informed that it is very rare to see it exposed like this, even the bus driver was out taking photos:

I met up with some folks that I knew on the way north and stayed with them for a few days, they had some friends that were nutters, especially the one in the driver’s seat with the hat on:

I’m perticularly proud of the first one of the kids (6109), it’s technically a very good shot, I didn’t even crop it.

Millford sound deserves it’s own post, it was the bit of NZ that I was really interested in from the start — I would have liked a week to peruse the area, but that’s tricky — there is always walking tracks, but doing that in a fjord is one way to quickly give your self really sore feet.

This is a really stunning fjord, similar to some of the best found in norway, it was excavated by a mother of a glacier in the ice age, and is now filled with sea water half way up.

We joined a bus that had just come down from queenstown, so even got a long lie. The bus took the rather long trip into fjordland, and through the Homer tunnel, which is a really impressive and remarkably old feat of engineering. Kiwi Ex had managed to negotiate a 2 hour cruse to the mouth of the fjord and back, with a free bufet meal included — the meal was more of a pain than anything, you were eating when you should be looking at scenery, although the route in and out was the same.

I decided that I had to do somthing to mitigate the lack of my only wide lens for somthing as mamoth as millford, so my solution was panoramic images, I have good software for stiching them, but not with me. This means that I took a stackload of images, none of which are really usefull untill I get home.

In the middle of the boat trip we stopped by an underwater observatory — think floating inverted lighthouse.

So The pics that are usable:

I rapidly left Queenstown knowning I would be back a few days later.

I was booked onto another excursion around the Invercargill, Duneden area. Varius things went wrong including the weather; some people I was with; and my primary camera lens breaking so I spent most of the trip pissed off damp, cold and uninterested.

We were told that one of the places we visited (I believe invercargill, but I may be mistaken) was described by one famous musician that visited the area as “the arsehole of the world” and I can see why, I’m sure it’s wonderfull in good weather when one is happy, but I have to agree with him.

The following are the highlights:

Sea Lyons, trying to work out who’s boss:

A fairly basic farm tour involving sheep sheering which as far as I’m concerned is a chore, so I stuck to photography.

some random scenery and other stuff seen along the way.

Note that the Cadburies tour sucked goats — it lasted 45 minutes, and could have been done in about 5, they didn’t even bother showing us the factory.

So anyway, this took me up to Te Anou — nice place, lots of souvenir shops. Notably however it had no shops capable of replairing camera bits.

For those interested in the tech bits: my 17-70 zoom (35mm equivelent: 25-105) developed an issue of it’s zoom ring jaming randomly and making rattling noises when shaken. To avoid any further damage and incase picture sharpness was being affected by loose optics it has been retired to the bottom of my bag untill I do a warantee return from home. My second widest lens is a 30/1.4 (35mm eqiv: 45mm) this is not very wide … bummer.

For those less technically inclined, I can still take photos, but not of really big things… like mountains or fjords or cliffs; all of which I know I would encounter the next day in abundence.

Opon departing the Poo Pub, I quietly chuckling at the multitues that had sore heads, and heard unpleasent stories involving vomit…

We quickly arrived at a place called “The bushman’s center” this was for the want of a beter term a small musium. They showed a 20 minute dvd which gave details about the diferent phases the NZ hunting industry had gone through, and covered a lot of really interesting stuff involving nutters jumping out of helicopters onto the backs of red dear, net shooters, and other crazy stuff. the bloke that was running the palce gave a quick speel before it all started, and started the comical theme that ran through the whole place, he said “there are 2 species of possom in NZ: round ones and flat ones. And for those of you that havent seen round ones yet, we have some here for you to look at.”

He also tossed a plastic bag at one of us (the Canadian with the afro wig from last post) and said that when the video finished that he was to go to the other side of the room, jump in the pen and open a hatch in the wall, out would run a ravenous wild pig. The pig was to be told to sit, and when it did, it was to be given some bread out of the bag. “However” he siad “when the bread is finished, get the hell out of there or it’ll eat you instead”. Now as for exactly how ravenous or dangerous the thing was I’m not sure, but it seemed pretty dosy to me — after it did it’s sitting trick, it floped over onto it’s side and took a quick nap.

There were a number of other practical jokes dotted around the place, next to the possom cages was a small window with a lightswitch, and a sign saying there was a wetta inside, we had been told to remember to switch the light off when we were finished. The switch was infact wired to a water pistol protruding just above the window. The cafe was biger than the musium, and has some really good food, including bambi burgers and roadkill pie. The white thing is a poor photo of a very rare white possom.

a few scenery bits later…

We arrived at Franz Josef. for those of you that don’t know, Franz is one of only 3 glaciers in the world to emerge into rain foresta few miles down the road is Fox glacier, that’s one of the others (the 3rd is in south America somwhere) so it’s a pretty odd environment.

I spent 2 nights there, and went for a guided hike in the middle. we were issued with boots, warm clothing and crampons (spikes) and bussed to the botom of the valey. after a 2KM walk we were divided into groups of 11, and started the climb up the face of the glacier. The guide was a bit dim, it may have been a language issue (which is fair enough) but most of what was said to him was misunderstood. The guides go out there early every morning and carve steps into the face of the thing with ice axes adding rome handrails where needed. By the end of the day the steps are all but gone in the sun.

Untill you get up close you don’t reallise just how collossal a lump of ice we are speaking about here, these pictures don’t even give a proper sense of the scale of the thing, the phrase “ants on a truck” gives some idea.

photography was a complete bugger up there, because the ice was (in parts) bright white and in sunlight; the background was murky dark forest/rock. I Measured 3.3 stops of diference with spot metering to the technically inclined.

Some stupid guide decided to leave at stupid AM to get to a lake before all the ducks woke up… anyway … down the coast a little and yet more scenery later, I arrived in Wanaka to stay with relitives for a couple of nights.

The Wanaka maze and assosiated random stuff was seen:

Just outside Queenstown is a bungi jump. I’m not sure why, but many people on kiwi ex seem to be obsessed with jumping out of or off of things. it’s not my scene but each to thier own. It’s really interesting how insecure many of them get about this as well, “you want to jump out of a plain .. your crazy” does not go down too well, and is generally taken literally and to their offence. some photos follow, begining with the presentation of the ceremonial toilet paper:

I’m getting a little behind on updates due to lack of proper internet, but here we go:

In “christchurch 2″ I mentioned some stuff that now have photos, here they are:

I rejoined the Kiwi bus, and headed anticlockwise round the coast of the south island, to Kaikoura, on the way there was swimming in a river, I dared to stick my big toe in, and didn’t venture further, but there were pleanty doing silly things, I took photographic evenence, and used the opertunity to practice photography of such subjects:

In Kaikoura I was very torn between 2 activities: whale watching and seal swimming, the interesting point here is that the seal swimming was a third of the price of the whale watching, in the end i went for the whale watching, but I may end up doing seal swimming later. The whales — sperm whales — where very interesting, but due ot reasons involving distance and other factors, photography wasn’t all that productive. we saw 3 whales, they come up to the surface, and sit there snorting for 5 minutes, then dive down to fish, then come back up and start snorting again. There is some very deep water very close to land in where we were, and that’s why the whales were there, they like diving really deep. there is a spot of seabed 1KM off shore that is 900 meters deep, I’ll let you folks work out the gradients involved there, sufice to say the idea of that gives me the hebejebees.

Up the east coast to nelson and then annoyingly back the best part of 2 hours drive out to the south of the Abel Tasman National park, I had the chance to go on another kayaking trip. The scenery was utterly stunning and a great time was had. naturally water and cameras don’t mix too well, but none the less i got some good shots. interestingly I noticed that the best views were from the beach looking out.

Back to the bus, heading down the coast some scenery was found:

A good deal of rain followed, this is only to be expected given that it’s the west coast. At a place refered to as the Poo Pub (due to it’s unfortunate locality in relation to Lake Mahinapua) we stayed a night — the accomodation was a a bunch of sheds behind a pub, this was all well and good as they were quite luxurius sheds, except for the dampness, at the next hostel I had to totaly empty my bag to dry everything, I have never seen anything like it. I woke up in the middle of the night, roled over, and found cold damp patches, and it was too warm to use the heaters. The pub was run by a bloke in his (I believe) 80’s (see photos), and a dambed good party was held there (for those that liked parties anyway) it was fancy dress and the theme was “pimps and prostitutes”. I took an early night while most of the rest of the bus proceded to get pissed out of thier skulls and make royal tits of them selves (literally in some cases). I stuck around for a little while to get some photos, but frankly found the environment so oppressive and socially clostrophobic that I had to take breaks from it.

For future reference, the over nigt stops were: Kaikoura, Nelsonx2, Westport, Lake Mahinapua

Please be advised that if you are attempting to use any of the links in the “thingomy’s feeds” section of my site, it’s broken.

The links for some reason have random crap added to the end. To fix it, you need to manually trunkate the url just before the second “http”; this should fix it.

I don’t know exactly what’s causing the issue, but I’ll take a look at it when I have a spare day and my own computer. (this should read: sometime next decade)

Congratulations to the pair that are about to get married. You know who you are.

I really do wish I was there, but as you know it’s a little infeesable given my current travel plans, I still wish you all the best for the future.

Christmas and new year over with I’m heading around the south island, I leave tomorrow.

In the last week or 2 I have seen many interesting people, some of whom were relatives of mine, I won’t go into any more depth here to preserve privacy other than to say that I hope I meet many of them again.

Myself and the folks I’m staying with here (also related to me) went on a dolphine watching cruse, I have phtographic evedence, but not handy. we saw a mother and pup (if that’s the correct term) so close that they filled the frame of one photo (100mm) it’s slightly blurry, but it’s usable.

Went up Arthur’s Pass — a road over to the west coast, with some really interesting scenery. We went for a walk to see a glacier, we didn’t find it in the end, but we had still a really nice walk and saw scenery miles from anywhere.

Had a picnic and swim at a beach with some of the above mentioned people.

Went to a Mouri … show? … dificult to explain, but it involved 60ish actors, 25 acres of land, a tram and lots of acting. The were telling the story of the inFLUEnce of the europiens on thier culture, with details of musket powered civil wars killing thoustands of people, desise, stealing of land and the such. All very grim, but the food afterward was fantastic. It’s the same outfit that did the show in Roturua that I saw.

Anyway — must pack…