Tuesday, December 13, 2005

LIFE: Kiwi photo album


Did I mention we're heading to New Zealand again to visit my wife's family in February? At this point, going to the Southern Hemisphere for a taste of summer (the seasons are reversed there) sounds mighty fine, it's been near-freezing in Oregon for weeks. Going down under is always a blast. This will be my third trip (Avril and P went last year as some might recall but I had to stay in America).

Anyway, we're going in just over two months, partly for family reasons I cannot divulge right now, but I thought I would use this chance to do an impromptu New Zealand photo album of Avril and I's first two trips together, in 2000 and 2003. We managed to cover a lot of ground from Auckland south in 2000, and in 2003 we headed up to the far Northland. Photos, ahoy!

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Among highlights in 2000 was a trip all the way to the bottom of South Island and back with my in-laws, where we visited Milford Sound, which is kind of like Yosemite at the seaside, an amazing place full of soaring peaks rising right out of the water, gigantic waterfalls and more.

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We also saw Fox Glacier which is huge (you can't quite get the scale in this picture), and very "Lord of the Rings"-esque. Just a few miles from here is rain forest and the ocean.

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And Avril and I visited several impressive Maori meeting houses, with their distinctive red color and amazingly ornate carvings.

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In our trip in 2003, we stuck mostly to Auckland, NZ's largest city, and parts north of there. Here's a pretty shot of the harbor.

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On Coromandel, a peninsula which sticks out like a thumb on the east side of NZ, we visited amazing beaches including Cathedral Cove with these great rock formations.

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And then Avril and I took the long, lonely trek to the very tip of NZ north, Cape Reinga, a strange, lonesome spot that feels like the end of the earth.

But perhaps my favorite photo from our Northland trek was this sign, all by itself out in a lonely picturesque field:
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In case you can't read it:
"The Bastard who stole the blue canvass covers Return them they were not mine." I swear I did not take them.

More NZ photos some other time, if you like these!

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