More views...

I'm now in Queenstown which is really nice.  We arrived here yesterday lunchtime and I went out for a walk up Queenstown hill and along the ridge a bit further.  The view from the top was pretty good, you can see the town and the lake and all the surrounding mountains.  And I could see Ben Lomond which I have just climbed, its big.  I went with Luci, Michal stayed behind to do shorter walks - she doesn't like hills and the Ben Lomond summit track is apparently the most difficult walk in the area, but thats why I wanted to do it...  We did cheat a bit by getting the cable car up  the first few hundred metres, this still left us about 1500m to climb.  It was steep, very steep. You walk up constantly until a saddle point between two mountains where it flattens out and theres even a park bench to sit on (how they got that there I have no idea).  From there it just goes straight up, it felt like I was hrdly moving forwards some of the time, and it was one of those evil mountains where you think you're at the top and then another bit appears.  The view from the top was incredible, and its quite a pointy mountain so the summit is pretty small which makes you feel like you're just perched on the top, its pretty cool.  It was so quiet up there too, we sat there for about an hour and ate lunch then came back down which was a lot quicker than going up...  So tonight we are going to have a very large dinner and I'm going to drink a lot of New Zealand wine then fall asleep, thats my plan.

So what else have I done?  We visited Lake Tekapo which is bright turquoise and very cold, I know I went for a swim after we had climbed mount John and walked back along the lake side - I needed cooling down... We spent a few days in Dunedin which was nice, we stopped at Moeraki on the way to see the boulders, these huge spherical concretions formed around sea creatures along time ago which have were embbeded in mud cliffs when the sea level fell and have now been washed out onto the beach.  Then we went to another place and saw some seals and penguin (lots of a rock out to sea that we could only see when we zoomed in on our photos and two on the beach).  We went out to the Otago peninsula and saw albatrosses, more seals, penguins and a sea lion, pretty cool!  After Dunedin we went to Te Anau which is a town on Lake Te Anau which is very beautiful..We went to the glowworm caves which were cool, they look loke stars.  And the river that created the caves is pretty cool, there are big waterfalls and the water is so clear!  We also went up to Milford SOund of course.  We went out on a boat trip and saw loads of dolphins swimming along the cliff edge with the boat, that was very cool.  The weather wasn't so great but it looks spectacular anyway with clouds hanging over the mountains and the water looks all grey and scary.  After the boat trip we drove back towards Te Anau stopping at a few nice spots along the way.  We went for a walk up to Marion Lake.  It was pretty cold and wet but still looked cool with the clouds hanging over the mountains again and you couldn't see the end of the lake.  A pretty good day out really, next time I go hopefully it will be sunny, it'll look completely different.

Quite a lot of stuff in just over a week, going to slow down a bit now I think..

(will try to put photos up soon so you can all see the views..)