Here are the stars in New Zealand on the longest day of the year. I think it turned out really cool. I like how high up in the sky the stars rotate around. I think it is because we are so far south. I took this picture using 30 second exposures and combining them in photoshop. In all, there were around 25 images used. I had to get a rubber band and a rock to hold down my shutter button for that long. I felt like a real MacGyver… ah, I miss that show. I also, while I was in photoshop added a little texture. Hope you enjoy the picture as much as I enjoyed making it.
Colin Feldhaus
Hope everyone has an amazing Christmas this year. We had a blast. There is a family group staying at our hostel tonight and they invited us in on their Christmas dinner and festivities. We had a secret Santa gift exchange game that was heaps of fun. I ended up with a bottle of wine and Andre’a got a Chinese checkers game. Good times.
Here are a couple of pictures to get you in the Christmas spirit. On our journey to Alex knob a couple weeks back, there was a lookout called Christmas lookout. And this is what it looked like…
Merry Christmas
From Colin and Andre’a
This is a photograph of cathedral that is down town.
And this is some of the cool landscape we came across on the other side of the mountains.
Colin
Last week Andre’a and I took a little trip to Christchurch to… you know… do some Christmas shopping for each other and ourselves. It was a really great trip, very relaxing. It was a much needed break from Okarito. We didn’t get to do any tourist things in town, but that was just fine. We got to do alot of Christmas shopping and hanging out in a big city. It was good to get a little bit of Christmas spirit in us. In Okarito there really is not much… if any. Kinda disappointing, but very understandable. Christmas is the busiest time for tourism, it does not get dark until almost 10pm (who is going to go Christmas light looking after 10pm?), and Christmas lights are $25 for 100 little lights. That is a bit ridiculous if you ask me. Christmas is definitely different in New Zealand.
Andre’a took these 2 pictures on the way home from Christchurch.
Look how different the mountains look on the other side of us! No snow, or green rain forest… just dirt and rock.
We passed through Springfield…. and lookie what I found….. home of the Simpsons.
This was taken at the botanical gardens in Christchurch. Probably the coolest public, downtown park ever. They even had a huge swimming pool.
Same pic just cropped really tight. I loved all the detail in the bee.
Oh, wait… are we back in Texas?… no… they had a desert theme garden….
And the biggest Christmas tree in Christchurch. It was in the cathedral downtown.
By: Colin Feldhaus
So, on one of our days off we were getting a bit stir crazy and needed something to do. It was actually a nice day outside and had heard from an Active tour Guide that the Alex Knob walk was awesome. He said you could see some amazing views of the blue ice in the glacier. It was quite a long hike though, but we were ready for the challenge. We packed some lunch and headed to the track.
It was an 8 hour hike altogether. Four hours up and four down. And it was up hill the whole four hours to the top of a mountain! It was quite an exhausting hike up, but once we made it to the top… the views were breathtaking! Totally worth all the agony of aching muscles!
It’s just a weird feeling to be up so high, that you feel like you’re eye level with the snow capped mountains.
And this is the long drop down… I know pictures don’t quite capture the height, but those are waterfalls and the little green dots at the bottom are trees. The coolest part of the picture is that you can see a bit of the grass from our height in the bottom right hand corner. It just emphasizes the sheer drop
Colin and I in front of the glacier. This is the first time we’ve been able to see the top of the glacier, where the snow actually falls.
All Colin had was his 50mm camera lens (since his other one broke…). So, he had to take about 10 pictures and stitch them altogether in photoshop. This is the final product!
This is where we ate lunch… at the top! And if you look really close, you can see Okarito behind where I’m standing. Okay, not really, but that’s about where it is.
After we made it to the bottom, we went to check the mail and to our surprise we had a package. Colin’s mom had shipped our other zoom lens. (which we are so thankful for) It would just figure that it would show up right after this hike, where we could have got some awesome pictures with it. Haha.
by Andre’a and Colin Feldhaus
We saw this fantastic bumper sticker we saw a while back and I just had to post it. I just wish some people would tell you how they really feel….
by colin
(Andre’a) So, a couple weeks ago, we had a lot of rain. And by a lot of rain, i mean… A LOT OF RAIN! (Probably more than San Angelo, sees in a few years!!) The storms weren’t that unusually big, it’’s just that we had 4 of them right after another. Our hostel grounds ended up getting flooded pretty bad and had some plumbing issues, but other than that we survived.
So along with all the rain, came other catastrophes as well. The Fox Glacier (45 minutes away) had major problems. The road to get out to the glacier was washed away… with some vehicles stranded on the other side… and still are. As I hear right now, it looks like they won”t even be able to reopen it up for another 3 months or so… That’s right in the middle of the peak season too… bummer! But good for the Franz Glacier Guides! They are and will be pretty busy for awhile since they are the only glacier open. As far as the Franz Josef Glacier goes, they had some ice collapse causing the cave in the front to get bigger and tons of ice to float down the gushing river! We were lucky on our day off to run into a fellow Okaritoan (who is a glacier guide) at the Franz Josef coffee shop, Full of Beans. (I love that name!) Anyway, he told us to check out the glacier… it would be well worth a visit and would be so different than the last time we were there. So we did…
This is the “new” glacier. You might be able to compare it to some pictures from a previous post about the Franz Josef glacier. As you can see, it’s still a bit rainy outside.
Here are some big chunks of ice that were laying on the riverbed. Amazing!
You can kinda see the large pieces of ice next to my feet. Although they do blend in with the background a bit… but look how large they are!
Colin trying to be a “macho man”…. I mean, he IS a macho man…..
I like how you can see the rain falling in the background.
Me and my sissy piece of ice! My hands are getting really cold!!
by Andre’a Feldhaus
The last day of whitebait season. We figured we couldn’t live on the west coast of New Zealand for 6 months right in the middle of whitebaiting season, and not give it a go. So on the very last day, at the wrong tide, we tried…. and were VERY unsuccessful! But we did it and got some pictures, and that’s what matters.
Andre’a makes it look alot harder than it actually is. But she might tell you differently… This is where she pulls up the big “puddin” as they call it… or not…
Note from Andre’a – This picture really does not give justice as to how difficult this really is… especially when the tide is against you. It’s so hard to keep the net straight in the water without the tide pulling it sideways. And as weird as it sounds, the water really does weigh down the net, making it very heavy to pull up. Colin struggled too, he just won’t admit it!!!
Note from Colin – I told you that is what she would say, and it was easy for me.
See, look how easy I make it look.
I caught a whitebait and Andre’a didn’t!!! I found this little crab and put him in the bucket. It was only after playing with him a little while, did I notice that he was actually eating a whitebait fish…
Another note from Andre’a – I don’t think catching a crab in a bucket and it just happened to be eating a whitebait fish… counts as actually catching one. So, the final count of whitebait we caught was….0!
by Colin Feldhaus
