We took many pictures during our time in New Zealand, but we don't want to bore you with one beautiful scene after another. For those of you reading our blog, we highly recommend traveling to New Zealand for a few weeks if you can. It is totally worth it!
We camped, we hiked, we surfed, we met lots of friendly people and saw familiar faces too. We tried to go to every corner, but we did not make it, and so we will have to go back.
Some cave exploring
We hiked to both Fox Glacier and Franz Josef Glaciers. This is Franz Josef Glacier in the background.
We fed alpacas and got some really amazing warm wool/alpaca/possum socks, which were essential for winter camping, which we did on several nights.
Anj about to drop down 100 feet into "The Abyss"
The famous New Zealand Glowworms
Our enthusiasm during our training before entering the caves. Check out our super cool outfits.
We found a beautiful hike up in the Coromandel Peninsula. We just went about half way, but it is meant to be done as an overnight longer trek. Absolutely stunning views!
We stayed with a friend at her family's dairy farm and tried to help out. Mostly, we were unhelpful, but we looked like we knew what we were doing. The days old calves were really cute. There were nearly 200 cows on their farm and daily 4-6 calves were being born. Apparently, we arrived just in time for calving season. It was pretty cool to experience a dairy farm at this time. Our friend is from the US and married a Kiwi dairy farmer. It has been his family's business for generations. The whole family was working on the farm while we were there. They are in the middle of building a new milking barn that could milk 20 cows at once, but due to it still being in construction they were having to milk the cows only 2 at a time all day long. On top of that our friend and her husband have a 4 month old baby! Talk about a lot going on.
Of course our trip to New Zealand wouldn't be complete without a stop at Hobbiton.
