New Zedland trip: The mountains

We recently returned from a journey to the south island of New Zealand. The scenery lived up to the quote on the back of our Lonely Planet guide: "New Zealand is jaw-droppingly gorgeous. The word 'Wow!' will escape from your lips at least once a day."

We went well over our once-a-day 'Wow!' quota. 

Peter Jackson's decision to complete the 3 hobbit movies now makes a lot more sense: the Lord of the Rings movies barely touched on the varieties of amazing settings we saw in just 9 days. We took around 1500 photos, so it was a difficult task to choose just some to put on the blog. So, we decided to make a few posts each with its own theme. 

If you would like a sense of where we went, you can see our route on this map.

We'll keep our words brief. Just imagine everything in the pictures being much more towering than it seems.

The topic of this post is: Mountains. There were lots of them. And they were hard to fully capture in photographs, but we tried. 

On the approach to our first destination in Arthur's Pass:

If you look closely, you can see the red-flowering rata (a type of tree) halfway up this mountain. Apparently we came at the right time of year to see them.

The mountains we saw after Arthur's Pass were unmarked (no special look-outs, no signs, etc.). Like they were no big deal. But they were still stunningly beautiful:

One of our goals on the west coast of NZ was to see glaciers. More on those next time. But here's a teaser shot of the mountains on the approach to Fox Glacier:

On a clear day, one can see Mt. Cook from near Fox Glacier. We had great weather luck (though apparently NZ is having a drought now). Here's the tallest mountain on the island... from a very long ways away:

This was only our first view of mighty Cook. It reappeared at various other points along the trip.

After a couple days on the west coast (more about that soon), we headed inland again, via Haast Pass. More outrageously amazing mountains, this time with a river and low clouds:

The mountains continue inland, in a drier way. This is part of a range called 'The Remarkables' near Queenstown.

One of the best-known destinations on the south island is a fjord called 'Milford Sound.' We liked the Sound (fjord), but liked the drive there at least as much:

There were lots of places to stop on the road. One of our hosts had recommended one hike in particular, at a place called 'Gertrude Saddle.' The rock was a sort of silvery granite, and the hike led us straight into a valley with sheer rock walls with bits of forest, alpine shrubs, and waterfalls.

A view of the approach, with some Germans for perspective:

Looking in the opposite direction:

Up closer, on an ascent, with Naomi for perspective:

The view from our lunch spot, with feet for perspective:

And here's a final glance as we looked back while returning. The shrubs were different from anything we've seen before:

After the hike, we went through a tunnel into the Milford Valley. Here are two views of that:

Wow wow wow.

Stay tuned for glaciers, lakes, rivers... and more mountains (of course).