Live.Love.Travel.: Roadtrip

Day 41
We checked out of Queenstown to get a shuttle to the airport to get our rented car for our roadtrip! Everyone could now know how cheap we were as the car had El Cheapo splashed across the side. Haha! Dunedin, a university town, was our destination of the day. Charlotte had a friend from Whistler named Emma that was letting us stay with her. She goes to school in Dunedin but she is from Taupo. When we arrived all of us plus her roommate jumped into Emma's car to show us around. We went up a couple hills to lookouts where we saw the Pacific Ocean for the first time since getting to New Zealand! We also went to the steepest street in the world, drove through the campus and shown where 'scarfies' live (student ghetto).
Doing as true students do we started drinking games with Emma and her 3 roommates early on in the night and continued till going to the bar at 12. They seemed to think the bars were dead because of exams but we still had fun out till 4 in the morning! Belated birthday celebrations for Charlotte! (she made me say that because she didn't want people thinking she was actually getting old haha!)

World's Steepest Street

Dunedin

Charlotte, Emma and I

Day 42
Once our day got going we said our goodbyes to our Dunedin friends and went on the Cadbury World tour! Mmmmmm chocolate! I felt like I was in the Willy Wonka movie...no umpa lumpas but there was a chocolate waterfall!! After we jumped back into the car we drove north of Dunedin to the Moeraki boulders. It's a mystery how the 60 million year old boulders came to be these large smooth spheres scattered along this pretty beach but it's cool tourist attraction none the less! CHECK!
This is where this day takes a cold turn. On our way back through Dunedin to get to Invercargill, the most southern city in the world, it started snowing! Almost the whole way was like a blizzard! Didn't I leave Canada to avoid this weather?! We arrived late into Invercargill therefore all the hostel receptions were closed meaning we were going to sleep in the car on our coldest night of the trip. We parked in a McDonalds parking lot and embarrassingly enough got a knock on the window at 2am asking us to leave. Kicked out of a McDonalds! We got very little sleep as it hailed all night while we shivered in our little car on a side street.


The 2nd most photographed building in the Southern Hemisphere - Dunedin Rail Station

Moeraki boulders

Day 43
It's hard to tell where the previous day ended and this day began. In the early hours of the day we decided to drive to Bluff for the sunrise. Bluff is known as the end of New Zealand. The saying goes to Cape Reinga to Bluff. The only other reason to go to Bluff is Sterling Point to get a picture of the landmark sign. CHECK! After the sunrise that didn't really happen because it was cloudy of course we went back to Invercargill to check it out in the daylight. There is nothing much to see here except the water tower, as we were told. We then started our drive to Milford Sound. There was lots of snow on the ground and sanded roads. This was a scene I would expect to see in November in Canada not New Zealand. When we got to Milford Sound I was overly excited about a nice warm bed to finally sleep in.

Day 44
We went on the Milford Sound cruise at 9:15 this morning. The weather was not as bad as the day before but since we were on the west coast it was raining. An advantage of the rain is that there was several pretty waterfalls, like the 4 sisters, that wouldn't be there if it had been sunny. The landscape reminded me of Jurassic Park or Avatar with the floating mountains in Pandora ! Also, our search for penguins is over since we saw 2 pairs of Fiordland Crested penguins, one of the rarest penguins in the world! CHECK! Milford Sound is spectacular how massive mountains come straight out of the water and although some peaks took imagination to see because of clouds it was still beautiful and worth the trip!! CHECK! On our way back via the Milford Hwy we stopped a couple times for a few short hikes and lookouts since we couldn't appreciate the trip the day before because of snow. We had lunch in Te Anau, which is about a halfway point between Milford and Queenstown. With a total of about 4 hours we were back in good ol' Queenstown late afternoon!