~ The Fjordlands - Lake Manapouri & Milford Sound ~

Hellooooouuuu =)

... back from another awesome weekend!!
We´ve been to the New Zealand Fjordlands and it was simply amazing - I loved it! The landscape was so different again that we sometimes felt like on another planet... mountains, lakes, forests, fjords... and all within such short distances.

We stayed in a town called Manapouri and were lucky to get a friend's holiday house for the weekend - and their house is right at the beautiful lake Manapouri.
From there to get to Milford Sound is a great drive as there's so much to see on the roads. You also have to pass through Homer Tunnel (look it up!) to get through the mountains to the actual fjordlands. So one can say the trip is half the fun.
In Milford itself I took a 2:15 hr cruise along the Sound and I can't even explain in words how much fun I had. We were lucky concerning the weather as well as it wasn't raining, which in that area is pretty rare... the views were spectacular and also the animal world loved us on our trip as we saw seals and our boat was followed by a whole group of dolphins :-)

So, to sum it up - breath-taking!!!

Enjoy the photos!

Lake Manapouri

on the road...

My cruise on Milford Sound

VIDEO of the dolphins!!! =)

~ Mount Dobson & Tekapo ~

Hi again everybody!! =)

I hear you´re melting away in Europe due to the heat you´re getting up there over the last few weeks and hope you all enjoy the beautiful summertime, swim in the lake and drink lots of Bavarian beer for me!! :)

As I´m on the other side of the world and it´s actually winter here (even though the temperatures don´t really show that) I definitely had to go skiing in New Zealand - and so I did on this last weekend!
We´ve been back to Timaru over the weekend, didn´t stay there though, but I joined Michael´s brother Tim, his girlfriend Kate and some other friends for a skiing trip. So we went to Mt. Dobson and must admit that while it was raining down in the towns, we had a beautiful sunny day as soon as we´ve made it through the clouds up into the ski fields on the mountain. We had a great skiing day, fantastic weather and lots of fun!! =)

Afterwards, Michael met us down at the mountain and we drove further on to Tekapo. There we enjoyed an awesome time at Lake Tekapo with some walks along the lake, relaxed in the hot pools (which was fantasic after a day of skiing) and discovered some Lord of the Rings countryside, didn´t we 'my preciousssss'?

skiing at Mount Dobson

Lake Tekapo and surroundings