Day Twelve - Lake Te Anau / Fjordland

December 22- Today was an amazing day of sightseeing. I can truly say that I have seen some of the most beautiful places on planet earth. It would truly be a hard thing to find somewhere on this planet that rivals the beauty of Fjordland. It is this amazing place of extremely sharp and high mountains, all coming straight out of the ocean, at times coming up a mile out of the ocean's surface. Just breathtaking.

Our excursion in Fjordland was a boat through the part of Fjordland named Milford Sound. It was a pretty chilly day, but the views of the mountains coming straight out of the water, with the cool mist clinging to the peaks, made for a very surreal surrounding.


There were waterfalls cascading down the sides of the mountains from all sides, and seals that had parked themselves on to rocks. It is just something that is hard to put into words. Hopefully once I get my pictures up on to Snapfish, they will help to get an idea of the beauty this place holds. So saying that, I won't try to put Fjordland into words, except for maybe one...exquisite.

Driving back to Lake Te Anau from Fjordland, we made some stops at some other beautiful places. One of the most memorable was a placed simply called "The Chasm", a deceptively ordinary name for an extraordinary place. Like the Glow Worm caves, it's this place on the side of a mountain that has been carved out by centuries of water flowing through the rocks, and creating these amazing holes and caverns, and waterfalls. It is one of those places that when you see it, the turqoise blue water cascading through these unreal rock formations, that your heart stops for a second and you just have to gasp at the beauty that you are beholding. Unreal.

The next place that we stopped off at was this place called "Mirror Lakes", and that's exactly what they were, these perfectly still lakes at the bottom of snow capped mountains, that perfectly reflected them. We also stopped at a place where we took pictures of the Lupins (wildflowers) that just grew in FIELDS all over the south island. They are in these amazing shades of vibrant purple and pink.

What a day! On to Queenstown (can't wait!)