Planes, Trains & Automobiles

Today was a mixed bag. We were in Wellington, the capital of New Zealand. Our primary mission was to extend our tourist permit until the end of the year so we can stay through Christmas. We entered the country without onward travel from NZ so immigration only gave us 30 days. We tried to do this yesterday but they only serve a limited number of people each day so we had to come back at 8am this morning and everything worked out “sweet” as the clerk said while helping us.

With legal status, we wandered around downtown and had an early lunch at a Malaysian place where the food was good and cheap. We ate …

We finally left the Queenstown/Wanaka area after two weeks of calling it home. We headed up the West Coast to the Marlborough wine region before crossing Cook Strait to the North Island. We stopped at Fox Glacier for a day and took a full-day hike on the glacier.

There are over 6,000 glaciers in NZ, but the Fox and Franz Josef are the two most popular. Nowhere in the world at this latitude have glaciers advanced so close to the sea. Both glaciers are actually advancing instead of receding, which is a phenomenon in itself, but they’re advanced at a rate of 3 feet a day which is also incredible.

We took a short drive to the glacier and …