Canyoning in Queenstown

My good friend Sara's boyfriend Shay

hooked me up to go canyoning - his friend from childhood runs a company in Queenstown. Sara opted out - she doesn't so much care for the cold, hence her hemisphere-hopping, following an endless summer. It was a chilly, overcast, rainy day, and the river was raging.

We did a couple of zip lines across the river,

abseiled (rappeled) down a cliff,

jumped into the river, swam through rapids. It was crazy. It made me feel so alive,

knowing that it was up to me to keep myself from injury. One guy, Mark,

whose camera we shot these fotos with, actually broke his ankle on one of the swims, caught it underneath a branch or a tree log when he was coming into a cave. I escaped with a few minor bumps and bruises, one from slamming myself back-first into a cliff. I considered myself very lucky. It was an amazing experience,

and we had a great dinner with Mike (the owner) and his wife Tinika later that night, bonding over some drinks and a heated game of Cranium...

Auckland, Second Visit

Queenstown, Second Visit

Castle Rock

And on to Christchurch

The beautiful rolling meadows, the well-manicured hedges. Almost got the Spaceship stuck in the mud turning around to get the meadow snaps.

And I must admit that the second foto was slightly altered. But isn't it perfect?

Moeraki Boulders, Second Visit

The light was better, so I stopped again. These things are amazing. No one's quite sure how they formed or where they came from. But many are perfect spheres, and some have crystalline formations bulging out of weather-worn cracks. Like amber, almost. Saw them featured for a split second in a Toshiba commercial for one of their laptops in the commercial previews in a movie theater in Kuala Lumpur...

Queenstown to Dunedin

After much fun with family and friends, left Queenstown to head back through Dunedin and to Christchurch to return my Spaceship and fly back to Queenstown to visit my friend Sara when she got back in from Vermont. Found champagne and the makers of the wine that had had me lusting after their Pinot Noir ever since first tasting it in Whakapapa some three weeks earlier.

Get this - the owners had to dynamite the rocky land to make a place to plant their grapes. An activity only my dad and I, and possibly Tim and Andy, could really enjoy the true merits of. Turned out they had a distributor in Billings, Montana, of all places.