New Zealand 2018

I have a problem with directions, namely north, south, east and west. My brain has no instinctual compass and therefore I travel through life going mostly the wrong way. In keeping with my quest to become more and more directionally proficient I decided to travel to a country where everything is backwards. It was not enough to be insecure just part of the time. I chose to drive a car with all it's parts in the wrong place as well as steer that car toward the wrong side of the road. And then I found that when I needed to make a turn the windshield wipers flew on, and when it rained I would use the blinker. And at intersections I just lingered for a long while trying to overthink my next move just to be sure I didn't cross over to the bad side. It took me 12 days to get the hang of it and when I got home the first thing I did was flip the windshield wipers on when I wanted to turn right.

So New Zealand (South Island) was great. Of course the driving was bonkers but so was the climate. I just couldn't accept that a subtropical rainforest can exist within a quarter mile of an actively moving glacier. Buckets of warmish rain falling in torrents, warm steam rising out of the jungle and oh yea, that's ice just ahead.

---Franz-Joseph Glacier Track---

Also the water situation threw me off. There's a lot of water in New Zealand whether it's coming down from the sky or in a river roiling down from a melting glacier, grey with sediment. Sometimes the rivers can be clear dark blue or bright light blue or milky turquoise blue. The lakes...well their color changes with the sun. There's even the Tasman Sea which gets a piece of all these shades of water. And I haven't mentioned the white water which cascades down a cliff face only when it rains hard and long.

grey water from the glacier above, the river is full of emulsified sediment (Mount Cook)

----Hooker Valley Track---

clear blue glacial water with no sediment ---Rob Roy Glacier Track---

milky blue rivers in the valley, a combination of glacier runoff and rainwater 

clear multi-blue lake near Queenstown

slate blue Lake Tekapo

baby blue Lake Pukaki (fed by the Mt Cook glaciers)

orange Lake Wanaka

The Tasman Sea (west coast)

AND....Milford Sound (fiords)

THE BIGGEST "WOW" OF THE TRIP

This only happens when it's raining....on our way back through this canyon at the end of the day the cliffs were dry