Travels continue with Morgan though the South Island with lots of long car rides, new friends, and lots of waterfalls.
After Queenstown, we drove to our next stop, Wanaka. Wanaka is another small town with not much going on. After a walk by the lake, Morgan decided we needed to liven up our lives. We went to a shooting range and shot a rifle at targets! I didn’t think I’d be shooting guns in New Zealand. Next we decided to go to the Winery closest to town. We tasted some wine at a vineyard with a beautiful view despite the sad grapeless vines. The guy who owned the shooting place gave us some great tips of where to go in town and on our drive up to Franz Joseph. He told us to check out a movie theatre in town but really it was like a little tiny cafe and a theatre, so we walked in and walked right out and found the place he told us to go for dinner, which was some typical kiwi food according to him.
We found two travelers in our hostel in Wanaka who needed a ride to Franz Joseph Glacier so I invited them to join us in the car ride up. So Lina from Germany and Irene from Italy joined us in the next part of our journey. On the way we stopped at some blue pools with crystal clear turquoise water. We learned about some desire rocks which people pile on top of each other with wishes they want, long term wishes are the rocks on the bottom and short term wishes are on top. After the blue pools we stopped at a couple waterfalls. The waterfalls were really nice this day because it was pretty rainy. After checking into our hostel we went for another walk through amoss covered forest called Peters pool with our new friends. At the end of the walk it had gotten pretty rainy and dreary out so ack at our hostel we jumped in the hot tub they have to relax and heat up.
The following morning we drove in the pouring rain to greymouth to drop our friends off before making our way back to Christchurch for the night. Of course with the rain the waterfalls were everywhere. We made a few stops along the way to see a random row of toilets on the side of the road, a giant doughnut in a playground, and we stopped to have Morgan try her first meat pie at Sheffields Famous Pies. After 5 hours of driving I was exhausted.
On our last day in Christchurch we did a lot of random things. We went to the Christmas store, the cookie time factory, and went for a walk near the ocean. After filling our day with random things in Christchurch we boarded a giant two story plane to Sydney.
