Arrowtown, New Zealand, 3-9 May, 2006

It’s been almost a week since we arrived in Arrowtown, in the South Island of NZ, about 20 minutes from Queenstown. We’ve been greeted by our gracious host Barbara who introduced us to the area and helped us get over the initial fear of driving on the left.

The area is absolutely magnificent. There are huge snow capped mountains everywhere you look, lush green meadows teeming with sheep, deer and cows, interesting and varied vegetation which includes beautiful mountain beech trees, ferns of all sizes and various other tropical looking plants.

Since it is the end of fall, there are still gold and red trees dotting the mountainsides adding to this lovely unspoiled scenery. There are definitely more sheep then people and very few cars on the roads, which made the adjustment to driving on the left quite easy (most of the time that is). We are getting used to the local dialect here, and managed to understand about half of what’s said at this point.

So far the weather has been cool but sunny and just great for traveling. We took advantage of the sun and drove to Milford Sound (about 5 hours drive) and took an overnight cruise on the magnificent Milford Sound, which is at the Fiordlands National Park area. The sheer, huge, vertical cliffs rising straight up from the sound are truly majestic and awe inspiring. The waterfalls are three times the height of the Niagara Falls. The overnight cruise was very pleasant, and gave us a real sense of the scale of these cliffs. On the way back we stopped in the rain forest near Milford Sound (it rains 300 out of 360 days a year and we were lucky to have totally clear weather). We stayed overnight at a B & B called the Cat’s Whiskers and visited the Te Anau glowworm caves. The drives to Milford Sound, Glenorchy and Paradise have been beautiful with windy roads surrounded with spectacular roads scenery.