What do I do now?

I feel like I am so far behind in my posts that I will never catch up. We are currently in Oamaru, just north of Dunedin on the South Island, Dunedin was our first negative experience and that was just because we could not find any free adventures to take, well not as many as we thought we should be able to do. For instance, we did not pay $15/each to see the Royal Albatross and after we talked with a couple who knew about the tour we were glad we did not pay for it. But, I am getting ahead of myself.

FYI, there always seems to be a problem with one of the applications, not so much the application but issues due to connectivity to the applications which are located on some server on the net somewhere in the network cloud. I use Blogger (obviously) which sometimes is slow and gets confused when it cannot connect to various servers, I use Picassa for my photo album sometimes I am not allowed to upload images by some of the service providers (bandwidth concerns on their part, maybe?) they don't want me to consume all their existing bandwidth (kinda ridiculous), and Google Maps. Today it seems to be Google Maps with the connectivity problems, and Blogger a little. So, it is difficult to let you see all that I would like to show you about the places we've been.

Anyway, I need to catch you folks up on the places we have been since Franz Josef & Fox Glaciers; we careened down the west coast to Haast where we turned inland because we had to go around Mt. Aspiring to get to the Fiordlands; yeah, yeah, gorgeous winding roads thru the Southern Alps, rivers below, forest to the sides, beautiful blue skies above, bla, bla, bla;) The scenery and weather has just been spectacular every where we have gone, we have been really lucky with the weather, we keep saying to each other that we should be paid for bringing the good weather with us as we traveled through NZ. All the natural wonders that we have seen, at times we are starting to take it for granted, which is too bad, it is so beautiful in this land. They have a tremendous sense here that they must live with the ecology, not man-handle the ecology, so they have created vast land reserves and national parks.

We spent the night in a cute little village, Arrowtown, not too far north of Queenstown, as we headed for the Fiordlands. This was the last drive (with the possible exception of Wellington to Auckland, when we need to catch our flight) that we will put the hammer down like this and drive for such a long time without a great hike along the way. Arrowtown, was a product of the Gold Rush in NZ during the mid-1800's, this town had a significant Chinese population that migrated for mining. The town has created a park out of the area where the Chinese population was segregated to. The town now seems to be a tourist destination (like quiet of few NZ towns/villages), our accommodations were at a Holiday Park, about 10 blocks from the town center, they were in the midst of a fall festival which had the community buzzing. So the pictures are primarily from the park that had the Chinese artifacts on display.

Well, time to go on down the road, we haven't figured out where yet, which has been our typical modus operandi. But, I will eventually write about, Milford Sound, the Divide in Milford Sound, Humbolt Falls, Mt. Burns, Riverton (our favorite village), Slope Point, Curio Point & the Yellow-Eyed Penguins, Cathedral Caves, Nugget Point, disappointing Dunedin, Oamaru, and ???????

Arrowtown