New Zealand- South Island

There was this pretty cool low lying fog over the lake that we camped by, which we woke up to one morning and we had to get a picture of.  It's pretty hard for us not to take a picture of almost everything we see in New Zealand because everywhere you look is some picturesque scene.  It's so common here that you start to take it for granted after a while.

The water here is so amazingly clean and clear.  And it's so reflective, that you can see the mountains more clearly in the reflection than when you actually look directly at the mountains. 

There are these alpine parrots called Keas that are really interesting (or cheeky as they say here).  They are pretty large birds, and 2 of them ran up to us, jumped on our car, and tried to bite it everywhere they could.  I thought it was crazy enough that there are parrots that live in snowy, cold, mountainous areas, and even crazier that they were attacking our car.

 the Milford Sound

We took a cruise through the Milford Sound and saw lots of steep, jagged, snow topped mountains jutting out from the water.

From the boat, we saw a big group of New Zealand fur seals napping on the rocks.

We were so amazed at the light blue color of the water, and the ice bergs and glaciers at Mt Cook National Park.

you can see some of the icebergs floating in the background

probably not a good idea to try to ride an iceberg

This is the type of view we see from the car quite often as we drive around the south island.

 Lake Tekapo