Stuck in the snow

It is snowstorm in New Zeeland. It is funny – we have had unusually good weather every day we spent here so far and yesterday it just turned. Luckily is hasn’t really affected our activities yet but it looks like it might change.

A couple of days ago we had a beautiful mountain bike tour around the lake in Queenstown. It was one of those perfect winter days with clear blue sky and sunshine. Of course it was a little cold – but as we say in Sweden “there is no bad weather, only bad clothes”. The bike tour was nearly 3 hours and in the end of it we had a great lunch just by the lake. It was real “life is good” moment.

After the bike tour we started our drive to Manapouri - a cute little village just by a lake. This is where we stayed the night before our trip to Milford Sound – in the Fiordland National Parks (what a beautiful place!!!!). We didn’t want to stay in Milford Sound since it is easy to get caught there in the winter. (And we still nearly did.) We went to Milford Sound in the early morning for our sea kayaking trip and already on the way there we were warned about the weather. You see – you have to drive through a pass to get there and the pass might close if there is a lot of snow (high risk of avalanches). And we knew that there was a lot of snow coming in. Anyhow – we arrived to Milford Sound with great weather and decided to take the kayaks out, but stay close to the starting point/harbor. We didn’t want to get caught by the weather far out, since it might be very hard to get back or to find another place to get out of the kayaks. We had a local guide, Paul, and since I’m new to kayaking I got to go with him. What a great guy! He kept me laughing the whole time and showed how to play around with the kayak. This is my kind of sport! I might start doing it back home in Sweden. I mean – there are great opportunities to do it in Stockholm. It was a lovely kayak tour even if we had to cut it short, only 2,5 hour instead of 4-5 hours. After the tour we had a quick lunch and then we headed back to Manapouri so we would not get caught by the snow.

We came back without any problems and spent a nice relaxing afternoon and evening in the motel, watching a movie, playing some game and sorting out pictures. Then we woke up this morning and found out that the road back to Queenstown is closed. And we were supposed to go there on our way to the highlight of the tour – the Copland hike!?! So here we are, stuck in Manapouri, waiting for the clearance to drive to Queensland. Our tour leaders are a lot of fun though – they decided that we should go for a 2 hour hike in the snow.  It was actually a quite nice hike, but I didn’t have the proper clothes for it (wasn’t prepared for a hike today), so now I’m sitting here in a coffee place slightly wet, sipping on a cup of nice jasmine tea and blogging. But I can definitely think of quite many worse ways to spend my day. My only worry is that the snow might stop us from doing the Copland hike. But in any case – I’m still in beautiful New Zeeland and if we can’t do that hike we can for sure do a lot of other nice things.