New Zealand - Keas, Rainbows, Sandfly Lullaby

Earlier this week we spent 2 days backpacking in Nelson Lakes National Park. We hiked up to Bushline Hut the first day and camped overnight.

I woke up a few times to the sounds of squaking Kea (green colored alpine parrot). according to some other campers, the birds had been picking at the strings of our tent.

Eli stayed sound asleep and missed the commotion even though I shook him a few times.

The hike up Mt Roberts was breathtaking as we climbed above the clouds along a rocky ridge. At one point, we looked down into a valley and saw a full rainbow. It was surreal to be standing above a rainbow. Our camera was too cold to work so we only got this one picture of it.

The last few days we have been fighting off swarms of biting sandflies. We are undecided as to whether we like them more or less than mosquitos. They are bloodsuckers too but more aggressive than mosquitos. They especially like Eli. We read somewhere that sandflys only sleep at night so to entertain Eli, I made up a "sandfly lullaby" one evening.

The one thing we forgot to bring on our trip was a wine bottle opener. We shopped around for a corkscrew and found one for $2.40! What a deal! Well on our first attempt at opening some wine, the screw broke.

Eli was able to use his pliers to get the cork out, thankfully. We've since decided to splurge and now we own the $6 corkscrew. Hope it works!

One of our favorite passtimes is skipping river rocks and building cairns (stacks of rocks). NZ has tons of perfect rocks.

We even stopped at a beach where there were thousands of cairns built by passerbys.

Yesterday we stopped at Fox Glacier and Franz Josef Glacier. Again, amazing.

We are currently in Queenstown, NZ and it is sunny and beautiful. T

he lakes and mountains have colors that seem unreal...vivid blues and greens. Our next adventure will take us into Fiordland National Park where we will do some more backpacking or "tramping" as they say in NZ.