Christmas in Queenstown

Mike, Dave and I spent two nights in Queenstown over Christmas. It's the most popular tourist destination in New Zealand, a glitzy town with the most expensive real estate in the country. The setting is absolutely gorgeous. On Christmas eve, Mike and I took the gondola up the steep hill behind the town.

For those of you who are golfers, the next photo zooms in on the golf course.

From the top of the gondola, you can look to the north and east towards Arrowtown, a charming little town only a few miles away. Yesterday the newspaper said that Bill Gates is spending New Year's in Arrowtown. It felt just like being back in Seattle to have Bill Gates's travels in the newspaper.

The next photo looks down the lake to the southwest. The little white dot is a pretty large boat that takes tourists up and down the lake.

We stayed up on top as long as we could, watching the sky change as sunset approached.

Christmas Day dawned clear and beautiful. We took a drive along the lake. As the day went on, the weather fell apart, so the following photos give various moods of Lake Wakatipu even though they were taken in the span of only a few hours.

When we left Queenstown the day after Christmas, we headed north over a pass. Looking down from the pass, there was a nice view of Arrowtown nestled at the foot of the hills.

About an hour north of Queenstown is Wanaka, another resort town on a lake with mountains in the background, smaller and less touristy than Queenstown. People say Wanaka is a lot like Queenstown was twenty years ago. It was gray and cloudy when we got there (next photo), then brightened up pretty quickly (last two photos).

Roses in December

We're right at the time of the summer solstice, and it's almost Christmas Day. A combination I'm still not absorbing very well. Last night when I went to bed at 10:40 there was still light in the sky. Today was a sunny beautiful day (windy and not very warm, but clear and beautiful), so Dave and I decided to take a walk in the Botanic Gardens. I particularly wanted to see the rose garden, because the roses in the gardens in our neighborhood are so beautiful. A wedding party was having their photos taken in the rose garden. So here are a few photos of roses in December.

One of the amazing things about New Zealand is all the plants I've never seen before. In the garden at our rental house there are several flowering plants that are new to me. And at the Botanic Gardens today, I saw dozens of flowering plants I'd never seen before. Here are two:

Mike's trip around the South Island

Our son, Mike, arrived a couple weeks ago for a five week visit. This blog post consists of photos he has taken. He flew from Sydney to Dunedin, and the first photo was taken from his plane window and shows the Southern Alps, west of Dunedin. He thinks Queenstown is on one of the lakes in the photo.

A friend of Mike's from Italy was visiting New Zealand, and they went on some outings from our house and then travelled around the South Island together for a few days. This first photo is one of the best penguin photos we've seen from the penguin-watching place near Dunedin. These are yellow-eyed penguins, and there's a baby in the little box. The parents are changing watches -- one stays with the baby at all times while the other one hunts for food. I should have cropped the photo in Photoshop. If you want to see the penguins larger, click on the photo and it will fill your screen.

They took an outing to a beach about an hour north of Dunedin near a town called Moeraki. The round rocks on the beach are called the Moeraki boulders, and no one knows how they were formed. Dave and I went there once, but the tide was too high to get good pictures.

Near Moeraki is a rocky beach called Shag Point where sea lions like to hang out. Below are a couple photos from that beach.

Mike and his friend drove to Milford Sound. The next two photos are on the road to Milford.

They had a sunnier day on Milford Sound than Dave had, so these photos have a really different mood than the ones earlier on this blog.

They also visited Lake Pukaki, which is glacier fed. That accounts for the beautiful color of the water in the next photo.

Lake Tekapo and Lake Alexandrina (where Dave visited last month) are close to Lake Pukaki. Below are some views of those two lakes.

The Church of the Good Shepherd is on Lake Tekapo. It's such a charming building.

Christmas in the Southern Hemisphere

It's sunny today, about 75 degrees. It stays light until 9:30 pm and even at 10 there is still some light in the sky. It totally does not feel like Christmas. It's not so much the warmth, it's more the long light evenings. Yesterday was about 50, gray and rainy. So during the day it felt a bit like Seattle in December, but then in the evening it stopped feeling like Seattle, even though it was still cold and rainy. There's something about daylight at 9 pm that says "not winter, not Christmas, not now."

Last week I went to a Christmas service for children at a church, and they sang a bunch of carols I knew and a few I didn't. That helped make Christmas more real. The words to one carol were wonderfully appropriate for the southern hemisphere:
Candle, candle, burning bright,
Shining in the warm summer light.
Candle, candle, burning bright,
Fill our hearts with Christmas light.

We're loving getting Christmas cards from friends and hearing everyone's news. That feels like Christmas. Today I ran some errands in the car, and for the first time the radio station was playing some carols, so that felt good. I think mostly this first year in New Zealand we're just watching ourselves to see how different things make us feel. Maybe next year we can then be more intentional to make choices about how to welcome each season.

People here have their favorite Christmas foods, things like strawberries and cherries. We have great fresh asparagus now, maybe that will continue until Christmas day. And the roses are absolutely gorgeous right now. So we'll have to create new Christmas traditions like strawberry shortcake or U-pick cherries. Yum. With roses on the table.

November/December paintings by Dave

Here are three more paintings by Dave. These are all big paintings, approx 11 by 14 inches. The first one is Tairoa Head, at the end of the Peninsula by the albatross colony.

The second one is the mountains west of here, or actually at the beginning of the mountains. We are both so fond of the view of fields in the foreground with mountains in the background. Dave said he had a lot of fun painting the sheep.

The next one is the lighthouse at Shag Point, about an hour north of Dunedin. We saw tons of seals there, just a little ways from the lighthouse.

Queenstown and Milford Sound

Our first visitors from Seattle are here. Hopefully the first of many. Last week Dave went with them to Queenstown and Milford Sound, two of the big tourist attractions on the South Island. The first two photos are on the road to Queenstown.

In the next photo, in the distance, you can see the clubhouse of one of Queenstown's golf courses. Dave made a painting of this scene which I'll try to get scanned and posted on the blog pretty soon.

There's a gondola that takes people up to the top of a hill with a view of Queenstown. Below is Queenstown spread out in its gorgeous lake and mountain setting.

The lake that Queenstown is on, Lake Wakatipu, is long and narrow. Our friends and Dave drove up the lake to a little village called Glenorchy where they took a walk along the lake. The next two photos are from that walk.

The next photo of Mirror Lake is on the way to Milford Sound.

The weather was good the whole trip until they got to Milford Sound, where it clouded up and rained. The main upside of seeing Milford Sound in the rain is that lots of waterfalls begin to flow. The hillsides are so steep and have so little dirt that the rain is not absorbed and falls down the hillsides.

On the way back from Milford Sound they drove through lots of farmland with mountains in the background. The amusing twist of the next photo is two fold. There was a flock of seagulls flying around the sheep and the tractor making a cloud of white, while the man on the tractor was talking on his cell phone.

The woman below is moving a huge flock of sheep from one field into another one with the help of two dogs and a pickup truck.

On the way home they drove through Gore (which is near Clinton, a fact that New Zealanders love to tell Americans -- they call the road between the two towns "the presidential highway"). Dave's interest in Gore is that the Mataura River runs through the town, and the Mataura River is one of the best flyfishing rivers in New Zealand. The town of Gore celebrates its fame as a flyfishing capital with the statue below. Dave watched two big brown trout cavorting in the Mataura below the bridge in Gore and wished he had his fishing gear with him.