Mark_twells' photostream  

Eased with a surfactant (soap to you and me) it does it's thing about 10 minutes after. Lots of warm, bubbly water.

Contrast this with the scenes in Doubtful when it's been raining (just search flickr or just click here). This gets 7 metres of rain a year, and when it rains it plummets. Down the hillsides. Wet gets a whole new meaning.

So does remote. To get here from Te Anau, the nearest significant town involves a coach of 20k, a trip across a freshwater lake of about 30km, then a drive across the Wilmot Pass (a road that connects nowhere to erewhon) of about 30km, then another saltwater boat of around 30km.....

This isn't populated! No-one could live here. It's too wet.

There is a story of an early NZ schoolmaster packing up and moving out here. Apparently left, inundated by rats.....

Huge flat expanse of rock at sea level, taken from above.

It's the scale thing again....

If you ever go, do the Kaikora Peninsula Walkway. it's awesome. With a long lens :-)

There are actually people in this shot, to give it some scale, but you'd be really hard pushed to see them. Pretty central, low down - small group of five or six.

Fox Glacier is quite large (i.e. awesome), and active. Some bits of it calved off whilst we were at the end. The ice, of course, is a delicious blue shade and the erosion is awesome.

New Zealand at it's remote, awesome best (unless you take climbing kit)

from the Lake Brunner Road

The Otira Highway snakes over an impressive new road bridge as one drops down towards Greymouth - though no shots of that because of Kea, which can extract your windscreen in a flash. The river is braided here, like many NZ rivers - the sheer amount of water it carries is impressive. We turned off the Otira Highway and stopped a short way down the Lake Brunner road to look back at this view. This is a rail bridge, and the line largely carries minerals - coal? (and very busy at night, if you ever stop in Arthur's Pass). And it's an impressive piece of engineering.