Kepler Track, The West Coast, and Nelson Lakes

This post is long overdue, for which we apologize.  But we have a good excuse: a cyclone surprised us as we headed up the west coast of New Zealand a week or so ago...

But before that, we had an awesome 3-day hike along the Kepler Track.  This was a fairly long (36-38 mile) hike through beach forest and along a ridgeline straight out of Lord of the Rings:

Awesome scenery, no mishaps, and we even managed to dodge the rain -- which poured down like the wrath of god, but only when we were in the hut and just after we made it back to the car at the end of the hike.  We'll just let the photos speak for themselves.  Here's a link to the full album.

After making it back to the car, we drove up to Arrow Town for a day of wine tasting and rest before heading to the west coast, where we hoped to do more hiking.  Little did we know, a cyclone was bearing down.  Apparently, the media played up the last cyclone, which was a dud, and so no one really raised an alarm over this one, which was definitely not a dud.

We didn't get nailed by the worst of it, but did have 5-6 days of windy and wet weather as we made our way through the pass and up the coast.  We did manage a few day hikes, had a good swim in the public pool at Hokatika, and stopped at the cool Pancake Rock formations.

From there, we headed inland to Nelson Lakes.  Once at the Lakes, we had two great days of day hiking, and one of the best campsites yet.

We followed that with a (difficult) 2-day trip from Nelson Lakes out to Angelus Hut, perched among alpine ridges and accessed by an eight-kilometer ridgeline that took us about six hours to hike - most of it was scrambling, rocky business - but the views were fantastic.

Here's a link to the full album.

We're in Nelson now, hanging out with some Kiwi's we met in Milford Sound, beer tasting, and recovering from a 2-day kayaking trip that sorely tested Erin's patience with Brook's steering. But more on that later...