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The last days have been getting up before dawn and driving up towards the face of Mount Cook to shoot the early light on the snow topped peaks and then spending the day driving from one amazing view to another then staying out late to shoot the setting sun on the glaciated waters. This equals days that start at 4 am. and finish around 10:30pm Those of you who know me are chuckling right now at the idea of me being coherent in any way at 4 am. (not exactly known as a morning person) The whole routine makes for a sleepy Bobbi way to early at night, and with the days lasting longer here it is really strange to be ready for PJ’s when the sun is still out.

I have to say, that there are some pretty funny things in this country. Like, I bet you never saw this on the local Sub Way menu:

And even though every one warned me that there are quite possibly more sheep than humans in this country, I NEVER expected to meet one named Shrek…who grows such thick wool that they can’t keep up with keeping him trimmed.. There are pictures of him looking like a giant stuffed animal, but I’m here to tell you that a big woolly animal that gets wet smells way way worse than an old wool sweater!

And then there are things like this, a super old Ford that we saw stuffed inside a wooden shack at the back of a little garden/shop we stopped at to have yummy hot black currant juice…

and the really really big dog that helped serve us dinner last week…who wears a sign that says not to feed him.

Of course there is a whole lot of amazing too….The lakes near Mount Cook are fed by glacier water and snow melt so they are the perfect color of cyan..not blue, not sort of green.. cyan.. The blogger version of this image won’t show it well, but this is a KRAZY color for water.

Oh, and just in case you can’t tell how big the glacier blobs in this picture are, that tiny yellow thing is a raft big enough to hold twenty people in it.

We got to take a helicopter to the second highest peak next to Mount Cook so that we could shoot from the snow patch we landed on… seriously one of the greatest things I’ve done in a long time.. the space and views are just glorious… that really is the only word I can think of to describe it.

The Lupine are all blooming, so the landscape smells and looks amazing. We are fighting with the wind to try and get some good wide shots for clients to use, but even just trying is great work. To be honest, I may never want to see another Lupine again after this trip!

The next two days are wrap up days and travel back up the coast to Christchurch. I’m sorry to be leaving, but really glad to be getting back home to Mark and the puppies! As soon as I can, I’ll post the real set of pictures for you all to see if you’d like .
Hope you all had a great Thanksgiving Holiday! I watched Women’s Net ball (which is a really strange form of basketball with no backboard and girls that don’t dribble the ball.) but even without pumpkin pie it was easy to spend time thinking of our friends and families and missing them a BUNCH!

best,

bh

long long day…. I hope it will be alright if I just post some quick selects of images taken recently. The bird shots aren’t exactly my area of expertise, but just getting a chance to see them in the wild is enough to be worth it to me. so, please, forgive the snapshot nature of some of these…

In the last 7 days I have traveled and shot in Christchurch, Oamaru, around the entire Otago Peninsula, the cities of Dunedin and Portobello (yes they grow the mushrooms there) and around Te Anau – Milford Sound.

I have gotten up at way too early and to sleep way to late on a regular basis to get to some locations prior to sunrise and then lay in wait for fog to lift off of mountain peaks and hiked about in amazing mazes of hides to see elusive creatures like the yellow eyed penguin (there are estimated to be less than 24 breading pairs in all of New Zealand, less than 1500 in the world) spent hours waiting for fog to lift from the top of Mitre Peak, shot dozens of images in vain trying to capture an albatross in flight (they may be big, but man are they fast!) and most recently driven 3 hours before dawn to catch morning light on waterfalls that feed Milford Sound.

Those of you who have enjoyed the visuals from the Lord of the Rings Film series may be able to appreciate this: The scenery is amazing.. the old growth rain forests are lush and the animals (Kea birds, Seals, Oyster Catchers, Sheep, Deer, Albatross, Penguins) are abundant… but the trade off is that the world that made up Middle Earth for those films…is not so internet friendly. All this is to say, sorry for taking so long for my next blog post. I’m sitting in a nice little motel room in Mildford Sound after a 17 hour day of early driving, shooting, waiting, shooting, swatting at the scary little black biting flies and more shooting. Tomorrow we get a “late start” and drive out at 8a.m. to See if Lake Manpouri has any pastoral scenes worthy of our clients.

I’m exhausted but happy.. too tired to really pull any images to show, so I’ll just include two low resolution versions of the yellow eyes penguins that we waited in a blind at a special reserve to see if we could capture a glimpse of. I’m told there are less than 24 breading pairs in this country. In addition to some shots of a parent keeping an egg warm near a man made safe space, we managed to capture two more wild adults returning from the sea with food in their tummies to bring to recently hatched young. The pictures I’m posting here are of a single adult that waddled his lovely little fat body up from the beach and then after we watched him preen for quite a while he finally moved his way up from the sand and right past where we where hiding on his way to his little family. I was hoping to just be able to see one from far far away… this little man walked past us and then stood with his back to us contemplating his long waddle home and then trudged his way across the grasses to his spouse and new born to trade places and watch the nest.

I hope to be able to post more soon. We should have access to the internet for the next couple of days.. then we are on our way to Queenstown. so there should be some shots of kingston flyer railway line (this is all in the remote area where a lot of the Lord of the Rings was actually filmed…

Mark and I love it when you guys add comments to the blog ( you don’t have to register or anything…just click on the comments link below this posting and let us know how you are and or say Hi etc. it makes us feel like there are people we know out there when we travel!

best regards from Middle earth!

bh

Breakfast this morning was at a little place next door to the motor lodge…how very Route 66 of them. Except of course for the menu itself, I don’t think Marmite and 14 grain toast with passion fruit filled yogurt was ever served to people with white wall tires on their rides. For those of you who haven’t tried Marmite, it’s a salty sort of brown paste made from yeast that turns out to be pretty tasty on toast…they swear it is good for you, but it does make me wonder if I’m turning the wheat from the bread I just ate into some form of beer in my tummy with all that yeast.

It took me a moment to decide if I wanted any after being offered a pot of “plunger coffee” maybe it is the jet lag, but my first thought was of scary use of plumbing equipment and not what basically turns out to be a French Press. I’m sure the waitress thought I was daft when I had to ask “so, the plunger coffee, it’s made here?” The best thing about this place is also the most strange: The Bee Gees are blaring through the place…not just a single song from a play list, but whole albums now I have the song “tragedy!” stuck in my head and indeed it is one…

Yesterday was “cup day” (this is part of the week long horse racing and shows going on here in Christchurch.) So, besides the obvious racing and horse shows, there is apparently a contest for things like best hat and best dressed people.. with outfits that would have made Eliza Doolitle proud (as well as the Queen Mum!) But the best part is this: one of the prizes goes to a category titled “Edge Dress” which would appear to be whatever outlandish costume a person is willing to show up in.. the winner? A woman wearing only a hat and skirt with the rest of her outfit painted on. I’m no prude, a full salute to anyone daring enough to go for it…my issue is that it was less than 60 degrees yesterday and this poor woman was using pink paint to keep warm!

It’s raining in a way that only New Zealand can conjure…now I know how this place stays so middle earthy green! But we can see the sun trying to burn through on the horizon line so this afternoon’s shooting should still be a go. We are 18 hours ahead of central time here so the whole today/tomorrow thing won’t make any sense, but Wednesday morning we are leaving Christchurch to Grab shots near the Selwyn River and then over to the Pacific Ocean to a town called Oamaru. Looking forward to lots of beach and Moeraki boulders to shoot there.

Mark got back home from Bulgaria this afternoon, Tbilisi is still under a state of emergency so the decision to postpone that leg of the trip was clearly a good one…   The puppies are so glad that he’s back that the two of them are piled on top of him while all three take a much deserved nap.