New Zealand

Kriss and I had a great time in New Zealand. We were busy just about every waking moment. We did a few of the typical touristy things such as a "Maori cultural experience" and the Waitomo Caves, but for a geology student like myself, the best part was the fact that New Zealand is one of the most vocanicaly active areas of the world. What this means is that my wonderful wife and I spent a lot of time checking out volcanoes and their related formations. It is times like this that I really know I found the right woman for me. Not only did she not mind spending her vacation looking at stinky (sulpher) rocks, but she claims to have enjoyed it as much as I. Kriss has done an excellent job of covering our day to day activities on her blog http://krissjohnson.blogspot.com/. So instead of going over everything again, I am going to pick a few of our highlights and cover them in a little more datail. The first post will cover our trip to White Island which is one of the most active volcanic islands in the world. Then I will cover Tongoriro Crossing which is a 17km hike through a UNESCO World Heritage site that is the most volcanicaly active area in New Zealand. I also encountered more than 30 species of birds that I have never seen before and shot pictures of most of them. All together I took over 1100 pictures while in NZ and while I obviously can't post them all here, I will over time cover most of the best.