Lake Kaniere and Hokitika Gorge

OK, OK, OK, back to the New Zealand posts. I cannot believe it's been so many months since our awesome trip and I am not done blogging about it!

After leaving Greymouth, we headed just north to Hokitika to check out the scenery. We wound our way through the agricultural land to beautiful Lake Kaniere:

Checked the lovely Dorothy waterfall:

Tim did some awkward stretching:

Then we headed further inland to check out Hokitika Gorge.  We were greeted by this curious fellow in the parking lot, who tried to get into our van while Tim was gathering up his things:

I think this is the weka, one of New Zealand's many flightless birds.

Then we took our picnic lunch down to sit by the beautiful, cloudy blue-green gorge. 

Gah, just look at the color of that water!

Unfortunately, when we got to the edge of the gorge and picked out a nice place to sit on the rocks and enjoy our sandwiches, we were ambushed!  Remember those pretty little fantail birds we saw earlier on our trip? Well, there was another one here and he was none too happy we chose that his particular rock:

As you can see from this shot below, the damn bird kept flying straight at us... that plus the black flies biting the crap out of our legs, so our picnic was a bit short.

But so preeeeeettty, anyway...