Lake Matheson Walk

After our amazeballs helicopter tour of Fox Glacier and Mt. Cook, Tim and I decided to take another look at the mountains, this time from a different perspective.  We heard the Lake Matheson walk had some beautiful mirror images of the mountains... 

Sadly, we were disappointed to see that the lake was not doing much reflecting that day.  But, honestly, after our crazy awesome helicopter flight, pretty much anything would have been somewhat disappointing.  But we had a nice walk anyway:

Lots of fun little things to see in this temperate rainforest, like colorful mushrooms:

Sky rat!  I mean... fancy pigeon.  In New Zealand they call these native pigeons kereru, kuku or kukupa... they're quite large, quite pretty, and not quite as annoying as American pigeons.  Apparently their fruit/seed dispersal is essential to regeneration of native forests.

Lots of cool looking berries:

As we looped around the lake, you could see the clouds our helicopter pilot mentioned making their way over the top of the mountains towards us... a bit ominous!:

Lots of spider webs with cool rain droplets:

And a big-ass spider... this thing was large and in-charge:

The clouds, they're coming!  We got back to the car just in time for the rain to start...

Singapore's Southern Ridges Trail

While in Singapore, Tim and I like to take the opportunity to walk around a lot because of the wide, non-open-sewer-adjacent sidewalks and lovely public parks...  we heard about a cool hiking (well, walking... this is still Singapore) trail that spans several of those parks, traverses some of the remaining patches of jungle and has some great views: the Southern Ridges Trail.  We decided to give it a go... over 9 km of jungle trail spanning several parks, accessible by public transportation... what more can you ask of an urban park?

We started out by taking the train to the Harbourfront MRT station, then climbing the steep steps up through the secondary forest to the top of Mount Faber.  At the top there was a pretty sweet view of the surrounding apartments, distant business towers, and the cable car to Sentosa, Singapore's resort area:

You could see a bit of Singapore's famous port through the trees, as well as a giant statue depicting the city's famous mascot, the Merlion:

 From there, we fended off busloads of tourists wielding umbrellas to make it through to the Henderson Waves pedestrian bridge, which is this cool, wavy structure that connects Mount Faber to the next hill, Telok Blangah Hill Park, 36 meters above the road below:

By this time, we were overheating and dripping with sweat, so we stopped to buy a drink.  I caught sight of these signs, which reminded me of one of EPA's mascots, Slim Bin, a favorite of all of my friends who spent time at the office formerly known as the Office of Solid Waste:

From there we kept on the Southern Ridges Trail on the Hilltop Walk, where we saw some pretty massive and cool looking trees as well as a massive and cool looking spider who had his web strung from tree to tree across a road:

Next we went through the Forest Walk, a raised walkway that winds through some pretty secondary forest: 

Next, Floral Walk and Hort Park, a lovely botanical garden:

Aaaand, we ended with the Canopy Walk to Kent Ridge Park, a hill that was used for defense of Singapore during WWII.   More views of Singapore's vast shipping industry as well as a couple big monitor lizard sightings:

And, in conclusion, some of my favorite signs from around the park:

I love the angry monkey face:

 

They said poo...  heh heh:

How one might grab a bird in this manner is a mystery to me: