Another stunning day

Yep I was right. It was a beautiful trip indeed - take a look at our pics and you'll see what we mean.

The Lakes, situated in the northernmost ranges of the Southern Alps were the kind of thing you see in the movies. Your cynical mind is sure that some clever digital enhancement 'jiggery pokery' has gone into making everything look so damned perfect. They came complete with perfect skies, mirror-like reflections, ducks, black swans & eels - all thriving in the protected environment where 'wild' is king. If you are 'native' even better.

One of the things that is not quite the flavour of the month is the poor ferret. . We went for a short walk around one of the lakes & the only thing that spoilt the illusion of Eden is the traps for these poor little blighters. Unfortunately for them, we humans thought it wise in 1877 to bring them in from England to kill the rabbits (which we'd also introduced...). This was a great success and now that all the rabbits are gone the ferrets are after the birds. The New Zealanders are rather fond of their little Kiwi birds which are now endangered (apparently mostly due to the ferrets). You can of course see that if us silly humans hadn't brought over those rabbits in the first place then that fluffy Kiwi birds would be thriving. And who gets it in the neck? The poor fluffy ferret.

Such is life.