Shine Falls

Today was a gorgeous day and we had a very successful hike! We also had a great end to last night, cooking ourselves some lamb steaks, marinated in a honey mint rosemary flavor and it was delicious! A couple of kiwi guys from Wellington were staying at the hostel for the long weekend (Monday is a public holiday) and were having a good time in the hostel lounge, chatting people up, and were overall very friendly. They (jokingly) told me that John and I could stay at their flat in Wellington. 

But on to today! We got up a little later than planned, so we decided to just stick to one hike for today and headed up to the Boundary Stream Reserve to go see a nice waterfall. There wasn't a could in the sky almost the whole time, the sun was out, but it wasn't too hot and there was a nice breeze--perfect hiking (called "tramping" here) weather! The track took us first through some private farm land where we walked past a lot of sheep and a lot of sheep poop:

We then ventured from farmland to some of the last remaining native forest in mainland New Zealand--and obviously they are trying to preserve it as it's part of a reserve. We learned at Te Papa that most of NZ was originally covered in forest, but the Maori took down some of it but the Europeans came and got rid of most of the rest of it through slashing and burning--turning it into farmland. The forest part was great, though It felt more like a jungle with big trees and ferns ( the big ferns are what excites John):

We finally made it to Shine Waterfall, after a not too bad hike, and had some lunch while enjoying the view (it's 40 meters, about 120 feet tall!):

We then hiked up some more on a very STEEP path, trying to get a view from the top, and while we could barely see it up there we did get a great view of another waterfall as well as the valley below:

All in all it was a great first hike and we had great weather. We are all set for our first official tramp tomorrow, and we are staying two nights in the hut! So expect another update in about two days.