Skiing at Cardrona today was pretty hairy, couldn’t tell the sky apart from the snow.
If you took the whole of norway, scrunched it up a bit, shook out all the moose and reindeer, hurled it ten thousand miles round the world and filled it with birds then you’d be wasting your time, because it looks very much as if someone has already done it.
Fiordland, a vast tract of mountainous terrain that occupies the south-west corner of south island, new zealand, is one of the most astounding pieces of land anywhere on god’s earth, and one’s first impulse, standing on a cliff top surveying it all, is simply to burst into spontaneous applause.
It is magnificent. it is awe-inspiring. the land is folded and twisted and broken on such a scale that it makes your brain quiver and sing in your skull just trying to comprehend what it is looking at. mountains and clouds jumbled on top of each other, immense rivers of ice cracking their way millimetre by millimetre through the ravines, cataracts thundering down into the narrow green valleys below, it all shines so luminously in the magically clear light of new zealand that to eyes which are accustomed to the grimier air of most of the western world it seems too vivid to be real.
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