I've seen the entire portion of the island visible from the ring road. It is absolutely beautiful and otherworldly... if you count the spectacular waterfalls a

I've seen the entire portion of the island visible from the ring road. It is absolutely beautiful and otherworldly... if you count the spectacular waterfalls and fjordlands as "beautiful" and the barren wastes of Mars and Venus as "otherworldly." If you're particularly inebriated you might see miles and miles of sheep, with no humans in sight, as "alien." If you're from New Zealand this might not be novel, but I'm not. There's nothing quite like hiking for miles before looking down and realizing that you've been walking on a dense two-dimensional mat of berry bushes and spiral-shaped alder trees. It's quite possible that you saw trees but did not recognize them as such -- from a distance, this "flat forest" looks a lot like moss. Not much can survive annual meters-deep snows, which is one of the reasons I'm uncharacteristically flippant about invasive species (the other reason being the sheep population).