We had a few days to spare in the north island before we leave New Zealand so we thought we'd go see something a bit different. Rotorua is a city based around an old volcano and so there are geysers and hotpools all over the place, as well as an overpowering smell of sulphur. We spent two days there and had a great time. Day one was spent in a spa trying out all the different temp. pools and discovering that 42C is pretty damn hot. The second day we did a little ...

From Dunedin we went north up the coast first stopping in Timaro and then in Omero (probably spelt wrong). Timaro was a nice little town which we enjoying hanging out in for a day. We again tried to see some penguins at the local nesting site but it doesn't look like it's ever going to happen for us! Omero was on the other hand a pretty boring place. We did see an amusing incident of road rage when four teenage guys were swearing at a car in front of them. The gu...

In an effort to escape the rain which had been dogging us all along the west coast we headed back east to Dunedin. We initially thought that it was probably going to be a boring little place which we would only stop off at for a night or two. As it turned out there were quite a lot of things to do and we ended up staying four nights in quite a nice old backpackers rummoured to have a resident ghost. Given its haunted nature it was probably a bad idea to watch sca...

We based ourselves in Te Anau for a couple of days in order to go to the legendary (at least out here) Milford Sound. The place we stayed put us in a separate house to the rest of the guests, probably because we smell bad, which was pretty sweet. For the price of a normal room we got our own private two bed house: kitchen, bathroom, lounge etc. We were tres chuffed until we had to get up at 7.30 am to go to Milford - believe me that's VERY early for us! The road ...

It was a long and winding journey to Wanaka, and miraculously the rain stopped enough for us to glimpse the amazing view over lake and mountains, stunning. We'd stopped at Fox Glacier on the way and a kindly gentleman had informed us that our back tyre looked a bit flat. Luckily after going back to the petrol station, the local mechanic prised out a drill bit that we had mysteriously managed to pick up on the way. I think Jack was just a bit pissed off that he di...