Our last stop in New Zealand! We cannot believe how quickly the last 6 weeks have flown by, we have loved every minute even the rain! The first thing we had to do here was hand in the camper van which was a very sad moment! It has been our first home together and we were very attached to it! In total over the last few weeks we have driven 6946km all around NZ in that van and listened to 3362 tracks on the ipod shuffle and spent 38 nights on the foam mattresse...

As we approached the Canterbury Plains the weather improved steadily and by the time we reached Christchurch it was a glorious spring day. We managed to sneak into a hostel and have a free shower before picking up our now mended camera from the post office - yes we now have 2 cameras!!! We then drove out onto the Banks Peninsula in search of a little French town called Akaroa - the French colonised here just after the English had claimed sovereignty over the ...

We left Franz Josef and headed north towards Hokitika and the famous old gold mining areas, it was raining yet again. It often rains on the West Coast, close to the sea they have about 5 m of rain annually, but up in the Southern Alps the figure gets as high as 12m!! We got to a soggy Hokitika mid morning and ventured to the i-site to try to find something to do in the rain for a few hours. Hokitika is famous for its Jade (nephrite/greenstone), it was precious t...

We arrived at Fox Glacier (mints - ha ha!) Saturday morning and were very happy to see the sun shining! This area is notorious for the very high rainfall of about 5m per year! Although at the top of the glacier in the high Southern Alps they record rainfall (generally as snow!) at 12m per year! That is why the glaciers are here and running down into tropical rainforest areas, a crazy phenomenon! We saw the Fox Glacier from its viewpoint and walked to the term...

We got to Wanaka via a very interesting road with hairpin after hairpin, the Crown Range road, 2 days later it was essential that you carried snow chains, we timed it well!! Wanaka was again beautiful, quieter than Queenstown and reminded us of the Lake District. We checked the i-site and found a walk to do the next day so we spent the afternoon at Puzzling World, it was excellent, great fun. The illusion rooms were good, from having 100 faces that follow you ar...