Ever since watching the film Point Break I have always fancied sky diving. In my student days I did static line solo parachuting from 3000 feet. However, this is far more of a thrill, a tandem skydive where you are strapped to an instructor and jump from an aeroplane at 15,000 feet, experiencing 65 seconds freefall as you plummet towards the ground at 125mph. Where else better to do it than Queenstown, the place labelled 'adventure capital of the world'. Hav...

Katy has a new interest. Forget skiing, forget snowboarding, forget (for the moment) skydiving and bungy jumping. Katy likes flying aeroplanes. No, not flying IN aeroplanes, but actually being at the controls and manoeuvring the plane around the sky. Before arriving in Wanaka, we had noticed a company called U Fly Wanaka offering an hour-long session, including 30 minutes actually in the air, for only NZ$195 (about £74). That sounded like a bargain and after a ...

"The coldest winter I ever spent was summer in San Francisco," is a quote attributed to Mark Twain. Unfortunately, there is no evidence that he (or anyone else in fact) actually spoke or wrote these words, but if he had then they would surely apply just as well to New Zealand. When we arrived in Wanaka on Thursday, for example, it was beautifully sunny and hot. Today is Sunday and the weather is even better. For most of Friday and Saturday, however, it...

We were thinking of going to Milford Sound for a few days, but the weather was forecast to rain for two of them so we decided to postpone the visit until after New Year when the weather will hopefully be brighter. After consulting the map we opted to shelter from the rain in Invercargill, not a place we initially intended to go to, but we thought a town would be better than a muddy field when the heavens opened. Invercargill is near the most southern part of m...

We left Dunedin on Saturday 13th and took the Southern Scenic Route, which goes round the southeastern coast of the South Island. Around Balclutha, we decided to stop at the Stirling Cheese Factory - mainly just to break up the journey. We turned off the road to Stirling and found a sign to the factory so we followed it along an unmade, very bumpy road. We kept going and going and going. No sign of any cheese factory anywhere! It wasn't as if the place was a f...