Our arrival in Queenstown wasn't too late and we stopped off on the way at the Kawarau bridge bungy, the first bungy site in the world, and where I was booking and paying for my Nevis bungy and canyon swing on Tuesday. The site itself is beautiful, suspended over a clear blue river in a narrow gorge with a vineyard over the road. The downside however is that you can watch people bungy and make yourself nervous about your own forthcoming fall of death. The Kawar...

Early the next day we were on a new bus with Poncey, our driver so named due to his penchant for wearing chinos, obviously not a common pastime in New Zealand. The other passengers had been together a while and were of an average age of about 12 so it was pretty lucky Susie and I were only on the bus for two days as we didn't seem to have anything in common with them. Since we spent a fair few hours on the bus that day I'm going to do a quick rundown of what we...

Our skydives were booked for the afternoon so we checked into our new hostel, which had a nice big fire to relax in front of, and twiddled our thumbs trying not to be nervous at the thought of leaping out of a plane and hurtling through the air on an 85 second freefall. We were extremely lucky as well that we had a champion limbo-er on our bus - enter Dan who won a 2-4-1 skydive the night before in the bar, and as he had already done one up in the North Island ...

Waking up with my first hangover in New Zealand (trying to stop drinking whilst here has proven difficult) was a painful experience as we had to be up early and onto the bus. The Kiwi Experience likes to show you as much of New Zealand as possible and today was no exception. We pulled into the Bushman Centre, a place where Bambi was a terrorist. Deer were introduced to New Zealand by settlers and rapidly set about eating all the local plants and generally bei...

I'd booked my bus trip with the Kiwi Experience in April, pretty soon after Nina had told me she wasn't coming to NZ with me, and did it all in a bit of a 'crap I'm travelling on my own' state of panic. However once booked and paid for I was pretty happy that I wouldn't have to worry about getting from place to place. That is, until someone said to me 'Oh yeah Kiwi Experience, that's a real party bus and everyone just sleeps with each other', reigniting my fear...