Poor Charlie, it was a 7am departure from Greymouth to head to Franz Josef the place famous for it's Glacier. We had a much needed stop at 9am in Hokitika where they had a rather nice cafe and lots of Greenstone shops. We then headed on to Ross which is historic town made famous for it's gold mining. We could do a bit of gold panning if we wanted but it was only in tubs of water and it was all too set up for me and they gave you your stones with a bit of gold ...

We saw some amazing scenery on our trip down to Greymouth, we stopped at Cape Foulwind (named by Captain Cook when he was blown off course) where we could see some fur seals. We also stopped to view the pancake rocks and some other great coastal scenery along the way. Well the bus drivers warned us there wasn't much to do in Greymouth apart from a Brewery tour and they were pretty much right. We only stayed the one night althougth the hostel was quite nice (Ne...

February 14th till 16th. Well it was Valentines day and the sun was shinning when we arrived so we headed in to town. We visited the oldest restored street in New Zealand which only had a bout 20 houses on it but still looked really nice. Then, thanks to the lovely Mark who sent me out some money for a Valentines treat, we sat outside a lovely bar in the sun and ordered a nice bottle of local wine (the Ned) and some potato wedges. It was absolute bliss! The ...

Okay so it was a bit of a trek to get here; we left Taupo early and headed along the desert road - there was lots of windy roads. We did get to stop to take a picture of Mount Doom out of the Lord of the Rings, that looked properly good just like out of the film. We ten got to Wellington about 4 o'clock and the bus driver drove us up to Mt Vitoria so we could look down on the whole city. Wellington is famous for it's architecture and it is actually pretty impr...

Well we arrived in Taupo just after 3pm and I decided I best do a bungy jump! It was 47m over the Huka river - for some reason I was the only person on the bus who wanted to do it so the nice bus driver taxi'd me up there and stayed and watched! I did it here rather than Queenstown as it was a lot cheaper and this one actually allowed you to splash in to the water at the bottom. I was actually suprisingly nervous at the top I didn't think I would be - it felt lik...