When we bought our bus pass for New Zealand back in January we ended up having some hours left over, once we'd booked all of our travel. So we decided to use them to go on a city tour of Auckland on our last day. The weather was really changeable today, so it started off raining as we walked to the bus stop, and then soon went to bright blue skies, later to really strong winds, then back to rain then sun. Talk about 4 seasons in 1 day! Our tour started off by dri...

Well, it wasn't that unexpected because we booked this trip back in January, when we were in a booking frenzy sorting out the rest of our trip, but we couldn't come to New Zealand and not visit the set of some of the most successful movies ever made - Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit. Yes, we took a daytrip to Hobbiton to see the Shire, home of Bilbo and Frodo. It was actually really good, very interesting and not at all nerdy. We got up very early to get the coa...

From Franz Josef we took a coach up the West Coast to Nelson, where we spent our last night in the South Island. Even though it wasn't an official tour we still made loads of stops for coffee, lunch and tea, as well as a 40 minute stop to visit the Pancake Rocks and Blowholes at Punakaiki, which we really enjoyed seeing. The sea was quite wild so the water was being forced up through the blowholes, which was really great to see. We only had a night in Nelson, and...

From Queenstown we hopped on another coach to take us out onto the West Coast of New Zealand, up to the township of Franz Josef. This was just a regular coach so we weren't expecting much info on what we were driving past, but the coach trips here are so much better than the Greyhound buses in Australia. There were only 8 people on the coach for most of the day, so we had basically the entire thing to ourselves so we could pick the best seats, and both coach driv...

Today we took a daytrip out to Milford Sound, which is in the heart of the Fiordland National Park, the largest national park in New Zealand. We had an early start, being picked up from Queenstown while it was still dark before making our way along the shore of Lake Wakatipu through some of the vast farms to the town of Te Anau. We had a short coffee stop here and had a walk down to the lake, before getting back on the bus to head into the national park. We star...