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...

We're pretty sure, judging by google maps, that Queenstown is the furthest south in the world that we have ever been, and it will be the furthest south that we go during our travels as from now everything we do is slowly working our way north back home. We arrived in Queenstown in the pitch black following our tour to Mount Cook, so all we could really make out from the bus was the lights of the houses and then the main road as we crossed over to get to our hoste...

We were up early again today (well, only 6am so not as early as other starts have been) to get down to the bus stop in time for our tour to Mount Cook. The bus started off driving through the city and the outskirts (where a lot of businesses moved after the earthquake, so it was pretty busy at 7.30am) to get onto the highway going south along the coast. We drove through the Canterbury Plains for around an hour and a half, and it was interesting to see at first as...

We were up extremely early, the earliest start of our travels so far (3.30am!) to get our taxi to the airport, and we had a 2 hour flight down to Brisbane before we changed planes and finally left Australia to go to New Zealand. The flight to Christchurch took less than 3 hours, so we only just had time to watch a short movie (the new Paddington film - it was really funny!) before we were preparing to land, and we got down through the cloud cover to get our first...