After surviving another night at a DOC campsite we drove to Hanmer Springs and found a nice flashy campsite with power and a TV and everything. Hanmer Springs is a small town known for its thermal hot springs, which was the reason we had decided to visit. We went in the afternoon as it was a really sunny day. There were about 10 pools in total all at different temperatures, ranging from a chilly 29 degrees to a toes burning and take 10 minutes to sit down 41 deg...

Today was just a day of driving unfortunately. Not a cloud in the sky aswell so hopefully it will stay nice as we make our way for Hanmer Springs and Kaikora. We did stop off at NZ's longest swing bridge going across the Buller Gorge, on the way but although the bridge was quite good, it was followed by a bit of a dissappointing walk (yes another) on the other side. We didn't even get the camera out. We then parked up on another DOC campsite in the middle of no...

Westport doesn't have much to offer to be honest apart from a seal colony that we visited this morning. There were about 20-30 seals lieing around on the rocks and occasionally jumpining in the water for a play. Once we were sealed out we decided to head further North to the very end of the Western coastal road, to a town called Karamea. From what we can gather no one really goes up to Karamea, it's 2 hours out of the way of most routes but since we aren't short...

It's a good job that we did the heli hiking yesterday as it was raining this morning... again. It was a bit dssappointing as we were hoping to go back to Lake Matheson for a walk so we could see the famous mirror reflection of the Alps. Not now. Instead we drove up the coast towards Greymouth, where we were going to have a look round but as the rain got worse as the day progressed all we saw of Greymouth was a supermarket carpark where we had our lunch. We deci...

Blue Sky! We rang up the glacier tour companies and managed to squeeze onto a helihike for the morning - brilliant! We munched down a quick brekkie and made our way up to the glacier via a helicopter! Claire got the front seat next to the pilot and Dave sat behind with the other people in our group. Headsets on and seatbelts fastened and we were off! A little wobbly start but before long we were miles high, flying over the huge mound of rugged ice that we would ...