We arrived in Queenstown after a looong journey from Fran Josef and another early start. We liked the place straight away as it had a really good feeling about it. Unfortunately, we didn't have a chance to sample the nightlife as we had to get to bed early in order to get up at 5.30am for our trip to Milford Sound. We managed to make it to the bus in time and settled down for a 6 hour journey to Milford Sound. It sounds horrific but half the fun of the trip is the journey there. So after just a few hours of catching up on our sleep we made ourselves stay awake to see the amazing scenery New Zealand has to offer. True to form the Kiwi bus driver was as informative as ever, telling us fast facts about the trees, animals and landscape that we saw. There were lots of photo stops along the way and so lots of opportunities for "you take one of me then I'll take one of you".

Finally we arrived at Milford Sound itself and got onboard our little cruise ship the Encounter. We headed off into the sound and along the way we saw seals, dolphins and some pretty waterfalls. Unfortunately for us it hadn't rained (never thought we'd say that) so we were limited to the numbe of waterfalls there were for us to see, but the permanent ones were still very pretty. The boat even drove straight into one so we got a bit wet, but off course we had attractive red raincoats to protect us from the worst of the water. After a warming cup of tea we were able to get back to enjoying the journey just looking at the amazing landscape.

We returned to the pier and got back on our bus and promptly fell asleep for most of the journey home, it was a long day!

The next day we decided to having an organising day so we spent a few hours on the internet then spent some more time checking out the shops, mainly to try and find some kind of warm clothing as the weather had suddenly turned chilly! Possibly in preparation for us coming home, but we're hoping it's just a cold snap!