I arrived off the plane in Christchurch in the early hours of the 29th April and headed straight on the shuttle bus to my hostel. I had booked ahead online for a place called ‘The Jailhouse’. As I arrived I found it was exactly as described. The new owners had barely changed the building from when it had, really quite recently, been a jail. As I was arriving late I had to let myself in using the code and found my key waiting for me at reception. I walked into the main hall in complete silence. With two floors and a central covered courtyard it looked exactly like Porridge, and I expected to run into Norman Stanley Fletcher at any point! I sneaked up the stairs, let myself into my shared cell and went off to sleep as quietly as possible so as not to annoy any of my cellmates, I didn’t want any trouble in the showers!

Over the next couple of days I reacquainted myself with the travelling life, getting used to shared rooms, hostel kitchens and starting to plan what I wanted to do in New Zealand. I wandered the city and found it just as I remembered, pretty but very quiet, like a smaller version of Cambridge. I booked myself onto a bus tour to do the very South of the South Island with ‘Stray tours’, a company catering for backpackers that claimed to get a bit off the beaten track. I headed down on an early shuttle bus to Queenstown on the 1st May ready for an early start on the tour down to Milford Sound on the 2nd. I had a quick walk into town from my Lakeside hostel, got some things for dinner and had a quiet night watching tv with a couple of guys back in the hostel. The real adventure would start with my joining the Stray tour.