Mt Cook is a winter wonderland!! The village at the base of Mt Cook was our stop for the night and the hostel seemed pretty nice. We got our bags checked in and headed out for a walk in the snow – it was really about 3 feet deep off the tracks!! We were in search of a good area of deep snow to build our Stray family snowman but it was so cold everything had frozen! After about 30 minutes walking we found the spot and after an intense game of cut the chees...

We stopped off for the night in Invercargill on the way to Dunedin. We were now officially down under after crossing the 45th Parallel outside Wanaka a couple of days before. It turns out most of Australia is not “technically” down under – who knew?? We didn’t get up to much in Invercargill apart from playing pool (on a round table – check photos) and going to the bar next door to watch the All Blacks hammer Fiji in the rugby! The next morning we we...

We left Queenstown at 6am for Milford Sound. The bus all morning was very quiet and subdued – I think it was a combination of the beers the night before and then 5:30am alarm clocks!! We stopped in a place called Te Anau for breakfast before heading further down the road and into the Fiordland National Park. I know we have kept going on about how amazing this place looks but Fiordland National Park was something else – seems to get more and more stunning t...

Our next major stopover on the South Island is Queenstown – the adrenaline capital of the world!! We did make a few stops along the way to get here though including Wanaka – a small town on the edge of one of the larger lakes here in NZ and Kawarau Bungee Centre which was the first commercial Bungee Jump site in the world! We spent a couple of hours here with a few of our group doing the bungee jump – we decided not too…..this time at least! We were st...

We have continued down the west coast and have made it to Franz Joseph….eventually – home of the famous Franz Joseph Glacier which we are hoping to conquer at some point during our time here. Before we arrived in Franz Joseph we had a one night stop over in Greymouth. We didn’t know if we were going to make it as once we left Abel Tasman the mountain pass was closed due to heavy snow. We parked ourselves in a roadside Café for what we were told could ...