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New Zealand (South Island)

We arrived in Christchurch, New Zealand after the 3 hour trip from Sydney. Christchurch is a great city and weirdly English! A really nice little city and we spent five days there walking around the local markets, looking in the shops and relaxing in the lovely Botanical Gardens. We even managed to fit in watching a Super 14 rugby match between the Crusaders and the Cape Town Stormers. It was brilliant and very entertaining - we are glad to report that the Canterbury Crusaders (our adopted team) won 11-6! We then picked up our John Lennon Wicked camper van and started our 49 day tour of New Zealand's south and north island. From Christchurch we visited the very picturesque Banks Peninsula and we then had a surprise return visit back to Christchurch. Unfortunately as we went to leave Banks Peninsula John, our van, decided that he was not quite ready to leave, it turns out that the battery could not cope with us having the reading light on for an hour!! Quite clearly not allowed to read or see anything past 5pm!! Anyway we took it back to Christchurch had a new battery put in and left hoping that we would have better luck from here on in! We then headed north to the coastal town of Kaikoura. With the back drop of snow covered mountains we spent the day there. On the coastal drive in we saw a pod of what must have been 300 dusky dolphins. They were doing acrobatics with jumps and somersaults. It was amazing! We then decided to get fit and do a coastal walk past a seal colony and we saw a group of 9 Orca's swimming by. We were both pretty amazed and felt very lucky as the Orcas are only in the bay once every 4-6 weeks. After Kaikoura we headed south to the beautiful Lake Tekapo and Lake Pukati. Here again we did more walks with stunning views. We tried to see the iconic view of Mt Cook the highest mountain in New Zealand, but unfortunately the weather was against us. Wind, rain and huge clouds that decided to settle on the mountain blocking the view! We then drove to Dunedin and did a tour of the Cadbury's factory, with Dan getting his chocolate fix with lots of freebies as we went round! We then drove around the bottom part of the south island and went to the stunning Milford Sound, beautiful scenery with Mitre Peak that reflected in the sound. We then drove to Queenstown, adrenalin capital of the world. Anything you can't do here is not worth doing! We spent four days here. The highlight was definitely doing a tandem bungy jump off of the worlds first ever bungy site! It was amazing, such a weird sensation but really good fun! A massive rush! We also saw a few of the Lord of the Rings locations, such as Isengaard. After Queenstown we drove up the west coast, stopping to do some Glacier walking on Fox Glacier. The glacier is growing 1m a day at the bottom and 5m a day at the top so it s pretty impressive really! We spent an hour on the ice with our crampons! It was great fun and very awesome in its size.

We then carried on up the west coast and caught the ferry from Picton on the south island to Wellington on the North island. New Zealand has such stunning scenery that you have to resist taking too many pictures. Hopefully the North island will be as good as the South!