After the rain - what a glorious day! The washing on the line however was wetter than when we took it out of the washing machine and so rigged up a line inside the van and pegged it up to dry along the way lol (and it did).

After checking out of the camp site and doing the dump stuff - the less glamorous side of motor homing! - we stopped to get a coffee and watched a 'Milford Explorer' coach pull up outside the Pop-In Cafe and disgorge a load of young people who tumbled out 'bed-headed', yawning, sleepy-eyed and half asleep. It would have been an early start for them - 8am from Queenstown.

Just outside of Te Anau we were directed to stop off the side of the road by Traffic Control because of a 'house moving', yup it was! Filled the whole road, goodness knows how they got it around corners, even the back porch was hanging on. Then a little further down the road we got pulled over again for another house on the road lol. Fortunately we avoided being pulled over another twice after this - by speed police, luckily Dave was sticking to the speed limit.

Note on butter pat wrapper: 'Warning, contains milk'. Yeah that's true!

We passed a number of wineries on the early part of our route and one of them had a 'cheesery', never heard that word before, does it exist?

At the risk of sounding very boring and repetitive we have to tell you that yet again the scenery was stunning, all the way to Mt.Cook - all 300+km of the drive. We drove out of Fjiordland and into Otago, through the central Otago plateaux stopping to buy cherries, strawberries, nectarines and peaches and on to the Mackenzie area of central South Island. Our jaws never left the floor pretty much all the way the journey was a dream: blue blue skies, hardly a cloud to be seen other than puffy white thermals above the mountains, hot sunshine and completely still - not a breath of wind. The Cicadas chattered loudly, there was hardly any traffic.

We retraced our journey through to Queenstown and then through rolling dry dry Central Otago, there are bright patches of green in the pastures and sprinkles must be on much of the time to keep enough pasture for the sheep and cows. The sheep huddled beneath trees in the sizzling heat and we saw a cow standing under a sprinkler! The rolling (but very high) hills gave way to the surreal landscape of the Lindis Pass which carries a health warning (changeable weather) and went on for miles! Huge huge mountains with no vegetation apart from odd scrubby bushes, not a scrap of shelter to be seen. The highest mountain we saw was Old Man Peak at 1827m, HUGE! We can't begin to explain how tall these mountains are, how vast the ranges: we've photos of the mountains with a road at the bottom and the traffic is a mere dust speck, you'd miss it if we didn't tell you it was there. The high pass gave way to plains, equally as dry and parched (mind it's also late summer in NZ so many of the crops will have been gathered and even UK the fields look pretty dried out after harvest.)

We stopped shortly before Twizel (temporary town built for staff working on the Hydro, they were there for 18years and didn't want to leave so the temporary camp became a town) and bought some smoked salmon. The water running through the salmon farm is an impossibly translucent blue green, like Lake Emerald in the Rockies, but much much bigger and further down the road Lake Pukaki seems to go on forever.

Our camp for the night is in the Aoraki valley, we are almost in the wilderness here, just off the road but are parked up in scrub with a view of Lake Pukaki in front and the mighty southern Alps looping across the top, there's no lights other than in the vans. It's dark now and we're hoping the bugs don't bite tonight....and glad there's no wolves or bears....