Oh yes, we woke to a lovely warm morning full of promise for a great day ahead. We enjoyed our morning coffee watching the paraglider's drifting down from the mountain behind us and enjoying views of Lake Watapiku through the trees.

A 10minute walk got us to the check-in for a Jet Boat ride in Shotover canyon, yee haa! What a slick outfit, loved the thrills of the ride and marvelled at the clever way we got through the system - pick up, kitting out, photos, the ride (more about that in a mo), the merchandising all ran seamlessly and in a way that you never felt rushed, pressured or treated like 'cattle'. These boys are professionals! The ride with Brad our 'boxer' wearing Skipper was fantastic, racing through apparent tight canyons at 80km per hour with a number of 360degree turns, lots of twists and enough excitement to get the girls squealing.

The $250,000 bright red twin jet engine boat, with heated handrails (!) has a very shallow draught and can run in 4" of water, today we were on about 10". The Jet boat uses Jet Units for propulsion, steering and control. The water is drawn through two intakes in the bottom of the boat and two jet units with impellers (internal propellers) compress and drive the water out through two jet nozzles at the rear of the boat at 760litres of water per second, oh yeah! We got splashed just enough without feeling uncomfortable. Oh and the family sitting in front of us were from Welwyn Garden City.... A fab morning and we recommend it the next time you're down this way !!!!!!

This afternoon we dropped the pace and decided to walk around the Frankton Arm section of Lake Wakatipu. We used the local water taxi to get us to our start point and phoned him with our location to get picked up - how cool is that! We walked the Franklin track around the lake's edge (about 5-6miles) just beneath some rather amazing lake front houses of all different designs and most with docks in front, we can see why there has been 'trouble at mill' in recent times as aircraft taking off from Queenstown airport fly right down this part of the bay disturbing an otherwise idyllic setting. It was pleasantly warm and a lovely walk on a good track, we enjoyed seeing the motorboats, birds, sniffing the roses and sitting on some of the benches along the route! We saw few walkers and were passed by a number of cyclists - some of whom rather worryingly didn't pass us on a return leg of this one way track! Where did they go?!

Tomorrow we move on.....and dare we say it as friends and family shivering in the UK...the NZ weather forecast for our area is, at the moment, rather good! Now where's the salt for your wounds.....?