The South Island is known as 'the mainland' to the South Islanders, to whom the North Island equates to Auckland - and they don't like Auckland very much! There's less than a million people in the whole island and vast tracts of it wild and uninhabited. My arrival point was Christchurch, which has the moniker of 'the most English of cities' but I found that, like an English city it wasn't at its best in the wind and driving rain so after two days of waiting fo...

New Zealand - Land of the Rings, the volcanoes, the mountains, the sea, the sheep, the kiwis, the rugby, the adventure activities; I've encountered all of these in my first week here but have learned that there's much more to the country than just that. I arrived in Auckland on a cold, wet winter's morning in July and was thinking it might have been a bad time to come here, but I've since been proven wrong. Winter in the north island on a bad July day is a bit...