I (we) were tempted to just write "it rained" for this entry which involved us bombing up the west coast from Fox Glacier as that is pretty much all it did as the weather forecast proved to be stunningly accurate. However i'm sure something of interest happened so here goes. Well erm, the road was hilly, yes that's right and it made driving conditions tough what with all the rain and that. Oh yeah, first stop along the road was Hotika which is the jad...

I'm jumping ahead on the blog today just to tell you that I finally plucked up the courage to do a bungee jump in Taupo in the central North island. I had no plans to do one at all in Taupo although I had been thinking about doing one for years, although in the back of my mind I had pretty much decided not to bother and that it was a frankly stupid thing to do (my mum was right!). Then we rock up at a caravan park in Taupo and happen to mention to the bloke behi...

One of the hi-lights of any trip to New Zealand is to visit the Glaciers on the west coast of the south island so obviously we weren't going to miss it out of our tour and after Wanaka we crossed the mountains and hit the west coast which is famous for being the rainiest coast in the country. I could bore you with the reason and in fact i'm going to. It's because New Zealand is on the Roaring Forties which refers to it's latitude (or maybe longitude) and basicall...

Arrowtown is a cute little town that was a big during the New Zealand gold rush of the 1850s to 1880s and has done nothing since but we still liked it. One road pretty much covers the whole town but each building seems to come straight out of an US town in the deep south, think Gone with the Wind meets any old Western and you won't be far wrong. I think probably the main thing we did here was get our first taste of New Zealand lamb in a pub which served massive r...

They say that you either love Queenstown or you hate it, but I have to say that i'm on the fence which kind of blows that cliche out of the water I suppose. It didn't help that the weather turned from good to bad on the day we arrived which kind of put a dampener on things and didn't help my first impression. Even worse was that we had booked into the campervan park near the town centre, and it is very central, which turned out to be little more than a big car p...