We have been to several places in the last few days around Queenstown, so I've put them all together but titled them seperately within the blog. This area has so much to offer, so we had to make some tough choices about what we really wanted to do, along with time and cost constraints! WANAKA On the way to Wanaka, we stopped to take photos of the lake. It is huge!! We arrived quite late in the afternoon, so waited for the next day to have a look at the lake. ...

The Franz Josef Glacier ice climb was amazing! When we first arrived we fearded it would be too easy and that we would not get to see much of the glacier, as from a distance, on the ground, it doesn't look that impressive. It also looks a lot smaller and closer than it is. I thought the walk would be about 300 metres to the base, but in fact it was over 2 kilometres! Apparently 40 metres of snow lands on the top of the glacier each year, and this gets pushed do...

We took the SH63 back to the SH6 and stopped off at the Buller Gorge near to Murchison.Here they have the longest swingbridge in New Zealand, or you can pay more to zip wire across the gorge.As we had recently done the Gibbon Experience, with zip wires 4 times longer than this one and much higher, we did not bother to do it.To be honest the swingbridge itself was quite exciting, and not for those afraid of heights as there was a lot of movement as you walked acro...

As we will be on the move nearly every day for the next month, we shall just update the blog and photos every few days, and put the location of the main place we visited within that area. We had an early start in Wellington the day we collected the van, and we had watched the New Zealand/ Italy game (what a result for NZ) with the family we were staying with at 2am, so we were very tired!They gave us a free upgrade of van, so we were given a 'Britz' instead of a...

Our flight into Wellington was fantastic, as we flew in low over the top of the South island and so had a great view of the mountains and islands.We then came over the Cook Straight and saw some dolphins below, then a beach with surfers in the sea, before we hit the very short runway in Wellington. As a capital city, it has a very small and friendly feel to it.We did a home stay here, which has been a great experience, as we have met some great people and got so...