Hi all, (particularly mum and dad smith) sorry this has been a while in coming. After travelling over to the North Island we headed quickly for Tongariro National Park, much of which was the scenery for Lord of the Rings Mordor. It didn't look much like Mordor when we were there as it was covered in snow as we headed out for our trek up to the summit of Mount Tongariro, passing 'Mount Doom' on our way! We did the trek on Rhys' birthday and couldn't believe our l...

Hello everybody! We've decided to do just 2 blogs for NZ having one for our time on the South Island and one for the North. This is because the time is flying here and we don't want to have top spend more time typing than necessary!!! New Zealand is spectacular! So far we have travelled round parts of the South Island in our van. We started in Kaikoura and went whale watching for a morning, it was very exciting and although we were a little disappointed we did...