JAMES

Welcome to New Zealand! It was an eventful journey over from Australia on Sunday - everything went smoothly on the first flight from Sydney to Christchurch, but as we were sitting waiting to board the next plane for a 50 minute hop down to Queenstown, we were told that there was bad weather in Queenstown and we might have to divert to Invercargill and then bus it up to Queenstown. Suffice it to say that that was exactly what happened, so we were a good 3 hours later getting here than we had expected - I will let Katie tell the full story because I know she wants to!

Even though we didn't get here until about 8.30 in the end, we still had an hour of light, so we could appreciate the stunning setting that Queenstown is in. It reminds me a bit of Interlaken with the lake - here it is only one lake rather than two, but it bends and twists past both ends of the town, such that it almost feels like two different lakes at either end of town - and mountains towering over the place in all directions. Even though it is mid-spring here there was still fresh snow falling on the mountains yesterday, although most of that has melted now, and the temperature is up to just over 20C. It's an absolutely stunning setting, every way you look there is a different view that you wouldn't ever get bored of looking at...

Monday 17th November

Queenstown is essentially set up for any sort of outdoor and / or adrenalin activity. The bungee jump was invented here. You can do bungee, canyon swings, sky diving, paragliding and parascending. And I am sure there are other ways available for you to pay a couple of hundred dollars to chuck yourself off / out of something very high, with not much more than an overgrown elastic band / bed sheet preventing from smacking into something quite hard at several hundred miles an hour. We spent much of the morning debating whether or not we had the guts to do any of them, before reaching the inevitable (for me anyway) conclusion that no, we were just too chicken sh!t to give it a go. So instead we did the Shotover Jet. Basically, an overgrown red jet ski, it works by sucking in water and squirting it out of a small hole very fast, rather than by a propeller. This means the it can a) work in about 10 inches of water, b) change direction very quickly and c) go very fast. So we spent a fun half hour blasting up and down the Shotover River and through the canyon at high speed and doing numerous 360 degree turns! I am sure the boat could have gone much quicker and much closer to the canyon walls, but it was great fun nonetheless!!

Next we picked our car up, a delightful pale blue Ford Focus, and sped off towards Te Anau, 175km away. We wanted to do a trip over to some caves, and we knew that there was a trip leaving at 5pm so we figured we would have just enough time to get there if we floored it all the way there, whilst being careful not to exceed the speed limit after the Florida incident! Police cars in NZ are annoyingly few and far between. I have only seen two since we have been here, and both have appeared just at the point I was getting bored of driving at 100kmh exactly! Anyway, we made it to Real Journeys office in Te Anau at 4.45, only to find that Lonely Planet had been telling us lies, and the boat had left at 4.30!

Real Journeys also run the cruise we wanted to do at Milford Sound the following day, so we booked onto the Gloworm Caves at 10.15 the next morning, and the Milford cruise at 3pm.

Milford Sound is 120km from Te Anau. We would return from the first trip at 12.30pm. The second one left at 3pm. Even allowing for time to walk to / from the car, and board the boat etc, it still only meant we needed to drive at slightly more than a snails pace to make it, but the ticket agent almost refused to sell us the tickets as she didn't believe we would get there! Well, she was about 80 and probably did actually drive at a snails pace herself...

Tuesday 18th November

The trip to the Gloworm Caves was pretty good. It is a half hour trip across Lake Te Anau, from where you walk a couple of hundred metres into the cave system and then get onto a hand pulled boat into the grotto where there are hundreds of gloworms sitting there glowing bright blue in the pitch black. Pretty cool...

We then proved the old bat wrong and arrived at Milford Sound with half an hour to spare, despite waiting ten minutes at the Homer Tunnel lights. It is a beautiful drive down, the Lonely Planet is right in saying that even if you are not going to do anything at the other end, the drive is worth making in its own right. Huge snow dusted mountains rise up on either side for most of the trip, and one point you have a great view along the length of a valley grassland to the 3000m peaks at the end. The road slowly winds up from Te Anau (250m) to the Homer Tunnel (950m), almost up at the snowline. The Tunnel itself is an amazing piece of work. It is something like 1300m long at a 1:10 gradient, and took 27 years to complete - no machinery was used - it was done by pickaxe, dynamite and a bit of forced labour!

I'd seen pictures of Milford Sound (0m - I will stop with the altitudes soon, honest) in Wanderlust before, and knew that it looked pretty cool, but the photos just don't capture the size of it. It is 15km long, up to 4(? - I can't really remember)km wide, and is lined with mountains of up to 1800m that plunge straight into the water. As we were told several times, it isn't really a sound but a fjord (a sound is a river carved valley flooded by the sea whereas a fjord is a valley carved out by glaciation and then flooded by the sea, just in case you were interested). The size of the place is difficult to comprehend. A waterfall of 162m would look enormous in isolation, but when it is against a backdrop of a mountain more than ten times its size, it looks pretty small. The dwarfing effect. It is only when you see one of the tourist boats up against them you realise just how big everything is. And it is spectacularly beautiful. Coming here in Spring is really cool, as there is still snow on the mountains which just makes everything even better.

The cruise ran the length of the Sound out to the Tasman sea and back. On the way not only did we see about 8 million waterfalls, but also some tiny little Fiordland Crested Penguins (the most endangered in the world, and only about 20cm tall) and a colony of New Zealand brown fur seals. Actually they are a type of sea lion rather than seal. You can tell this because sea lions have external ears and a split rear tail, whereas seals have no external ears and one big flipper type tail. Yet another interesting fact I learned from a tour guide. Aren't I interesting?!?

We stayed overnight in the Milford Sound Lodge, which was nice to do. Most tourists (they get about 4000 a day) bus in and out from Queenstown on the same day (the record is 108 coaches in one day) (dammit, stop quoting tour guides) so staying down in the isolated Sound, and having the place pretty much to ourselves the next morning was wicked.

The downside was that there was only one place to eat, and the food was pretty sh!te...

Wednesday 19th November

We enjoyed glorious (if a little chilly) weather the day before for the boat cruise, so it was entirely predictable that when we threw back the curtains at 6.30 for 5 hours of sea kayaking, we were greeted with rain of biblical proportions.

Fearlessly (or actually more like because we had already paid over $220) we stuck with it, even when we were made to wear the most ridiculous outfit yet (the Bridgeclimb outfit looks positively dapper in comparison). After a funny instruction on how to paddle and how not to paddle, we struck out into the Sound. It looked so different than the day before. The clouds we low over the mountains, which from those that we could see, had received a fair dousing of snow overnight, and there was a misty haze across the water. Our guide Dan kept reminding us how "atmospheric" it was every time he caught someone looking cold and fed up, but actually he was right. It was brilliant, and so different from the day before. Our dedication was rewarded with a close up view of a couple of seals lolling on the rocks, a couple of penguins fishing in the water, and even more waterfalls than the day before - because the mountains are pure granite, the water literally just falls off them, so 20 minutes after the rains stops, so do the waterfalls!

By the end of our trip we were all definitely ready to get off the water and into a nice hot shower. I could hardly move my toes and I know Katie was even colder!

We drove back to Queenstown via a middle age coffee and cake stop in Te Anau. It is a 300km drive and we were followed by a berk in a little red Kia who was nicknamed Mister Ed, and his miserable gaunt wife for at least half the way. It provided us with endless entertainment, as we travelled along the same stretch of road for the third time in 3 days, speculating all sorts of things about him and his grumpy wife....

Checked back in to the Black Sheep for the night, did some laundry, played some Yahtzee (for anyone who is interested Katie is leading the World Series Yahtzee Tour something like 22-17. She cheats though) and then went to Sombrero's in town for a quality Mexican!

Thursday 20th November

Had a fairly quiet morning today. Took the Skyline Gondola to the top of a peak whose name I do not know (more spectacular views over Queenstown and Lake Wakatipu from them top), and had 3 goes on the luge run at the top. Not quite the same as the infamously homosexual two-man luge of the winter Olympics - more gravity powered go karts that feel like they are going about 100mph but to an outsider look like they are going about 3mph! Good fun and I kicked Katie's ass at them...

KATIE

Sunday 16th November

Well, it was certainly an interesting journey over to New Zealand, the first part was straightforward enough from Sydney to Christchurch and the short hop from there to Queenstown never entered our minds as being anything other than a quick easy internal flight of 50 mins. There was a short delay to the flight but then we were advised that, although the plane was ready for boarding, we may be diverted to Invercargill as the weather conditions weren't very good in Queenstown and the pilot might not be able to land - however, in the typically good spirit of the Kiwi's they would try. Excellent. We boarded the plane and had the usual welcome message from the captain, but also confirming that the visibility at Queenstown airport was very poor, however, and in the words of the pilot, " I'll have a go and we'll see what happens." Luckily this made me laugh rather than run screaming off the plane but it was rather amusing to think of a pilot 'having a go' at landing an aircraft! Anyway, to be fair to the man, he did have a go, and given we had no idea where we were as there was thick cloud surrounding the plane right until the last minute, it can't have been easy for him, but despite a valiant effort he had to give up and we headed for Invercargill instead where buses would take us back to Queenstown. Although it meant a 2.5 hour drive, and getting to Queenstown about 3.5 hours after we'd originally hoped to, I'm pleased we had the diversion as it meant we had a wonderful scenic drive up from the far southern coast which was truly beautiful. The first views were of completely flat fields, much like a lot of England, then we moved through rolling hills, again much like England, Wales or Scotland, but then the landscape changed again to rocky snow- capped mountains, with a real alpine feel. The sun was streaming through in the late evening light giving a really surreal glow to the countryside and I was completely spell bound, with a big grin on my face for much of the journey!! We had enough time to check into our hostel, Black Sheep Backpackers (which was great value) and head out for some great pizza at Winnie Bagoes (chicken, brie and cranberry pizza might now be my favourite....)

Monday 17th November

Queenstown really is the hive of action activity, there are just so many things to do, and not all of them completely barking mad! I was actually quite keen to do a bungy jump or a sky dive but ended up deciding not to since I've been struggling with a bit a sore throat, cold, cough and etc for a few days now (I've been a real sick note this trip!) and didn't think it would really help my head feel better to throw myself upside down on a bungy rope.....Plus it is incredibly expensive! So, the Shotover Jet seemed to fit the bill nicely! It was great fun, you did get the feeling they could really throw the thing around if they wanted to but it was great, and the 360 degree turns were pretty fun, although did make James very wet as he was sitting on the outside!

The drive to Te Anau was glorious, it doesn't matter where you look, the scenery is stunning and its almost unreal at times. Words just cannot do it justice! There isn't much to do in Te Anau itself but its a lovely setting and the location for the gloworm caves which we're going to visit tomorrow. Plus its a very handy stopping off point on the way to Milford! Oh, and its very cold here.......

Tuesday 18th November

The gloworm trip was definitely worth doing, the skipper was actually really funny and gave some useful commentary about where we were as well as making us laugh! You go into the caves in about 4 small groups, and after walking along for a while in the cave system, as James said, you get into a little boat in the pitch black and are pulled along ropes to the inner grotto where the temperature dropped a couple of degrees in a split second. It's so peaceful in the grotto, and very surreal sitting there looking up at all these glowing lights in absolute darkness.

The drive to Milford was again, an experience not to be missed. Its impossible to even try to describe the scenery and how imposing and stunning the mountains are with their snow covered peaks and the way the shadows and clouds fall on them. There is a definite alpine feel about this area, but then it is fiordland so not that surprising really. It was a gorgeous day too, lovely sunshine but as its still spring, there's a pretty icy wind which reminds you of lovely crisp sunny winter days back home (but better scenery!!) I'd definitely recommend the cruise, just a lovely way to spend the afternoon - particularly as the weather was so good. The sound itself is just so stunning, very calm and peaceful right out to the Tasman Sea and you could be in any century and the view wouldn't change. We were commenting that you could be in pre-historic times and it wouldn't be any different, there's a real, sort of raw un-changing beauty in the place. We were also rewarded with the sight of Fiordland Crested Penguins (tiny little things, I had no idea they could be so small!) and seals that weren't really seals but sea lions. We loved it and were very pleased we'd booked to stay the night rather than having to rush off somewhere else.

I hope you notice I've left all the statistics to my husband who seems to be obsessing with numbers at the moment - I think it's the accountant in him missing his work.....I have no such problem.....

Wednesday 19th November

Today was the day for hours of fun filled kayaking.......unfortunately we'd booked it months ago with no thought for the weather and woke up to p*ssing rain and near zero visibility due to a LOT of mist and cloud! Despite being convinced that this would be no fun at all, we gaily joined the other unfortunates and got kitted up in lovely stripy thermal long johns, tops and fleeces, neoprene skirts and the most essential item, waterproof tops. Let me tell you now, they don't work.

Although at times I did get a little irritated by the guide making us stop for minutes on end to tell us stories (which then meant you really started noticing the rain lashing down on you and I'd get very cold due to inactivity!) it honestly was atmospheric and it was also fun believe it or not. We all felt very 'hard core' in the water waving at the tour boats going out - no doubt they just thought we were incredibly stupid! We did manage to get some close up looks at waterfalls, penguins and seals so it was worth it, and actually I'd choose to have had the better weather for the cruise. We did get very wet and pretty cold though, I couldn't feel my feet for about 30 minutes after we got out of the kayaks and I've never been so glad of a hot shower......

James drove the Milford to Te Anau leg of the journey then I did the Te Anau to Queenstown stretch, where we encountered Mr Ed (originally Mr Red due to the red car, but soon became Mr Ed) - as James said, this gave us endless amusement in the car and we were almost overjoyed when we got to see him and his miserable wife at one of the lookout points. Small things please small minds ......

Back at Black Sheep Backpackers in Queenstown we caught up on washing and had an excellent Mexican meal at Sombrero's, definitely comes recommended!!

Thursday 20th November

This morning we headed up to the Skyline Gondola to the Luge, although more 'go kart' like than 'luge' like I reckon! Still it was great fun, and despite what James says, I beat him on the last run down the advanced track!! Whoo hoo!!! Views were spectacular - I think I'm falling in love with New Zealand.....