After a night chez Dusty at his Bak Paka's (!) we said goodbye to the angora sheep and miniature horse and fed them our last crusts, and drove on up to Te Anau to a different hostel experience - Rosie's Backpacker Homestay which is very small and in a family home. Rosie's no less. It's very cosy and lovely to spend time cooking in a proper family kitchen with Bella the fat black cat mewing at my feet. I celebrated by making pumpkin bread ( which is delicious I should put the recipe up here one time.) and roasted vegetables. Evan is doing a New Zealand tour of 1 dollar pies, so you can imagine his glee when in pak'n'save in Dunedin we managed to pick up some pies for 79 cents each!!! I've never seen him so happy. Anyway, all this gluttony was preceded by a walk round the lake at te anau, or more accurately round some of the lake as it's very big! The weather was really misty - very atmostpheric, but when we arrived back the sun had come through and we realised that Rosie's had a really cool view of snow capped mountains. Spent a productive evening watching Bring It On - a very enjoyable teen movie for those who don't follow these things.

The next day was our big Milford Sound trip. Well actually it's not a sound it's a fjord, but anyway, we were picked up by big Merv in his tour bus and learnt that we were the only passengers that day, so had a personal tour up to the sound/ fjord. On the way we passed crystal clear streams, amazing mountain views and a motorcycle commerical being filmed ( apparently car companies use this stretch of road a lot!) Once at Milford we dodged sandflies to get onto the boat. Now this part of the world gets 7-9 metres of rain a year, similar to Sheffield these day I imagine, and it rains 2 out of 3 days, again rather like a British summer.... so we had a little drizzle, but only to be expected. We spent 3 hours on the sound, on a boat, going through mist and viewing rock formations, waterfalls ( that they go right up to so you all get soaked, unless you hurry indoors to avail yourself of a free cup of tea instead.) It's incredibly dramatic and I don't think our pics will do it justice. On the way back, having dropped all the Kiwi Experience lovelies off at the underwater observatory that we're too cheap to have signed up to, we got a special treat as we spotted some yellow crested penguins. These are very rare and hardly ever seen on the sound, so we were very pleased and it takes our penguin breed tally up to 3!

Very productive day and very early night thusly. Monday we drove to Queenstown - party central - I'd love to be able to report that we've been drinking til dawn then up at 7 to hike to the ski field, but we're getting on a bit, and frankly this is not humanly possible. The hostel was a bit of shock coming from Rosie's, as it's a long term hostel for people working in town and it's kind of party central, plus the first person we saw had a leg in a cast... hmmmm

But anyway, snow was what we came for, so today we upped early and headed to the Remarkables snow field for a day of snowboarding. Togged up and ready to go we started by learning how to stop, sadly I didn't pick this up at all well so ended up on my arse a lot. Evan picked it up much quicker and by lunch he was zig zagging down on his heel edge ( for those of you who know about these things) whereas I was in the doldrums ... a bit of practice later however and Evan patiently helping me very kindly... by the time we got back from lunch I was a professional snowboarder!! well almost. This afternoon we learnt to go down on our toe edge, which is where you go down backwards... looks really scary when you see other people do it, but actually it's totally fine, and I picked this up totally fine amazingly. Something to do with the fact that normally you would fall forward onto your hands rather than on your heel edge where you tend to fall back onto your bony bum ouch!

(Evan)and now we are in an internet cafe feeling slightly bruised and battered, I pulled my groin just putting my board on the first time and subsequently felt twinges in old knee and ankle injuries, the sore ankle prevented me doing much of the backward nonesense which seemed just to be a way to make things harder, i wouldn't do triganometry without a calculator and i won't snowboard backwards, so back to whizzing down sensibly for me.

otherwise it's all as jennifer said. much fun.

(jen) and on a final note, congratulations Sonia and James on your engagement - fantastic news!