Rozy and Teddy visit NZ: After 4 weeks of touring the South Island at super speed, we headed to the North Island to meet my ma and pa for some slower-paced venturing. We greeted Lord and Lady Northiam (their official title) at the airport with a homemade sign (with Jen's somewhat questionable drawing of the NZ flag?) Our first adventure was to the little town of Warkworth about 2 hours from Auckland. While Mum and Dad stayed at Snells Beach, Marky and I found...

Cookie Monster visits Mount Cookie: After a few days in the Catlins National Park we had had enough of beach forests and petrified wood; we were craving the mountains again. So we packed up our belongings, made some salad sandwiches and headed to Mount Cook (Aoraki - Cloud Piercer) - only the tallest mountain in the whole of the southern hemisphere of planet Earth. As we drove along the glacial valley floor we were trying to identify the exact whereabouts of s...

Galavanting on glaciers: After the incredibly creepy fishing town, we made our way back to civilisation to Franz Josef Glacier. We (being I) had already decided that we were to climb the glacier. Having completely ignored Marky's mumblings that he had been on a glacier in the alps before, I went ahead and booked us on a heli hike. This extravagantly involved us being dropped off on to the glacier where we walked around for a while with crampons, before being pic...

At one with the boulders: After recovering from our wine tasting tour we got back on the road and decided to make our way across country via beautiful Arthurs Pass. We made a few detours along the way namely whale watching in Kaikoura (Jen, Mark decided that he would rather ramble around the countryside than see giant sperm whales, perhaps Neptune had a disagreement with them - who knows!), hot springs in Hamner Springs for some R&R, then to Christchurch f...

Le Tour de Marlborough. After the breathtakingly beautiful, but woefully wet Marlborough Sounds, we headed south to the town of Blenheim, home of the world famous Malborough Wine region. Obviously, being such connoisseurs of the plonk, Jen and I thought we should be doing our share of wine tasting- so we did, by bicycle! After various escapades throughout Asia with child-sized adult bikes, I (M) was pleased to be given a trusty stead that actually fitt...