We aren´t sure how it started ...possibly it was the sun, maybe the hang gliding was a trigger, perhaps our minds needed a fresh supply of fun memories to get us through the likely years of sedentary desk sitting ahead of us. Either way, an itch for adrenaline had started to grow in us and with it we started to use a lot of cheesy words. Like ´Rad´.

Thankfully, New Zealanders seem to take great delight in devising ways of terrifying each and every one of their visitors by any means possible...and there are a lot of possibilities for the imaginative Kiwi...

This all meant that we woke up one morning, crawled out of our tent into the sun near the beautiful lake we had camped by with a craving for something exciting. Before setting off we had a chance encounter with a an ex-pat originally from Ayr in Scotland. He was one of the few lucky folk who applied to the UK government to move to New Zealand 50 years ago. Following acceptance he was paid by the government, bundled in a boat for a very long trip and has never looked back since. What drew him? All the fishing and hunting he wanted! If anyone sees a similar opportunity advertised, let me know.



With time ticking on, we got in the car, flooring the pedal to the metal... (which didn´t have that much effect in our little car)...and went looking for adventure.



Awesome...



With words such as that running through our minds it was a matter of hours until we drove past the Buller Gorge. A deep fissure in the countryside with a stunning blue river running through it - sight of a swing bridge, gold panning and a jet boat.



Cowabunga...



we thought, feeling old as we had to refer to the teenage mutant ninja turtles for action-y words. We walked accross the thin metal bridge to the boat. Jetboats are speedboats with an engine that sucks water up from under the boat and pressurises it into a high power jet out of the back, like a big jet ski. This means huge speed and no propeller to damage which allows the boat to operate with virtually no water depth. The thing can do 360 degree spins and the driver adds to the excitement by mising the walls of the gorge by what felt like inches...



Right On...



We left the boat and jumped back in the car, on our way to Hokitika. On the way we stopped at the ´Pancake Rocks´, which I was disappointed to find did not involve real pancakes but rocks that (allegedly) look like pancake stacks. They look a little bit more like rocks.We left and made our way to Hokitika.



Nice...



is a word as exciting as Hokitika so we decided to leave to another town which was even more boring so came back again. Feeling the come down from the day´s excitement and with little else to do to get the heart rate up we got a speeding ticket on the way back.



Sweet...



...it was not, as the lights appeared up ahead of us on the road and the policeman proved to us that not all Kiwis are great...



Bad...



...luck I guess. It would be unfair to divulge who the speed freak behind the wheel was at the time nor that the passenger pointed out the police car and was ignored... all you will get from me is that there were 3 things that the two of us didn´t do together in New Zealand. One was to grow a beard, the other was the aforementioned speeding ticket, the third was a bungy jump.



Sick...



We felt following the night of the speeding ticket but we woke up and got on with our trip down south to the Franz Joseph Glacier. We made it to the town near the glacier later that night and set up camp in a nasty little spot behind a hostel before going on a walk to the glacier which really was a lovely sight sitting in its self carved valley...



Far Out...



of town. Unfortunately, the cloud had begun to win the ongoing battle with the sun and the next day the weather was so foggy we decided to rule out a helicopter trip and ice trek on the glacier itself the next day and went on down to Queenstown via a second glacier called the Fox Glacier. This was fascinating, it had just re-opened after a few weeks of closure after the a massive amount of water had built up in the face of the glacier before exploding out the front and changing the direction of the river that flows from the gallons of melting glacial ice. The river had just got back to a normal level and the glacier re-opened when we got there. Unbelievably, where the overflow had been the mud looked as though it was painted with gold leaf, catching the sun this gave the impression of whole boulders of gold just under the water. It turned out that this was in fact gold dust, the rangers explained there must be a deposit of gold somewhere in the rock under the glacier. This was yet another example that New Zealand is so rich an area but well protected, preserved and relatively un-touched. In the space of a couple of days we had past countless rivers offering gold panning with guaranteed success (gold dust mainly) and here was loads of the stuff. Anywhere else in the world machines would be ripping the area apart.



Cool...



Were the icy glaciers.



With our need for adventure growing by the day and our list of 90´s surf phrases exhausted, we got in the speedmobile and drove reverently to the capital of adventure sports in New Zealand, Queenstown.

Who knows what we will find...