Our final trip on the Stray bus on Thursday got us in to Christchurch, the 'most English' of all city's in NZ, late in the afternoon and after our driver dropped us off at the wrong hostel we were actually pretty glad to be off the bus by this point, even if it has been really good overall.The average age of our hostel room was about 50 and there was a pretty special crowd there all told, especially the guy with a hole in his shirt who claimed he worked for the g...

So the head was a bit sore waking up early on Wednesday morning but we were both pretty excited about the day ahead as we set off on the drive back inland. We stopped off at the Moeraki boulders, basically just a load of big, round rocks in the sand, and got a bacon butty which was GOOD! The road into Mount Cook village was another cracker and we passed lakes and rivers that were the bightest turquoise you have ever seen and despite having seen loads of...

It was a nice leisurely start on Tuesday as we headed back north and up the east coast for the first time, through the remote Catlin's wilderness area. En route we stopped off at Curio Bay and right on cue there was a big sea lion chilling out on the beach and posing for us!We made another cool stop at the petrified forest and then had lunch, realising that we had definately started to take the scenery around NZ for granted!After rolling into the Scottish town if...

Another early start at Gunns Camp on Monday morning finally got us on our way out of Milford Sound country and we got our foot down and headed to Invercargill, the southern most town in NZ.After stopping off at another of the lighthouse signposts that they seem to love so much over here, it meant that in about a month we had travelled from the very northern tip at Cape Reinga to the most southerly point.With that done, there actually wasn't much else left to do a...

We left Queenstown bright and early in the morning on a new Stray bus to head to Milford Sound, and Gunn's camp where we were staying for the night. Once again the drive there was pretty scenic, but unfortunately it was slightly spoiled by the heavy rain and mist which so far in NZ we had managed to avoid!We arrived at the Sound (or to give it the correct technical name, fjord - since it was carved out by a glacier and is not a flooded valley) mid-afternoon after...