The next morning, still buzzing from our epic day in Franz Joseph, we got back on the bus to go to Makarora. En route we stopped off at Lake Matheson, which we had seen from 12 thousand feet the day before. A short walk took us to Reflection Island, where, on a good day you should be able to see a perfect reflection of all the mountains and trees in the lake, a photo which can be seen on loads of postcards etc. Try as we might, we couldn't quite get the perfect s...

After nursing Barrytown hangovers in the morning we headed off to Franz Joseph. The drive there was brilliant as part of the journey was through the rainforest and we saw some of the most stunning scenery to date. We stopped off en route in Hokitika for a rather rushed visit to a jade factory and to get supplies for the next 3 days as we would be going through the most remote part of New Zealand where there are no shops!! So as we were doing the glacier walk the ...

We left the surroundings on the Abel Tasman National Park on Sunday morning, but only after planting a group tree!We spent a lot of the day travelling on the bus, but it was made better than your average bus journey by the stunning scenery of the West coast. The landscape since we hit the South island has been spectacular, and it's only gonna get better!We made a couple of stops during the day - firstly at Cape Foulwind where we did a little walk to try and se...

We were pretty cranky when we finally arrived in Abel Tasman about 6pm after having been on the road/boat for most of the day and feeling slightly worse for wear from the night before! However the crankiness soon disappeared when we got to the hostel which was a converted barn smack bang in the middle of the national park and when we tucked into some tacos made by the Hoff (cue arms and elbows everywhere as it really was every man for himself, and some very loud...

Most of Thursday was spent travelling down to the capital city of NZ, Wellington. We made a lunch stop at a strange little place (which to be honest, a lot of the stopoffs are!) called Bulls. Here they seemed to pride themselves on their word plays and so everything in the town ended in -bulls.... Eg the toilets were called 'relieva-bulls' and the baby shop 'non-returna-bulls'. How very witty.Later we also stopped off at a strange place where they hold the annual...