Our last night in Auckland was spent in a value hotel by the airport. After spending over three weeks in a van, the room felt like a stadium. We settled in early and spent the night relaxing after treating ourselves to delivery pizza. With a flight at 1pm we headed to the airport in mid-morning to get through the usual tasks of baggage check and security screening. Unfortunately our plane was coming from Hong Kong and was an hour late, delaying our flight b...

Our cross back over to the North Island was pretty uneventful as well. The ferry company has it right, they put on a Johnny Depp movie and lull you to sleep. When you wake up, the movie is over and you're almost there. The last time, they played one of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies and I tried to keep my eyes open to catch most of it. This time, however, Chocolat did not fare so well. Although the did play Pinocchio after that and both of us did mana...

Well, the last few days have been rather low-key because the New Zealand spring weather finally caught up with us. On Monday, the sky was overcast in Lake Tekapo and the clouds were low. We went for a walk along the beach - the lake was still a pretty colour, but without the sun to reflect on it, the brilliant turquoise colour was lost. We spent the afternoon at the hotpools, a great warm activity for a lousy weather day. We just hung around the campground...

Waking up in Queenstown Friday morning, we had been expecting sunshine but it was instead cloudy and a bit windy. We took this as our cue to roll on. We continued our drive on Highway 6 and headed south, first to Te Anau, and onwards to the Fjordland National Park. We stopped about 20 minutes outside Te Anau at a great campground, Henry's Creek. It was on the beach of Lake Te Anau and had the first campsites we've seen that have been in the trees like at h...

Our hike up to the Fox glacier was much the same as the Franz Josef the previous day - a pretty walk through old glacial fields. The view of the Fox glacier was more impressive because we were able to get much closer to a larger ice face. The blue-tinged snow snaked all the way up into the mountain peaks and we were lucky enough for the clouds to clear briefly to see them. We spent most of our day traveling to Queenstown, enjoying our drive along the coast. ...