After leaving Christchurch in the afternoon of our second full day in New Zealand we headed off on our first proper drive in the van. It was very exciting! We were planning to go to Mount Cook National Park the following day and thought we would drive as far as possible in that direction as we could, making a few stops along the way. This was the first time we really saw the true new Zealand scenery that everyone had told us was so great, and they weren't wrong. We also saw our first sheep! We drove off along route 72 which is one of the scenic routes, and made our first stop by Mount Hutt. We thought we would stop off an have a look at Lake Coleridge, but after driving for about 20 minutes up the road towards it we realised that it was down a unsealed track which we weren't supposed to drive down. So we had to turn back and drive back to the main road, but it was still worth it because we saw our first snow-topped mountains and they were amazing to see. I took over the driving for the first time, which was a bit nerve-wracking at first as the van is a bit bigger than my clio, but I got used to it pretty quickly. The next stop we made was a bit further along at a gorge that I can't remember the name of. Anyway we carried on driving into the dark, only stopping for some sandwiches, until we got to Lake Tekapo. By this time it was getting quite late so we thought we would stop for the night. The campsites here are much more expensive than we had expected so we thought we would stay in a rest stop by the road that night. This is allowed, but it was one of the scariest things ever even after only being there for a little while. We were jumping at every noise, and decided there was no way we were going to get any sleep so we would go and find a campsite. We feel a bit stupid but we thought we would stay in camps from now on! Then stops don't look that bad during the day but they are always a way out of the towns and very creepy at night! We drove to the first campsite we could find right on the water at Lake Tekkapo and went straight to bed. We felt bad, but the next morning we left really early so we still got a free night!

In the morning after doing our runner from the camp we drove down to the front of Lake Tekapo where there was an old church to take some pictures, and it was very cold but very pretty too. From there we drove on towards Mount Cook, or Aoraki which is the Maori name for it. It was a very nice drive and it didnt take us long to reach Mount Cook village in the national park. The mountains were everywhere and were amazing to see. They all had snow on them, which we decided made them better, and were huge! We stopped there for a while and did the Governor's Walk, which was about a hour long track up through one of the mountains and had great views of Mount Cook. It was really enjoyable, until Justin fell over and hurt his bad knee, but it gave us our first taste of how amazing New Zealand could be. After that we drove for the rest of the day towards Dunedin, which was our next destination, stopping a couple of times on the way. It was another long drive!