Wanaka is a little town on the way to Queenstown and I'm very glad we stopped here. The scenery is amazing and we've spent the morning on the beach of the lake looking at the mountains. We're staying in an ok hostel sharing with 2 others, a Japanese girl (who screamed and jumped up and down with delight when I told her we'd seen cherry blossom in Japan) and a German boy. We were all in bed by 9.45pm!! I can't believe how excited the Japanese are over the cherry blossom, it's there every spring for a couple of weeks and yet they all run out and take photos and talk about it and bring out special cherry blosson flavoured food and kit kats and line the street with cherry blossom! They seem to enjoy the simple things in life like Britian doesn't. Obviously they are technologically very advanced but they stick to looking at the cherry blossom and don't bother with crime or vandalism. It's the same here in a way, health and safety is non existant, I just saw a supermarket worker on top of a massive ladder stocking the shelves while another worker wheeled the ladder along while he was still up it. He must have been 20 ft in the air!!!! People just seem to get on with it and don't bother with political correctness and safety which is so much better and easier than at home.

 Yesterday we went to the puzzling world place where they have loads of illusions including a room where you look massive at one end and tiny at the other as the celing slopes but you can't see it does. It's how they filmed the Dwarves on Lord of the Rings apparently. We drove through loads of the film sets on the way here too. We got addicted to a NZ game called Tantrix where you have coloured plastic tile things and you have to match them up. It's like a really hard puzzle, our next plane journey will be taken up with that!

It's been a nice relaxing 2 days here, probably much needed before Queenstown!!!