Day 134: North Island, sweet as!

Today marks 19 weeks of travelling - it is flying by! We're now in Auckland for our last couple of days in New Zealand.

From Queenstown we headed south to Milford Sound. The drive through the mountains was amazing and it was a beautiful sunny day. We spent the afternoon on a boat exploring the sound and saw some fantastic waterfalls, rainbows and fur seals! After that we went even further south to Bluff, the most southerly point in NZ. We spent a few days working our way back up towards christchurch, which had lovely coastline but not much else, it's so quiet here!! We did, however, get to see a sealion on the beach. They are huge and a little bit agressive, although they couldn't charge towards us too quickly without falling over!

We stopped at Mount Cook, the highest mountain in NZ (I think!) and hiked to a very impressive lookout point over the tasman glacier.

It was then time to head north where we stopped in Wellington, known as 'windy welly' to the locals. It definitely lived up to the name! We spent a day seeing the highlights with our expert tour guide (a friend we had met in Africa - thanks AJ!) and then went to Tongaririo national park hoping to do the Alpine crossing. Unfortunately when we got there it was closed as the weather forecast had predicted strong wind from a cyclone!! Although it was a grey day, it wasn't too bad at ground level. Instead we spent a day relaxing and catching up with some friends from uni who are also travelling.

We have now spent a couple of days in Auckland and did a tour of the city today (we got it free with our bus tour!) which included walking part of the harbour bridge climb. They also gave away one free upright bungy jump from the sky tower (nearly 200m high!) to the winner of a mass game of heads/tails. Unfortunately neither of us won, Louise was pretty disappointed but realised she could not get competitive over a game of heads and tails!!

We are going to see the rest of the sights tomorrow with another friend of ours from uni, then it's off to fiji for some serious island time!

See you all soon (we can actually say that now!)

Lots of love xxx