Our travels over the last couple of days have taken us to the southernmost point of our trip in Queenstown.

We left Franz Josef on Tuesday morning bound for the town of Wanaka. The weather was truly appalling as we left Franz Josef with the rain belting down. We were lucky with the weather as if we had been trying to do the glacier trip on Tuesday then it would have been cancelled and we wouldn't have been able to do the trip at all. On the way to Wanaka, we stopped at a lake which offers awesome reflections on the surrounding countryside. However, due to the bad weather, the reflections weren't as good as they normally are although it was still quite impressive. We then had a quick stop for some lunch in some random New Zealand village where it was absolutely lashing down. I tucked into a good pie as Beth devoured a blueberry muffin. A note about New Zealand is that they absolutely love pies here; wherever you are you are never far from somewhere selling pies. We then had another quick stop at Thunder Creek waterfall where again it was raining hard so we pretty much ran to the waterfall, took a few pictures and ran straight back to the bus. It was here that one of the alarms on the bus started to go off but the driver ignored it and ploughed on through to Wanaka. When we were close to Wanaka, we got stuck in a cattle traffic jam. Basically, a farmer was moving his cows from one field to another along the main road but the cows were refusing to play ball an running everywhere. We eventually got through after about 15 minutes.

We made it to Wanaka and checked into our hostel which seemed pretty nice. We had a quick walk around the town but the weather still wasn't the best. We were quite impressed with the town though and it reminded us of a town in the Lake District, mainly due to the huge lake it was built next to! The rest of the afternoon was spent doing admin stuff like sorting our photos as the wifi was better than the last few stops. On Tuesday night, we went to the cinema opposite the hostel which was quite quirky as you could sit on sofas and even in an old Morris Minor to watch the film.

We only spent the one night in Wanaka before leaving on Wednesday morning bound for Queenstown. Our first stop was at Puzzling World which was basically a few rooms with illusions and then a pretty big maze to walk around. It was good and we spent about an hour trying to get out of the maze before our heads exploded!! We made it to Queenstown at about 2 on Wednesday afternoon and again we were impressed with our hostel. The first thing we decided to do was the luge which was similar to what we had done in Rotorua. It again involved getting a gondola up the side of a hill next to Queenstown and the views were amazing. The hill overlooks the town, the lake and the surrounding mountains and the colours were brilliant. The contrast between the greenery of the pine trees, the blues of the lakes and the white of the snow on the mountains was some of the best scenery we have seen so far. We then had seven goes on the luge which was really good and we enjoyed trying to pass each other as we flew down the tracks. As per usual, Beth cheated and got head starts on basically every go!!

On Wednesday night, we headed out with the rest of our bus for a few drinks and had a good night. There was a live band on in the bar who were really good so we had quite a few five dollar drinks whilst enjoying the music an talking to the rest of the people off the bus. We then headed to another bar which was decent where we shared a teapot of alcohol between us and a lad we had met from Taiwan. There was a canny bit of alcohol in these and seemed pretty strange to be drinking alcohol from a teapot. After deciding enough was enough at about 12 , we had a McDonald's to round off a good night.

So we had a bit of a lie in this morning before getting ready and doing the shortish walk along the lake to Sunshine Bay. The walk was nice and the weather has dramatically improved so we enjoyed the scenery whilst having the sun on our backs for the first time in a while. This afternoon, we have spent in the hostel watching a film in the impressive cinema room before we head out for a Thai meal tonight as my brother is leaving for Melbourne then the UK in the morning.