Thursday, 24 Feb. We're driving to Manipouri, a small village on a lake in the southwest of the South Island. Manipouri is on the edge of the Fiordlands National Park, an enormous land and water mass that is almost completely without human habitation, and is now cherished and protected from any and all human development. The national park covers the coastline for several hundred kilometres, and quite a ways inland, encompassing fiords and subsidiary arms and inle...

Tuesday and we're off to Queenstown in the district of Otago. A long drive down the coastal road so we set off early. We're booked for the Siberian experience (Siberia referring to the name of a local stream and valley), which includes a small-plane flight, a 3 hour walk and a jet boat ride. Sadly, the bad weather has continued, and our experience is cancelled, so we rescheduled it for the next day and continued on to Queenstown. On the drive down, we heard on t...

As we continue driving south along the west coast, the weather worsens (rain and wind), but is to be expected, as this area has over 6 meters of rainfall per annum - one of the highest in the world. Having reached our next destination, Franz Josef (the name of the town as well as the glacier), we stay at Te Waunai (we never learned how to pronounce this). It's grandly billed as an eco lodge, as the construction of it was supposed to be on environmentally sound p...

Sunday 20 Feb—the Tranz Alpine railway runs from Christchurch to Greymouth, across the middle of New Zealand from the East coast to the West coast, over the Alpine range. The crossing takes 4 ½ hours, over Arthur's Pass, and also over 3 viaducts and through 19 tunnels, most of the time hugging the edge of the mountains. One carriage for viewing is open air with just a railing for safety—talk about windblown. Views were stunning, as we trundled over massive r...

Once Robin has peeled off his wetsuit and we're back on solid ground, we continue our long drive, the goal being just beyond Christchurch to Taitapu. It's been a long day - over 270 kms and a swim. Our lodge for the next two nights is Otahuna, NZ's largest private house, built by a Victorian era Anglo-New Zealander. After various incarnations, the property has thankfully come into the ownership of two former New Yorkers, Miles and Hall. (It turns out that Miles g...