Sunday 27 Feb. Up at the crack of dawn to catch the early ferry back to the mainland. We have a leisurely drive ahead, mainly following the southeastern coast, through a scenic area called the Catlins, up to Dunedin. We make a couple of stops along the way at beaches and also in a small town for a bite to eat, choosing the Lumberman Café, which turns out to provide more than decent food, at good prices (did we mention how expensive everything seems in this count...

Friday, 25 Feb. Today we drive to the extreme southern point of the South Island, catching a ferry across the Foveaux Strait (20 miles) to Stewart Island. A long drive ahead, moving down out of the mountains, takes us through farmland almost all the way to Invercargill. We pass one sheep station (New Zealand farm) after another. By now, we must have seen a million sheep, Glenna's been counting them to help her go to sleep! This has become the most familiar view w...

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...