Hey everyone. Hope you're not all too cold back home. We just keep running out of suncream! Since we last posted, we nearly climbed Mount Doom from Lord of the Rings, but couldn't in the end, as the weather closed in as soon as we got to the base. We went from Taupo down to a place called River Valley for a night. While we were there we went horseriding in really cool mountains. We thought it would be really tame, but we were allowed to properly canter and gallop and go off by ourselves and it was about 3 hours so was class. Rose's horse was called Gypsy and started off misbehaving and only turned right so if she wanted to turn left she had to go right through 270 degrees! Mike's was a perfectly behaved one called Honey and responded perfectly! We caught the bug for it, as it's really cheap here but is so much fun.

From there we caught the bus to Wellington, where we stayed for 2 nights. In the day we climbed Mount Victoria to look out over the city, went to the free museum where we saw a giant squid and walked around the city. It was a nice city, but odd that it's the capital city and only the size of Plymouth. The next morning we caught the 3 hour ferry across to the South Island, where we travelled on to Nelson. Nelson is really small but is close to Abel tasman national Park, where we explored on the second day there. We hired a couple of cars between 9 of us, which worked out really cheap, and we got to explore some of the beaches which were really nice. We caught the bus on to Westport on the West coast, which is a small mining town with not much to do, so we did our second horse ride. This one was more tame, but after a while we were allowed to gallop. one cool thing was that we did a river crossing with the horses, which meant getting wet and giving the horses a swim.

From there we went down to the infamous 'Poo Pub' by Lake Mahinapua further down the coast. The drives on this coast are amazing, and the pub was cool, but really small. We had a lush meal of steak, venison stew , potatoes and other veg etc! There was a fancy dress party in the evening where the theme was 'Tight and Bright/80's' so Rose used her costume from New Year, and Mike dressed up as a bee! It was fun, but we weren't in the mood for it as much as New Year, but was still cool.

Then this morning we came to Franz Josef which is a small town by a huge glacier, which we are planning to hike up for 8 hours tomorrow with a guide. We're spending 2 nights here and then going to Lake Wanaka, where we'll be for 3 nights, and Rose may do a skydive and Mike may join her! Lookout for pics...

Speak soon, Mike and Rose.xx