Hello from Queenstown! We're staying in an airbandb about 20 mins out of the town on the beautiful Lake Hayes. It's the best of both worlds, close enough to the crazy fun and yet so peaceful. Our little 'cottage' is a tiny straw bale house in the garden of a larger property which is also straw bale. It also has a living roof (not a typo for living room ), beautiful sculpures around the garden created by the owner and lots of fantails and tuis flying around. We couldn't be happier.

However, let's get back to Great Barrier Island. The evening looked cloudy for our star gazing and we were still jet-lagged but mother nature came up trumps and the clouds parted as we arrived at the beach to give us a mind blowing display of the Milky Way. Using the binoculars provided and the enormous telescope we could see an infinite number of stars, old and new, Mars, contellations galore, a satellite moving pretty swiftly and several 'shooting stars'. The statistics were actually a bit overwhelming for me but certainly put us firmly in our place as specs of transient dust.

The following day we walked a track to some hot pools and sat around in hot, smelly mud for a while. We popped down to a beach and enjoyed cooling off. The very hot weather that has hit Australia finally reached NZ and it has been unseasonably hot but only in the very high 20s/low 30s with a cooling sea breeze.

We took a drive up to the north of the island and walked some way up the highest peak, Mt Hobson. It was just too hot to trek it all so we did what we could later in the day and had the whole trail to ourselves. It's just a very special island.

We met lots of friendly stick insects around the property :))

We arrived at the airstrip on the morning we left to find it pretty much shut down. Low cloud was putting flights in jeopardy and we had a tight one hour connection in Auckland for Queenstown. Eventually the flight from Auckland showed as departed and although it was about as late as it could have been, we made our bag drop with 3 minutes to spare. Beautiful views of Fox and Franz Joseph glaciers as we came down.

Dom, Maggy and Raphael arrived the next morning and we have had a great couple of days with them laughing, eating and drinking in one of our favourite places. We met them when we lived in Nelson and, although Maggy is a Kiwi, they had moved there from Watford! We had a lot of fun with them and I have visited them a couple of times since when I've been over on my own but Paul has only seen Dom who was in the UK a couple of years ago. Now they live down in Invercargill, just a couple of hours from here. It was so good to spend time with them and to see how Raph has grown into such an interesting, humerous and polite young man.

We have just returned from the briefing for our Routeburn Track walk which starts at 6.30 in the morning. There are only 7 of us booked on the walk (they take 40) which is a little disappointing in some ways because meeting and walking with lots of different people is part of the joy. When we walked the Milford Track we made friends for life who we still walk with. We're very excited and keen to get going. The weather looks set dry if a bit on the cool side. Pity I trod on some broken glass yesterday but hopefully, by the morning, it will have stopped bleeding every time I step on it...hahaha!

So, all going well and we'll be in touch again after the walk.