We arrived in the Golden Bay area after a long drive from Greymouth. We went straight to the YHA Hostel but after a quick look around we decided to check out some other hostels around the area. Takaka is REALLY small we soon discovered and a bit of a ghost town! We found another hostel which was closed down then ended up outside another hostel which also looked very quiet. Outside this hostel was another couple who said they had been in and it looked like it...

It was a lovely day when we drove from Wanaka to our next destination Franz Josef, and we were a bit disappointed as its typical when you're just driving around that the weather's nice and sunny! Franz Josef is a very small town on the west side of the South island and is home to New Zealand's two ice glaciers, the Franz Josef glacier and the Fox Glacier about 2o minutes down the road. We decided to stay at the YHA Hostel again as we are now members and get a bit...

After a 3 hour drive (with a French hitchhiker we picked up from our hostel!) we finally arrived in Queenstown and were pleasantly surprised at how picturesque it was. We had been told by all the backpackers that it was a party town with lots of activities and backpackers so we didn't expect it to look quite as nice as it was. Queenstown is surrounded by mountains and had a really large lake near to the centre. We stayed in the YHA Hostel on the lakefront which w...

We decided to again do the scenic route down South through a place called the Catlins, to get to the most Southern most city called Invercargill. The scenery again was really good and when you're driving you often don't see a car for age's just lots of sheep! We had arranged to stay in a hostel when we got to Invercargill but when we arrived I found out Ady had booked us into a nice hotel for my birthday. The hotel was great and even had a cinema room where you c...

We had arranged to meet up with Sam and Jo who we met on the night train in Vietnam. They live in Dunedin and kindly offered to put us up while we were visiting. When we arrived in Dunedin after our long journey we arranged to meet up with Jo's son Jesse. We went to his flat first to meet him and also to look at the car he had for sale. It was a 1990 Honda Prelude and he was selling it for a good price so we took it for a bit of a spin and decided that we wo...