Lots and Lots of snow, very cold toes, getting back on the slopes and drinking mulled wine in the middle of June!!!! we finally arrived in Qeueenstown after driving for pretty much the whole day - unfortunately it turned out I had one of those progressive hangovers so the journey had been fairly torturous for me! the town itself is incredibly cool, a proper ski resort - lots of rah types and very swanky buildings - not really an image that a big orange camperven fits into though! So we parked up and crashed out for the evening - with the exception of Hol who in a show of either great patriotism or sheer stupidity got up at four am to go watch the footy game! warm bed, or drunken louts? i think you already know the decision i made!!! However we all got rudely awoken from our slumber at about 8am the next day by a man from the council - apparently they're too posh in Queenstown for us to park up in their car parks overnight so instead of getting fined we decided to shell out for a campsite, although the pain of paying was numbed by the prospect of a warm shower electricity and a real kistchen - things we get very excited about these days!!! so after a couple of hours of exploiting the abundant facilities campsites have to offer we set off to explore the town a bit - conclusions = beautiful, way too expensive, and full of annoyingly beautiful and annoyingly rich people! result = total self pity and an urge to eat crappy food and watch nieghbours!!! lol the next day Amb Hol and I got up super duper early - it was stil dark!!! and headed for the hills, well mountains technically, for a spot of skiing! Had a totally awesome day, had been quite worried that i had fogotten how to ski and was gonna look like a grade a pillark but it turns out it was just like riding a bike!!! the snow was ace and really really enjoyed myself - even bumped into one of the guys from fraser island in the queue for the ski lift and did a few runs with him which was pretty cool! At the end of the day i was pretty gutted we only had just a day on the slopes, although i think Amber and Hol would disagree! So i can add another plan to the long list of future travle plans - work a season in a ski resort! That night we went to the Queenstown winter Mardi Gras which was really good fun, lots of cheesy songs, a blokes beauty competition and mulled wine! t'was fab fun! unfortunately we still had a lot of ground to cover so got back on the road and headed for Franz Josef! xxxxx *** sorry all evidently techno bimbo strikes again the date on the last few entries are wrong - obviously!!!!!