We didn't really do anything in Westport, it was more about the journeys to and from the town. On the way in we stopped off at a recreated gold mining town with the made up name of 'Shantytown'. It was highly touristy but we did enjoy panning for gold and have the fruits of our labour in a little jar. Don't get too excited jointly we collected about a dozen grains of gold with a street value of about 10p, so we will be home in May. Next stop was P...

Someone somewhere had told us the best way to view the glacier was to get up close and personal on a heli-hiking trip. The weather had been pretty poor in Fox Glacier so we had rung ahead to make sure we got a seat on the first trip. We took a short walk away from the village to get our first real glimse of the glacier from a nearby view point and we were so impressed we decided to take a closer look and walked close up to the terminal face. That night we prayed ...

We arrived at our "cabin" in the holiday park delighted we changed our minds on the crazy idea of a tent, seeing the poor souls struggling to erect them in the wind and rain. The strangest bird woke us up in the morning with a tweet that can only be described as the ring of the phones in 24 crossed with R2-D2. I swear I thought a kid was messing with a PSP. We headed into town to change our final tickets at New Zealand Air. After a slight panic that we ...

We spent a quiet few days in Wanaka just relaxing with a few beers/glasses of wine by the lake taking in the wonderful views. We did manage to tear ourselves away from this idillic setting to visit 'Puzzling World' the strangest tourist attraction ever. Basically it is a collection of a few holograms, bizarre visual effects and wooden puzzles. After all that excitement we drove up the road to the 'Toy Museum'. Now this was really worth the effort....

We were hoping to use our time here to plan a little trip to Stewart Island but as the weather here was typical British summertime i.e pouring down we knocked that on the head and just chilled out for a couple of days. We did manage to visit the southern most point of the south island, but got absolutely soaked in the process for what turned out to be a trek across some farmers sheep filled fields to a gps marker on the edge of a cliff. At least we can say we did...