Before leaving Rotarua for Christchurch we had time to spend in a Maori village.

In this place the earth's crust is only 4 km thick. This manifests itself in boiling water pools, geysers, steam spouts, bubbling mud pools and belching hydrogen sulphide gas. In this charming environment the local tribe of Maori people have chosen to make their home. It has 2 advantages - free hot water for bathing and free hot water for cooking. Put your veg in a bag, drop them on the end of a rope into the boiling pool, give them 3 minutes and they are cooked to perfection. The disadvantages are slight - the ground can open up under your house and swallow it up with all its inhabitants - oh, and the place smells pretty bad. A lovely lady who has lived there all her life showed us round - it was like being shown the latest luxury development with a view to buying. In 150 years of showing people around no one has bought it from them.

Christchurch is seriously sad. The suburbs are very nice indeed and the parks and gardens are beautiful. The city centre had half its buildings knocked down in the earthquake 3 years ago and, other than making things safe, nothing much more has happened. The cathedral is demolished but the house of Satan (casino) nearby is doing brisk business. We were in the city centre on a Saturday evening and there were only tourists wandering around taking pictures of the broken buildings. Apparently, there are issues around insurance payouts, local government incompetence, a vision for the new city centre and, worst of all, a general lethargy about putting things right. Three years on you would hope to see a lot more progress. It seems that many people have left the city for good.

We left Christchurch on the Trans Alpine Railway to Greymouth on the west coast. This is supposed to be one of the top 6 railway journeys in the world. Once we were in the hills the scenery was fantastic. Deep river valleys, high mountain peaks and deep cold lochs at every turn. The train was designed to make viewing the scenery easy having large windows and an outdoor viewing platform every few carriages. Our outdoor viewing platform was directly behind the 2 giant diesel engines. It was great for taking pictures but the instant the train went into a tunnel the platform filled up with diesel fumes. At midday we had Gin and Tonic for lunch and coasted the rest of the way to Greymouth.

That evening we arrived in Franz Joseph and, because the weather was fine, went directly to have a look at the glacier. A short walk from the car park gave us great views of the mass of ice creeping down the valley. There are signs up everywhere telling you to keep a good distance from the ice wall as blocks of ice twice the size of camper vans break off and tumble down on a regular basis. We stayed well back.

Most of the group signed up for adventure activities the next day. Some took the helicopter ride up the glacier. Some went to do ice climbing. Some went to look at a Kiwi in a cage. We went quad biking up the river valley and through the river coming out of the glacier. This was harder and scarier than any quad biking that we had done before. The river bed was strewn with very large boulders and picking a way through them at good speed was far from easy. We rattled our teeth a few times as we bounced along. The slopes were steep and boulder strewn too so it was a bit tricky getting up and down. We only had one stretch of about 500 yards that was smooth enough to open the throttle and speed along at full tilt. Our arms were aching after 2 hours of this so its off to some nearby hot pools to ease the aching muscles. On to Queenstown via Fox Glacier tomorrow.