After a few promotional videos on the bus of all the activities you could do in Queenstown, we got bombarded with a plethora of clip-boards to put our names on. The Nevis bungy was obviously a definite, and there was the Canyon Swing which we had heard loads about and were considering. It's basically where you swing through a big canyon in a harness after a brief freefall and it's meant to be good because the guys who work there mess with your head loads and you ...

After no doubt some more token little stops on the way to Franz Josef from Lake Mahinapua that I can´t be asked to rake through my brain to remember, we got there and the weather was perfect! Sunny and hardly a cloud in the sky. So it looked as if we were going to get our dream skydive that we´d been holding out for. Then in an unbelievable turn of events, because so many people on the bus wanted to jump, the driver had to pull names out of a hat to see who got...

I was in need of some much needed kip having got up so early to catch the ferry over to the South Island, plus I hadn´t really slept much the last few days what with all the going out and early starts. So as soon as I was on the ferry I pretty much passed out. What´s weird is that I could have sworn I had some crazy dreams about being thrown about all over the place. Then when I woke up it transpired that the sea had been unbelievably choppy and the boat had be...

So after gazing at the gloworms in a cold cave in Waitomo, it was off to Taupo, sort of the adventure capital of the North and famous for it´s massive volcanic lake. A lot of people on our bus went for the skydive because it´s supposed to be one of the better ones, in terms of over the lake, but after much deliberation we decided to save our skydive for Franz Josef over the glaciers in the south. It´s supposed to be the second most scenic skydive in the world ...

So with a belly full of Bolognese after MercuryBay it was off to the pungent Roturoa or 'SulphurCity'. The place is littered with geysers and hot pools that give the whole place a rotten egg stench. I mean you get used to it after a while but it's still fairly unpleasant for the first 5 minutes you wake up in the morning. So first of course we visited the thermal reserve where we did our own self-guided tour (because we're cheap backpacking scum). There were load...