On September 4th 2010, a magnitude 7.1 earthquake struck Canterbury NZ, which caused significant damage to Christchurch and the central Canterbury region, but no direct fatalities. And then 6 months later, on February 22nd 2011, Christchurch was rocked again with a magnitude 6.3 earthquake that severely damaged New Zealand's second-largest city, killing 185 people (only New Zealand's stringent building codes limited the disaster)- an event almost unheard ...

Because we had only seen about 5 million penguins (complete with excessive amounts of guano) during our trip to Antarctica a couple of years ago, we decided we had to stop in Oamaru for another application of penguin viewings. To be fair, these were different, and relatively rare penguins- the Yellow Eyed Penguin, and the Little Blue Penguin. Penguins are the puppies of the bird species- you really could sit for hours and watch these cute little weebles wobbling ...

We had to blow through Dunedin a little quicker than we wanted to because our time in New Zealand is starting to wind down and we still have three ‘must-dos’ on our list: mountain biking through part of the scenery featured in the Lord Of The Rings movie trilogy, swimming with endangered Hector Dolphins, and surveying the earthquake damage in Christchurch- not sure we’ll get it all done. Cousin Robert had recommended something called the Rail Tr...

Crossing the southern tip of the South Island was all about dodging sheep (there are a reported 20 sheep for every person on the South Island- very believable as the little fur balls are everywhere), but the cows are omnipresent as are the deer farms (apparently the deer are captured via helicopter in the massive Fjordland National Park and moved to venison farms outside the boundaries- they are not native to NZ and are destroying the sensitive local flora). We r...

Before arriving in NZ, a number of people had suggested that we look at the 3 day hike of the Milford Track (which NZ Tourism refers to as 'the finest walk in the world') in the Fjordland National Park. Because of the restricted number of people allowed to hike the track on any given day, it looks like you would need to book your spot some weeks if not months in advance and our itinerary is just far too loose for this. We did want to spend a couple of day...