Day 141, 143 - Wanaka, South Island - Monday 5th, Tuesday 6th March 2012

We woke up to the sight of Mt Cook out of our window. It was so cold that the van had completely steamed up and so we were eager to get our breakfast and tea on the go to warm ourselves up a bit!

With breakie done we started our drive to our next destination - Wanaka.

A few hours in and we arrived in Wanaka - it's a really nice little town and there's people and shops!! Something we haven't seen for a while! We parked up and walked around and checked out the place before going to our campsite to check in. The Aspiring campsite was definitely the best we'd stayed in so far - for $42 you get everything plus free Wi-Fi and the use of a spa and sauna!

After paying we headed just slightly out of town to the Ribbon vineyard and arrived just in time to try some tastings - several tries of wine later and we were a cheese plate and a bottle of sauvignon blanc up (the cheese for us and the bottle of wine for dinner with Nikki and Danny the following night)!

We headed back to our campsite and within an hour had finished the bottle of red, eaten all of the cheese and biscuits plus a bag of crisps and were halfway through our lamb stew!

With the free WI-FI I caught up with Stace and Maya in Dubai - it was really lovely to chat to them face to face (well kind of face to face - the connection kept on cutting out).

After finishing on Skype I headed to the spa to join Ad - we discovered from this that a bottle of wine, lots of food and a hot spa do not mix! Feeling slightly woozy we headed to bed.

Ahh a nice lazy morning; this is a nice thing about travelling - deciding when to get up!! Usually we have something planned like a walk, a tour or moving on to the next place early, but today we waited to see where Wanaka took us - before leaving early evening to drive to Queenstown to meet our friends Danny & Nikki. We checked out of our campsite at the required 10 am which always seems strange to us as check in is at 2pm, quite why they need the space free for 4 hours will always remain a mystery to us! Anyway we drove into town and stopped at the local café for flat whites and a peanut butter cookies (Soph loves peanut butter!!), it was lovely. The café had free Wi-Fi so we put some blogs on the net and checked our emails. After 10 minutes our coffees and cookies were gone but we stayed another 2 hours using their free Wi-Fi and pretending to drink from empty cups! Once we had sucked the café dry of internet we left and drove out of town towards the Wanaka Brewery that Soph had read about the day before. The brewery was next to the "antique motor show" where they charged $20 each to look at old bangers, including loads of Fords… I thought… I've been doing that for free for years!! The brewery was a strange little place run by a white kiwi guy with long dreadlocks and a sleepy eye. I don't know how, but the tour lasted 1 hour and we covered about 15 yards in total. The beer however was very good, especially the Brewski, and we picked up a mixed 6 pack for dinner tonight. After the knackering beer tour we decided to drive to Queenstown (this is the adrenaline capital for bungy's, skydives etc.) to do some crazy stuff and hook up with D&N. We had a good drive down taking about 2-3 hours seeing some nice mountain scenery on route. We pulled into D&N's at about 5pm, it was great to see them and catch up. We spent ages talking then Danny knocked up a beef, veg and pasta meal followed by kit kat chunkys and finished up with hot chocolate with marshmallows - now that's my kind of 3 course meal. All this was washed down with all 6 bottles of beers from the brewery and 3 bottles of wine!! No chance of us driving so we stayed the night; me being the gentleman, I let Soph have the floor while I fell straight to sleep in the cosy single bed - hoping that Danny doesn't snore like usual!!