Hello from me, on my own again, as Nic left on her trek on Tuesday morning. On Monday evening I discovered that Keren (friend from Perth who went back to Asia when the tsunami hit) was in Nelson with a friend of her's from the UK and so the two of them met us for a drink. It was lovely to see her and the 4 of us compared notes as they had just finished the South Island and us the North, before they headed off to the cinema. Nic and I then went in search of foo...

Well, we have finally arrived in the South Island, having flown from Auckland to Nelson this morning on the smallest plane ever - it only had 30 seats. Yesterday we had to get the van back to Auckland and so got up early and headed out of Napier. When we got to Taupo we picked up a hitch-hiker by the name of Tamir from Israel. He was a really nice guy who helped us clean out the van before returning it in Auckland, however I did keep an eye on him in the r...

I can sum this day up in 4 words - cricket, sunshine, beer and b*****ks. The first 3 are fairly self explanatory - we sat on the embankment at McLean Park in the blazing sun and watched a one day international between New Zealand and Australia, oh and we had the odd cold beer. Australia won easily, but it was a great day out and the ground was small enough that you could actually almost stand on the boundary in places. We had a little chuckle as well when ...

Woke up in Clive and as we weren't being hassled to leave the site, we faffed for ages and the nice old boy gave me this, which I thought I'd share with you - as you can probably tell we didn't do too much today and I'm trying to pad things out!! A Traveller's 10 Commandments: 1 - Thou shalt not expect to find things as thou hast them at home, for thou hast left home to find things different. 2 - Thou shalt not take anything too seriously, for a carefree min...

Having spent the night at Butlin's, or at least the equivalent, and waking up to a coldish, overcast day, we decided to head into town and be organised. This entailed visiting a book exchange (we were running out of reading material), the internet, shopping for Nic's trek, sorting out the return of the van and deciding what and how to get to our next destination. By lunchtime we were pretty organised and after a snack we headed off on our guided tour of the...