Before i came away i'd been given the contact details of family on my mums side that lived in New Zealand. I'd been in contact with one member before i arrived, and i'd hoped to meet up with a few of them whislt i was here. All afternoon i'd been trying to ring them as we were near where i knew a few of them lived. But i wasnt getting through...finally i realised why, but by this point it was late afternoon/early evening... We started the day by driving along th...

Nice early start today - blue sky so we were excited about our trip to Milford Sound! Our tour left the campsite at 7:45 - there were only 3 other people on the tour so a nice small group! The drive from Te Anau to Milford Sound takes about 2 hours, but it is through the most beautiful scenary! Our tour provided us with lunch boxes - how cute! Our first stop was at the mirror lakes - the water reflects the mountains above perfectly! They were really impressive. N...

We left Les and Hazel today (hoping to catch them in Queenstown on the weekend) Our first stop was Peter's cafe with our flasks! He kindly filled them up with hot chocolate :o) and we got to meet his wife Wiki - who very nicely gave us christmas chocolate bags each (which we quickly tucked into!) Our second stop was at the 'famous' Big Red Barn or The Warehouse - everyone had spoken about how brilliant it was so we just had to check it out..it really does sell e...

Today we left Mount Cook and headed down to Dunedin - the town is named after Edinburgh and is apparently very Scottish! The drive was through very pretty landscape - we stopped off a few times along the way (we've brought a big road map book that tells you interesting places to stop so we checked out the ones that sounded the best!) Though we did stopped at what was apparently Maori rock art and couldnt see anything....We had a tastey lunch at a small cafe in th...

Our first full day in New Zealand - we decided to leave Christchurch straight away as we've had enough time in Cities these past few months and we want to get out into the countryside where the famous amazing scenary is in this country! I've printed out a driving round New Zealand guide so we decided to follow it for our first day. Mount Cook was our destination! It was a beautiful blue sky day. It was my turn to drive our campervan - I say van but its really jus...