Saturday 17th my bus left Rotorua on the final leg of my Kiwi pass to Auckland. The only stop we made en route was at a town called Matamata where filming of The Shire took place for Lord of the Rings. We didn’t see any little hobbit houses built into hills though, it was only […]
The weather hasn’t been very kind over the last few days, as I made my way from the South to the North Island. After all the adventure in Queenstown our bus to CHristchurch left on Sunday 11th. As I started my trip in Christchurch and already had a few days there I only planned on […]
We scheduled five nights in Queenstown because there’s an abundance of stuff to do here. The town sits alongside the snaking Lake Wakatipu amongst The Remarkables mountain range. 14,000 people live here and the town’s relatively high population (there’s only four million people in the whole of NZ) owes itself to the gold rush that […]
Yesterday was one of those rare days where everything goes well and things just fall into place. It was a text-book traveller’s day. The weather the day before, on Saturday, was rainy and miserable. We spoke to the group that arrived in the township of Franz Josef the day before us and hiked the glacier […]
It’s been a busy few days. On Thursday we boarded the coach and drove off towards Westport on the west coast of the south island. It’s a fantastically scenic drive through the southern alps; a mixture of rocky outcrops, rainforest and snow-capped mountains straight out of a movie scene. En route we stopped off to […]
Flight 415 touched down at Christchurch in New Zealand’s south island a little ahead of schedule on Monday night. When I stepped off the plane I thought I’d gotten off at Heathrow. It’s bloody freezing over here! For the first time in four months I can see my own breath at night. I was going […]