Moving on to the North Island

Our arrival onto the North Island at Wellington was a bit of a shock to the system... cars everywhere, big tall buildings, an abundance of traffic lights! After the remoteness of the South Island at times, it was strange but at the same time really nice being back in a big city again.

After spending an hour or two driving around the Wellington area trying to find somewhere to park for the night we decided on a hostel instead, after spending the last 2 nights at the hostel in Blenheim, poor Charlie must think we're neglecting him!

Wellington was beautiful, we were lucky enough to have some great weather while we were there, sun shine and blue skies. The Cuba Street area of downtown Wellington had some great shopping - which of course we all indulged in. After just a day I found myself really liking Wellington and thinking it could be a place I could possibly live in!

The Te Papa Museum, New Zealand's National Museum was a great way to spend a morning, and we spent an afternoon over at Somes Island, doing a few walks around the island, oohing and ahhing over cute little lambs and just soaking up the sunshine!

The Glaciers and the West Coast

Charlie was fixed and ready to go the afternoon of my last post and we left Wanaka pretty much soon after he was done, heading towards the little village of Haast, where we spent our first night in our newly fixed van.

Haast doesn't really have much to report about, they've spilt the area into 3 sections; Haast Township/Village, Haast Junction and Haast Beach, in my opinion they should have put the 3 areas together and maybe have had a decent sized village out of it. But hey, thats just my opinion!

From Haast we headed north towards the glaciers. Fox glacier was first, which we got a really good view of. I had done a 1/2 day glacier walk on Fox glacier a couple of years back so we decided to do our own glacier walk on the Franz Josef glacier instead, which is where we headed to that same evening. The rain was still following us unfortunately but our 1/2 day glacier walk on Franz Josef the day after was absolutely wonderful, the weather cleared up for the second half of the walk and we got some stunning views of the glacier and the surrounding area.

We passed through the West coast of the South Island pretty quickly, it was still raining - pretty heavily at times and the towns of Greymouth and Westport didn't really have much to offer other than a petrol stop!

We took the Lewis pass across the South Island, stopping off at Hamner springs for a soak in their thermal hotpools before heading to Kaikoura, where we saw even more fur seals and saw a sperm whale and the most dolphins I've ever seen in my life when we did a whale watching tour. I'll try and get some pictures up of the dolphins/whale when I can.

And now we're back in Blenheim, back at the hostel myself and Stacy stayed in when we were working here, just passing through for 2 nights to catch up with some friends who are still here, get some washing done and in Stacy's case, getting her fix of baking done before we head to Picton this afternoon for the ferry to Wellington. North Island here we come!

Milford Sound, Skiing in Queenstown and a sick Charlie...

Right, time to do some blog catch up and due to current circumstances (which I'll get to in a bit), seems like now is a good a time as ever! Be warned, this could be a long one...

So we got to Invercargill a little over 2 weeks ago and spent most of our time there chilling out and relaxing after exploring the Catlins. The rain we first encountered in Christchurch earlier in the month seems to have caught up with us here and we were quite happy sitting in cafes hiding out from the rain.

After 2 nights we left Invercargill for Te Anau, the wind and rain unfortunately following us and booked ourselves into the YHA there as Te Anau don't seem to like people camping out in their campervans overnight. We did a day trip over to Milford Sound from Te Anau, decided against driving there ourselves since the roads were pretty bad, I don't think Charlie would have made it up those mountain paths, especially with snow chains on!

Our Milford Sound cruise was pretty amazing, I'd been before and it was nothing like the first time I went, an evening/overnight cruise which meant that after the sun went down you really couldn't see anything! It was a bit misty which meant that the largeness of the sound was lost on us, but we did get to see fur seals, dolphins and albatross!

The weather wasn't about to let up and it seemed that during our last night in Te Anau, there was another minor earthquake (there had been one the night before apparantly), as well as more rain, which meant that the Glowworm Caves were definately off the cards. So onwards to Queenstown we drove, arriving early in the afternoon of the 1st August.

We stayed in Queenstown for a total of 9 nights and 5 of those days were spent skiing at the Remarkables and Coronet Peak which were amazing. The last time I'd been skiing was nearly 10 years ago when I was still in school so the lessons I had for the first 3 days were definitely needed and by the time we left last week I was just about to do parallel turns and blue runs without too much falling over and losing control!

The last time I was in New Zealand about 3 years ago I was too chicken to do a bungee jump, and I'm afraid to say, I still was this time around! Stacy did the Nevis Bungee, a 143m drop from the middle of a suspended platform, however that wasn't for myself or Holly. We did compromise and do the Nevis Arc though, the world's highest swing, which was amazing!

We left Queenstown 2 days ago for our current location of Wanaka with the plan of just staying for one night and then heading up to the glaciers - we still haven't decided whether we're doing the Fox or Franz Joseph Glacier. However our plan was foiled somewhat when Charlie died just as we arrived into Wanaka, seems like his gearbox has collasped...!!!! So for the last 2 nights we've been camped out at the garage thats fixing him and spending our days hiding out from the rain (its still following us) in cafes or as in the case of yesterday afternoon, puzzling world!! Hoping Charlie will be fit to go by this afternoon, or tomorrow at the latest and then we'll be good to hit the road again!