Decidan

The flight to Wellington was a goodun. I hadn't expected much but as soon as I sat down, next to my pre-booked window seat (gotta have a window seat), I was greeted by a beautiful young girl from Auckland who was sat next to me. Sharon was from Auckland but studied psychology at Wellington University. We got chatting and on the shuttle bus to the city, I got her number and arranged to give her a call to meet up sometime before I flew to Oz. I'd booked myself into Trek Global which was a smaller close knit community hostel in the city I'd visited before as some girls I knew through Mark were staying there. This hostel it turns out was notorious for having problems with their fire alarms. Literally every other day the fire ... read more

Right, I've left it quite a while now to catch up on this blog (having too much fun) and although I've taken notes to make it easier, my memory isn't great. We arrived back onto the North Island after nearly missing the ferry due to Mark being so bad at getting out of bed, and we headed to Nomads backpackers hostel in Wellington to meet Sanni and Sonny. Immediately we had a problem. We tried for ages to find a car parking space for the camper and eventually found one that was rather tight, squished in between an expensive looking shiny new BMW X5 and another van. Mark hit it, not the van, the BMW. He managed to catch the side of the camper on the front bumper of the Beemer, scuffing the lovely black bodywork. ... read more

The next day we spent doing pretty much bugger all. The weather was crap and I'm glad of it because after drinking the night before I wasn't in the mood to do a great deal of anything. We did however book ourselves onto a bus for the next morning to take us up to Cardrona for a days snowboarding. We were very lucky with the weather as the rain the previous day down in Queenstown equaled snow up on the mountains and it was a blue bird day all day for snowboarding. I've done 2 boarding holidays before but only ever with 1 or 2 friends so it was awesome to have a group of us up there over 10 strong. Although keeping in a group of that size proved to be impossible due to us ... read more

So the next morning we all hopped back on the bus, all very hung over, and set off bound for Franz Josef. After arriving in Franz Josef we checked into the lovely Rainforest hotel, got kitted up, hopped into a helicopter and flew up onto the Franz Josef glacier. Wow. We were sat on a beach next to the poo pub yesterday shivering in the cold and now we're stood on a glacier in the baking sun having to strip down because it's so hot. Our guide navigated us around the glacier through crevasses and big holes in the ice created by flowing air and water. This felt like something from another world. I've never experienced anything like this before. Completely mind blowing stuff. After roughly 3 hours on the glacier we hopped onto another helicopter ... read more

Right, so we arrive at our River Valley lodge. What an amazing place. It feels like a ski chalet in the alps. Beautiful wooden building with an open fire in the middle of the chillout room set right in a valley on the river, as the name suggests. The room options were either standard bunk bed dorm rooms or one big room which sleeps 16 on a row of connected bunks. I think 11 of us opted for the big room. Unfortunately there had been alot of rain so the rafting was cancelled and we were told there was a chance we could go in the morning. So we decided to go for a walk across the river and up a steep hill. There was no bridge across the river so in order to cross we ... read more