26/06/09 Friday Day 315 Today was another 8 hour bus journey. Left Queenstown at 8am and arrived into Christchurch some time after 4pm. Again the journey wasn’t too bad. Plenty of stops on the way and loads of information from the drivers on the way. We stopped somewhere to view Mount Cook in the distance behind some lake. The way the driver was talking before we got to the stop made it sound like an amazing view. It was good Mount Cook was miles away. You could just see it in the distance. Our hotel, Hotel So was right in the [View Full Entry]

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23/06/09 Tuesday Day 312 Crazy early start this morning. Our bus is at 7.15am and we would be in Milford sound around 1.15pm. The bus was full as soon as we picked up the last people. Also the bus driver made everyone sit in the bus starting from the front seats. Luckily we got the front seats. The only bad thing is that there’s no leg room. No sooner had we left when we had a casualty! This one decided to become sick and the roads hadn’t even become windy yet. So she sat in the jump seat in the front [View Full Entry]

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22/06/09 Monday Day 311 8am start for the bus journey again. Today we’re heading for Queenstown. Nothing really to report from the bus journey. As long as they are they’re not that bad. There’s a stop at least every 2 hours for either 15 minutes or 30 minutes for lunch. We arrived into the middle of the town around 5pm and our first impressions of the city were very good indeed. It’s like Christmas here. It’s cold and everyone is covered up. We only had about a 5 minute walk to get to our hotel, the Novotell. Once we checked in [View Full Entry]

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20/06/09 Saturday Day 309 Another early start this morning. Got the bus at 7.15am. Arrived into Franz Josef around 5pm. After checking in we checked out the town. It’s a tiny place. It’s basically got the main road and a parallel road to the main road. There’s loads of accommodation here and restaurants. The only thing to do here really is do a hike up the glacier, which we are doing tomorrow. Being a Saturday night you might think that it would be busy here. It wasn’t! All the pubs were pretty dead with only a hand full of people in [View Full Entry]

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19/06/09 Friday Day 308 After checking out at 10am from our hostel in Picton we just wandered around the town again just waiting for our 12.15pm bus to Nelson. We arrived into Nelson around half 2 and checked into another YHA hostel. This one is really nice, and it’s warm too, well kind of anyway. The town itself is again small and can be viewed pretty quickly. The rest of today is going to be used for recovering. Tomorrow we have an 8 hour bus journey to Franz Josef and that leaves at 7.15am! [View Full Entry]

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15/06/09 Monday Day 304 Ship Cove to Endeavour Inlet 15 kilometres After getting up early, we headed down towards the harbour area in Picton where we booked our boat trip and accommodation with Beachcombers. This is a great service as they will transport your bags to your accommodation each day. Our first section to walk today is 15 kilometres from Ship Cove to Endeavour Inlet where we would be staying the night in Furneaux Lodge. At the very start at Ship Cove is a big climb. We had a great day weather wise for the walk, blue skies and dry. The [View Full Entry]

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14/06/09 Sunday Day 303 Check out was early from the hotel so we had a lot of time to kill at the ferry terminal. Our ferry from Wellington to Picton was at 2pm. We arrived into Picton around 5.20pm and checked into our hotel, YHA Picton. Nice place. Small with only a couple of rooms. Picton itself is tiny. It’s got a huge harbour area though. After getting some supplies we headed back to the hostel to eat. We got chatting to a group of 3 that were also travelling. One of the girls was from Belfast, the other from Dublin [View Full Entry]

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11/06/09 Thursday Day 300 5 hour bus journey today from Napier to Wellington. It passed reasonably ok. Couple of small ones on board but generally they kept mostly quiet! We arrived into Wellington bus and train station around 1pm and got a taxi to our hotel, The Mercure on The Terrace. We went for a hotel this time because we got a 3 nights for 2 deal on hotels.com and it worked out around the same price than the hostels in the city. Very nice hotel, even includes a mini bar and great views of the city. The city is quiet [View Full Entry]

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09/06/09 Tuesday Day 298 Our hostel, The Criterion Hotel, is right in the middle of the city. It’s a huge place. It used to be a hotel back in the 30’s or something like that anyway! The walk from the bus station only took about 10 minutes so that’s not bad because our bus our of here in two days time is at 8am to Wellington. The city centre here is small too although the actual city spreads out a bit. We arrived at our hostel around 5pm so after checking in, we got ourselves a bit to eat in the [View Full Entry]

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08/06/09 Monday Day 297 Freefalling Just after checking in to our hostel, Tiki Lodge, we enquired about doing a skydive. Taupo is apparently the cheapest place in the world they say to do a jump. We had already picked out the company and to our luck, 3 people in our hostel were getting collected so we were able to hop in with them. So no time to think or get nervous…..or so we thought. There’s loads of different options for the jump, 12000 feet, 15000 feet, video taped with either a handicam by your jump buddy or another skydiver with a [View Full Entry]

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