Te Anau, New Zealand - 7/7/10

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Helloski!

Once again it's been a while since updating (sorry!) but we've been busy busy extreme-sporting bees!

From Christchurch we went to Lake Tekapo (giggle) where we saw our first bit of snow in this hemisphere (and year) and went on the snow-tubing, a bit like sledging but just on large rubber inner-tubes. That was good fun - surely after that no-one needs to bother with that skiing rubbish!

We then headed to the Mount Cook national park (named after - rather than by - the Oz-discoverer) and stayed a night just outside the village in Glentanner (which seemed to consist solely of a caravan park and a helicopter pad, although there were a fair few sheep and cows about too). We went on a 3 hour walk around the national park the next day, we weren't able to climb the mountain itself due to a lack of sherpas but we got a great view of it, as well as some small glaciers and rivers around it.

From there we stayed in a funny little hick town called Twizel (twi - like twilight) where they did free pork sandwiches in the local bar - excellent!).

We then burned it round to Queenstown, extreme sports capital of NZ, where we spent the last few days trying to get in some of the stuff. Only Amanda, Sarah's sister, actually skis so we didn't get any of that in but we did catch the last event of the Queenstown winter festival, a free gig on the top of the mountain. Getting up there proved to be quite concerning for some members of the party who were concerned about the sheer drops off the cliff edge as we drove up! We also did the luge (an un-powered downhill go-kart) after going up the 'gondola' (a fancy chair-lift, not a punt-powered riverboat) onto the top of the hills, and played frisbee golf. But the most exciting thing was the 43m Kawarau Bridge bungy - the worlds first commercial bungy site, which I did! The scenery was amazing and, despite minus 2 degree temperature and a few false starts at the top I managed to dive off and enjoyed it a lot. Don't think I'll be making a career of it though...

We then headed a bit further south so we could head around the bottom of the Southern Alps and go to Milford Sound and the Fox/Franz Josef glaciers. Last night was spent in Lumsden, a real arse-end-of-nowhere town, and we 're now in Te Anau where we might go to the glow-worm caves tonight.

Still no pictures- I keep forgetting my camera lead!

Tim

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