Blogs from New Zealand, Oceania - page 2329

Checked out and drove the short 2 hour journey to Queenstown. Picked up a hitchhiker, Christian from Germany, on the way. Hitching is fairly common amongst travellers in New Zealand, there's always other people with cars touring the islands. Stayed at the Southern Laughter Backpackers, each room had 8 people with it's own lounge, TV and kitchen, nice! Chatted to our roomies from England and Canada, and basically stayed in the room for the rest of the day chilling out.... read more

so, i'm truncating the entries for my last few days in new zealand.... dunedin: south of christchurch by about 3 hours. my recovery day from stewart island included a speights ale house tour and a cadbury chocolate factory tour. i don't like beer, but i decided i had to try the variety as a tasting was included in the tour. this i will label as 'michelle's part of the day' because she LOVES beer. she was all smiles the entire hour....she even smiled as we entered the stinky hopps (we don't know if there's 1 or 2 p's in hops) room. the biggest grins though were while trying her hand at pouring beer from an actual bar tap. by the time the tasting was over we'd had about 3 glasses of beer between us....feeling rather 'happy' ... read more

Well by now we were all prepared to be writing in the style of Big Brother ... "Dey nine in the Big Bovver Campervan and the vanmates are getting ratty...", but am relieved to report that no one's been nominated or evicted. Infact vanmate numbers have doubled with the addition of Someone and Somebody (ie, Someone forgot to lock the door and Somebody didn't empty the kettle...). Fortunately, it's very hard to do anything but smile here as everything is as good as we'd imagined it to be. Worked through the lingering pains of DS and headed for Lake Wanaka on Thursday. A cool, relaxing place to break up the journey to the glaciers and rest overnight. The town had lots of good cafes and bars but lost points because we couldn't find a pavlova anywhere. ... read more

We took a day hike on Franz Josef Glacier, which was just over 4 hours ice walking. We were all kitted up with leather boots and crampons etc, given a brief coach on ice walking, and off we went! There were only 13 in our group, and chose to be in the lead group (not that there was much choice for Spen!!), hacking the ice away for the other groups and roping up the steep inclines. The views and satisfaction were great when we got to our peak, which was 2,100 feet up! ... read more

Tongariro Crossing As I had mentioned in the last blog entry I was going to go on a hike ( or tramp as Kiwi's call them) through a place called the Tongariro Crossing which people will remember as 'Mount Doom' from Lord of the rings. On the 15 of Feb me and Mike a Canadian guy traveling with us both went on the tramp (the girls decided to go horse riding, wimps!). The views were stunning but the walk was very hard walk. The normal walk alone is 17km and as an option you can have a go at climbing the mountain which adds an extra 3 hours to the walk. We couldn't go all the way and not have a go so we ended up spending hours at some points literally crawling on our ... read more