Part two of the road trip saw us heading up to Mount Cook National Park, via Wanaka. On the way up to Wanaka we met with policeman number 3 in the space of just 5 days, we were beginning to feel liked marked men! So police pullovers = 3, tickets = 2 (Joey not so good at sweet talking the police)!! We should like to say in our defence that all three "misdemeanors" should not have been ticketable offences in the UK but fair do's they are offences here so wrists dully slapped we continued on our journey. It was a 3.5 hour drive to Mount Cook so we decided to take a pit stop at Wanaka and visit Puzzling World, which has a maze and some illusion rooms that play with your mind, plus loads ... read more

Whilst in the adventure capital of the world, we thought it would be ridiculous not to participate in some extreme activities, so I (Joe) decided to book in on a bungy jump and a skydive with Steve, whilst Sarah and Hannah booked themselves in for some spa treatments! Originally we were booked to do the bungy and skydive on the Saturday but unfortunately as mentioned in previous posts, whilst boarding, Steve managed to land a jump on his head/shoulder. This resulted in mild concussion and a grade one tear of his ACL, thus we arranged to reschedule for the following Wednesday. In retrospect this was an excellent decision as the weather on Wednesday was perfect (as you can see from the photos). We headed into Queenstown on Wednesday morning to the NZone skydive centre where we ... read more

This blog entry has been set up to document our amazing (and disastrous) snowboarding efforts. To be updated with regular videos and photos.... read more

So from the searing heat of Rio, we headed to Santiago in Chile, which lived up to its name by being pretty cold - wearing only shorts and a T-shirt on the plane was certainly not a great idea. We were essentially only in Chile en route to New Zealand but our itinerary meant that we had two days to experience Santiago. We thought it would be an excellent opportunity to visit one of the many vineyards in this country, building its reputation for quality wines, so we visited the Undurraga vineyard about 40 km south of Santiago. Our lack of Spanish finally caught up with us as we tried to get transport out to the vineyard resulting in a bit of a wild goose chase from the bus station to the Metro station and back ... read more

From Iguazu we decided to take a bus to Sao Paulo and from there directly on to a little coastal town called Paraty (pronounced "Parachi"). This was a pretty gruelling journey totalling over 24 hours but we decided not to stop in Sao Paulo as the guidebook suggested the main sites were museums so not really our kind of place (i.e too cultural) so we decided to spend our time in Brazil in and around Rio. The bus ride from Iguazu took an "interesting" turn when we were raided by the military police. It did not help that we cant speak a word of Portuguese but the policeman kindly explained in English while he was searching through Joe's bag that it was a "Blitz" - oh much clearer then. When they had searched through 90% of ... read more