Mountains, lakes, waterfalls, sun, heavy rain, beaches, the sea and suicidal giant bumble bee’s – today had it all! We had an early start today, setting off from Queenstown just after 8am with a quick pit stop at the local McDonalds for a sausage and bacon muffin which was much cheaper (and probably nicer) than the hotel breakfast option! Other than the very nice bellboy/car fetcher who delivered our cases to the room and parked and retrieved our car, we were quite disappointed with the Crowne Plaza hotel overall, it cost an absolute fortune and was very dated, we also had an interconnecting room with a family with a small (very loud) child, so we didn’t get a great nights sleep either! Our travel plans today meant we had a very long drive ahead of us, ... read more

Sand flies are the devil’s spawn! More on this later…. We had to check out of our motel in Te Anau (as a side note, we’ve discovered we’ve been saying this wrong, it’s pronounced “Tea-Ar-nu”) this morning as we’d not been able to extend our stay by the extra day we needed. We booked another motel, the Amber Court Motel, which is in the next road back for tonight but couldn’t check in until after our day trip to Milford Sound. It was a very grey, overcast, miserable morning and unlike other days which have looked the same as this but been surprisingly warm, it was also very cold! We met the coach just after 10am, and set off down the road we’d had a sneaky peak of yesterday. It was nice to be able to ... read more

Had a lovely drive over to Te Anau from Invercargill today, stopped at quite a few beaches along the way. Tihaka Beach, Colac Bay, Monkey Island Beach, Gemstone Beach (unfortunately just pebbles, no gems to be found!) and McCrackens Rest are the ones I can remember the name of. We’ve noticed during our time here that you randomly see items displayed in people’s gardens – ranging from old cars and boats to teapots (see pictures from yesterday) and sculptures (see “Nobby” in the pictures today!). I was surprised to stumble across a Bupa retirement village in Riverton, which overlooked a lake and was somewhere we would happily retire to! It was odd to see the Bupa logo over here and it reminded me briefly of work – but I soon put it to the back of ... read more

We’ve finally made it to New Zealand! Had a very early start today. We were up just before 3am to get to the airport for our delayed flight @ 6am. Thankfully, there were no more delays and we finally arrived in Christchurch just after 11am. It was a pleasant surprise to see that SIXT didn’t charge us for the day we missed due to our 20 hour flight delay, so that’s one less battle to have with Qantas to claim compensation for. We’re quite pleased with our Skoda Kodiaq, not only does it have all the gadgets you could possibly need, it’s also a nice shade of blue! Even with our later than planned start to our first day in NZ, we managed to catch up with our original plans for today, a drive over to ... read more

I can’t remember what it feels like to be able to sleep past 5am! Admittedly, we do leave the blackout blind up so just have a thin privacy blind which allows us to see out, but the office workers over the road can’t see in (at least I hope they can’t!). This means by 5am it’s practically daylight in the room, so once you wake up, it’s hard to get back to sleep. We were on the first bus to get to the connecting stop for the Bondi loop this morning, bit of a wait for it to arrive, but a lovely trip around the suburbs, away from the main city. Some of the houses over that way were impressive, with incredible views of the Sydney skyline. Wouldn’t mind living in one of those and enjoying ... read more