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Published: November 17th 2008
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Everyone should go to the South Island of New Zealand. Seriously, its stunning
Right, so here is the next update, and as promised only nine days since the last one - incredible! This time I am actually going to finish off a round up of my adventures in New Zealand which will lead me on to arriving in Sydney (where I still am now!)
So after spending a little of two weeks on the North Island, we (we being myself and all the other people traveling with me on the Kiwi Bus) headed across the sea to the South Island to spend a night in the town of Nelson. I didnt do too much here except go a for a little walk up a hill to the official geographical centre of New Zealand which was pretty cool and had some really nice views over the town and sea. Nelson is very close to one of New Zealands more famous National Parks (The Abel Tasmin) however I decided that I would try to conserve my money for some things I had wanted to do further down the coast so after one night pressed on with the bus and headed south.
The following night we spent in Westport, a town so boring I have nothing else to write about it, but here we did go jet boating up the Buller River which was awesome. They take you out (about 20 of you) in the really powerful/fast jet boat, up a the river valley, surrounded by amazingly gorgeous scenary and then after about half an hour, turn rround and speed back including loads of crazy spins where you feel as if you could fly ot of teh boat at any second. It was great! After Westport we continued south were the scenary continued to become more and more unspeakabley beautiful. Its hard to describe just how great the west coast of South Island is for this kind of thing. It felt like everytime you look out of the window you see another snow capped mountain, amazing waterfall, mirrored lake orfantastic coastline. I'm just realising this blog would triple in size if I tried to relay everything beautiful place I happened to see as therer are just too many but hopefully the pics will give you some idea although I fear justice wont be done.
We spent the following night is
a specialist hostel only for the Kiwi Expericne bus which was probably the most talked about stop on the trip as its pretty much in the middle of nowhere and every bus that passes though has its own fancy dress party in the evening, dressed up as anything made from bin bags. (See my photo below as a tiger, for which i actually won a DVD bungee jump prize!) Anytway, that was good fun and the next day we headed to teh town of Franz Joseph, probably one of the places I had been looking forward to most. It is the home of one of teh largest glaciers in New Zealand and we had been planning on spending a full day going on a glacier hike. Unfortunatley, dispite being told that they never cancelled due to weather, they cancelled the trip due to the weather. To be fair the winds were so high that the whole town was without power for hours and we were told that the tempersatures up on teh glacier its self could be lethal, so instead of spending a wasted day in the town (which is really just a village) our driver pushed on early to
our next stop of Wanaka.
Wanaka was a really nice town, set on a beautiful lake and surrounded by mountains. Whilst I was there the Ski season so there were lots of people there for that. After we had all expected to be walking on the galcier that day we didnt really know what to do with ourselves, however it was the birthday of one of the lads on the bus so we just ended up having a really good night out which was fun. I should also mention we visited Puzzlin World in Wanaka. An awesome, weird, little centre with a big, ourdoor maze and some really crazy stuff inside (such as a room built on a 45degree angle so when you walk in you totally lose your sense of balance and see weirs stuff like water running up a slope etc.. )
So, after a week heading down the coast we arrived in Queenstown. I loved it in Queenstown, it was (and is) one of my favourite places I have visited all year. I spent near enough 4 weeks there in total before I left and the more I think about it it probably requires its
own blog entry bearing in mind how much I have written already. As before, this will follow very soon and then I will finally be out of New Zealand and nearly up to date!
Thanks for reading and enjoy the pictures.
Love Andy!
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