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Published: August 26th 2005
Eventually here, after a few restful weeks in Perth it was back to lugging the backpacks everywhere.....BUGGER!
The overnight flights were pretty tiring, we left Perth at midnight, arrived in Christchurch at 6 PM the next day, within a few days we'd bought ourselves a car and were off on our travels.........Well, that's how it should have been, as soon as we bought the car, it wouldn't start, we bought a battery after getting advice from a garage then broke down the next night when we turned the car lights on, cutting a long story short the alternator was shafted, a recon one cost us another $350! We kitted it out ourselves & Jo hand made the curtains (Jo's mum would be proud).
Anyway, we headed off, the South island is absolutely beautiful, really rugged, our first stop was Dunedin to view penguins and sea lions in their natural habitat ( David Bellamy eat your heart out!! ). Milford Sound was next, the drive to it is unbelievably beautiful, vast, rugged mountains flank the road on both sides, once you arrive it's even better, it's just an incredible place! You have to look at things on a different scale here, everything
The Boulders
Really impressive round boulders scattered over the beach. Apparently there used to be a lot more but the others were smaller and so people took them home for their gardens. I tried to get you one mum & dad but didn't think customs would allow it!!!!is just BIG....oh, did we mention it's beautiful too, oh ye, we did! We took a boat trip on the Sound and fell in love with the place even more. The views were breathtaking, air was clean, waterfalls were huge blah blah blah.....
Queenstown came next, it's sort of NZ's outdoor playground, whatever sport you want, you can get it here, again the whole area is beautiful. We decided to save the skydiving for the North Island so I booked myself on the Nevis skywire Bungee ( 134m high bungee over a canyon... NICE! ) Once out there, Jo and I took the gondola over to the jump station, try as i might i couldn't get Jo to join me on this one so she watched as I left my ass and my sanity behind on the platform....What an incredible rush!!
In the afternoon we went jetboating on the famous Shotover jet, you basically hurtle through a stone walled river canyon in a 550BHP jet boat, these things turn on a dime and can operate in as little as 10cm's of water, they can do 360 degree spins too, the drivers love pointing the boats at the canyon walls
and veering off at the very last second.
We then visited Fox glacier and Franz Josef glacier, we joined a tour on the Franz Josef, what a great day, it's really hard to describe what walking on these huge rivers of ice is like, it's really gorgeous though, the colours are stunning, sometimes white, sometimes electric blue, the ice carves itself into some really interesting features too.
On the way to the pancake rocks the car decided to blow a head gasket, not being satisfied with that, the heater core sprung a leak too, wetting the inside floor and blowing steam through all the vents, all in all $1500 worth of damage in a couple of minutes. After numerous second opinions we decided to put $6.30 worth of "radiator leak" in the radiator which fixed the leak and carried on our merry way.
One of the highlights of the South Island were the amazing places we stayed: most nights we camped by the edge of a beatiful lake (there are literally hundreds of them), which had amazing snow-capped mountains. We felt so lucky each morning to be having brekkie with a view like that.
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