Arrived in Franz Josef today and I'm super excited as the main attraction in Franz is that there's a huge glacier here that you can go walking on. However, we quickly found out that earlier this year a massive chunk of the glacier actually fell off (damn global warming) so the only way you can get on that one safely now is by doing a heli-hike so taking a helicopter up, hiking round and then flying back down. Because that's the only way you can get up it was ac...

Rushed breakfast, a bus and a ferry and were being dropped at Anchorage before I know it, which is a bay on the coast of Abel Tasman. We were being picked up from Mahura which is 12.4km (7.7miles) from where we were and we had 5hours to get there; the walk should take 4hours so we had time for a dinner stop aswell. The first part of the walk was really really steep and of course unfit me was completely out of breath!! When we got to the top of the first part the...

Super super early start... Followed by a long cold bus journey and then a long ferry ride which was okay because it went fast as we were all talking so much. Then we arrived in Picton... Yay South island!!! We met the new magic bus driver Soap who seemed pretty cool then set off for Nelson. On the way we stopped at a winery for some tasting which would have been really fun, but it was closed!! Instead we bought fudge which made us all feel sick then got back ...

Woke up this morning to find out that at midnight the Tongarra volcano had erupted for the first time in 100years.... And that of course this volcano was pretty close to where we were staying. Luckily, the wind was blowing the other way so all the ash got blown that way and the damage had also fell the other side so we were okay to carry on going. We were heading down to Wellington today, which is the capital city and is where we would get our ferry to take us ...

Finally have the hearing back in my right ear... Thank god!!! Another early start as we're heading down to Waitomo today then on to the national park. In Waitomo there are loads of deep caves that you can walk through, go white water rafting in, abseil down or even go tubing in which is what we all decided to do. Tubing is where your in not very deep water and you have a big rubber tyre that you sit on and float through the cave. The reason these caves are suc...