On route to Hobbiton we stopped off at Papamoa Beach for the evening, treated ourselves to a Chinese, which was rank, and watched a bit of the rugby. It was good to see them all doing the Haka and actually understand what it was all about. Papamoa was a really lovely beach town but as we were short on time we didnt get to spend much time there, so it will definitely be on our list of places to go if we return. The next morning we were up nice and early and very ...

Our first night was spent recovering from the ferry journey and finding a campsite near Wellington. The next day we headed up north, and after driving for half an hour up a dead end road (closed for bridge repairs), we headed back the way we came to eventually join the highway. We stopped over in Turangi for the night before heading for Lake Taupo. It had lovely views across the lake of Mt Ruapehu, or 'Mt Doom' from Lord Of The Rings. We spent the afternoon visi...

We arrived in Wanaka in the afternoon and Ash still wasn't feeling too great so we chilled out on the campsite which was situated on Lake Wanaka so we had some lovely views from our campervan. The next day we drove on to Fox Glacier via The Mt Aspiring National Park and Haast. The National Park was beautiful and was like driving through something out of Jurassic Park, the roads were narrow and windy with huge trees hugging the roads, and every now and again ther...

When we arrived in Te Anau it was raining quite hard so we took the time to find out about what was on offer and went into town for a walk around, the streets were almost deserted and it was clear that this was not the greatest time of year to be visiting this part of NZ. One thing we did want to do was the Glowworm Caves, so we booked up to go the following day, that night we chilled in the campervan and watched a DVD hired from the campsite. During the night A...

We arrived in Christchurch at around 11pm, it was freezing! So it was a quick hop onto a bus and straight to our accommodation to get our heads down for the night. The bus driver dropped us off and pointed to a sign to our Guest House, off the bus and a bit bewildered we realised that our accommodation was up a dark alley, to our left was a fallen house with its windows smashed out (damage from the recent earthquake) hoping that wasn't where we would be staying w...