New Years Day. Once off the ferry we journeyed down towards the west side of the south island heading for Franz Joseph. It was a lovely evening to be doing the drive and no-one else seemed to be on the road, felt like we had New Zealand and it's amazing scenery all to ourselves. But the windy roads were very tiring so we decided to stop overnight where we could, which turned out to be a quaint little town called Reefton about 2.5 hours from the Ferry. We got ...

We have visited the amazing Te Papa museum where we saw the only Collosal Squid ever to be caught (it's dead but quite amazing). We went for two runs, one around the harbour and marina and on New Years Eve we ran up Mount Victoria upon which we could see right over Wellington and the harbour. It was a lovely clear sunny day and the work out was just what we needed. The rest of the day was spent sunbathing on the beach just outside the harbour. New Years Eve ...

28th December We headed for River Valley Lodge near Taihape, literally in the middle of nowhere. I have stayed here with the Kiwi Experience and I was hoping to take Katie white water rafting, however due to the extremely windy conditions and storm the river had swollen and risen very high and no rafting was taking place. We decided to do a horse ride instead and prayed the weather would be better in the morning for this. This was a good decision, the weathe...

Boxing day we headed for Gisborne on the East coast. This is where the sun rises first in the world on the new day. We are lucky with the weather as we hear reports of heavy rain and flooding in the south island. We sat and watched the sunset on boxing day and set our alarms for sunrise on 27th which was worth the early start. 27th was a beautiful day. We were lucky to get a motel for a couple of nights less than 100 metres from the sandy beach. Lucky as th...

....well.... Christmas dinner at Urban Retreat, Taupo turned out to be the thing to do in Taupo. We and about 70 others enjoyed dinner in 25degrees sunny weather. The staff laid on a fabulous spread with more than enough food for everyone. We ate on plastic plates with plastic cutlery which was really the only down side, but hey, no washing up! Bumped in to Tom and Dom AGAIN who were staying at the hostel too, so had dinner with them and their nutty 'fairy' f...