After Pammy, the Paedo, the Pimp & the Prossie's antics at the Poo pub we were shooed back onto the bus by Les. After my decoration job in the girls' bathroom he was naturally a little less charming at this point, seeing us off with a puzzling question - "Which one of you b*****s was sick by my telephone?" and the crowning glory of it all was that it wasn't me!

It all just contributed to a very funny morning and the bus had once again been united by ridiculous drunken behaviour and sadly, once again I provided the most drunken and most disgraceful of the said actions. Bleurgh.

It's what we call taking one for the team.

In all honesty, however, I felt great and actually looked a lot perkier than many of my busmates... which annoyed just about everyone. They also decided to tell me just how much they hated me for it pretty damn regularly too!

First stop was the Bushman centre, where you can get a Possum pie for a small donation of $4 (it's illegal these days to sell them so they have their own little way around it). The place was actually full of gags like this, although I can't vouch for the museum, (I'd escaped a hangover but was NOT ready to tunn my attention to anything more taxing than conversation!) including a handful of correspondences after a particularly brutal TV appearance where he talked up the virtues of being a man's man and hunting just about everything possible. The responses to letters of people who were genuinely outraged by the blase way he talked about a touchy subject were hilarious, I just wished I'd taken a photo of one or two. That was as much reading as I could stomach, and i then sat down with a couple of American girls and definitely managed to convince them that I was an alchoholic. Bearing in mind that the two girls I was chatting to were under legal drinking age in the US, that I had drunk a few bevvies the night before, and the fact that they were both teetotal - alcohol was on my mind and definitely not on theirs. An attempt to salvage conversation then moved onto the infamous 4 pillars (thanks to Will Osbourn of KU) of man conversation... and again ended up making me look like a tit. Easily done, mind you.

We arrived in Franz Josef pretty soon after at the Rainforest Retreat hostel after booking ourselves in for a glacier hike the next day. In order to promote the hostel's own bar, our host then asked if anyone liked wine. Playing up to the fact I was feeling pretty damn good for a drunken disgrace, my hand shot up and of course this meant I could have a glass of wine for free. This would have been about 1pm... I saw it away but it did NOT go down easy. Shil then got handed the pint but is one of those people who just cannot down anything fizzy so he had to step back while Gavin sunk the pint instead.

The rest of the day was pretty calm, but Shil, Matt, Josh & I earnt some free beers by moving some kegs and a few beds around. When it came to moving the kegs they sure felt a lot heavier than I remember ever lifting in Chorleywood or Chamonix, but with a woodcutting area just nearby it felt like we had truly entered the "man corner".

Catching up with the girls, we had a chat with the hostel owner who recommended a stunning walk nearby that would kill some time. He pitched it to us as a short walk that led up a hill to a view of the glacier on one side, with the sea on the other. So we set off pretty excited at the prospect of yet another, stunning scene in NZ. What a load of rubbish. His vague directions didn't help either. It took us a good couple of hours and the view was underwhelming to say the least. Just s***e, to be honest. It was still, as with all walks, a great chance for a chat, and we had fun, but it was NOT what we were expecting. Not one bit.

Next stop, the hostel spa. Nothing special here, but it just led to some good man chats (the girls didn't wanna join us!) with music in the background and the stars just beginning to show themselves. It was pretty stunning, and just another, of so many, moments out here when you can just sit there and realise how muhc you love life.

Killa Pool at the bar was next up with the chance to win a Skydive in Queenstown up for grabs. I didn't expect to challenge much at all, but I was just awful. Once again Shil was the best of our bunch but he couldn't quite pull off his heroics in Globe bar that started off our NZ experience in style. He got third place - a kiwi bar crawl in Queenstown as his reward - but in his typical competitive way he was sulking all evening after! Anticipating the 8 hour glacier hike the next day, nobody was really up for getting too drunk, and we had a pretty tame one with 3 needless handles on my part. (This is the very belated moment where I realised that a standard measure in NZ is not a pint, but a "handle" - something just that little bit smaller which masquerades as a pint! Damn them)

Over and Out

Dan / Burge