Hola from Queenstown! Arrived here yesterday after a fairly long drive. Our trip has seen us visit several places since the last blog post and we've also acquired some additional road trip buddies in the shape of Kiefer (AKA - Gav/Bro) and Gem. After Rotorua we stayed at Taupo for a few nights which was a nice place and enjoyed some of the baking weather there beside Lake Taupo. We also took a drive around the lake one day and almost ran dry of petrol - not good but I'm sure would've made an interesting story!

After Taupo we took a long drive west along the Forgotten World Highway towards West Plymouth. To say that parts of the road have been forgotten about is an understatement and several stretches of the road require some immediate attention! It wasn't an uncommon sight to see rocks on the road that had fallen from the mountains we were driving through or parts of the road just collapsed. Thankfully lady luck was with us during our journey and no problems came our way! Nevertheless, the road wouldn't have looked out of place in an Indiana Jones film! At New Plymouth, we enjoyed a day of sunshine one day before heading to the cinema to watch Seven Pounds, Will Smith's new film that gives you DOOM! For our second day at New Plymouth we took to the task of climbing Mount Taranaki, a 2518 metre monster! It dawned on us after about an hour climbing that our previous 4 months preparation for the task was probably not ideal and we soon realised that we weren't the fine young athletes that we once were! However, after what felt like several near death experiences we made it to our targeted point and then started our descend. Needless to say that our evening following the climb was spent relaxing and recuperating!

After New Plymouth, we took a long drive south to Wellington to meet up with Gem and Gav. It was really good to see them both and we spent a few days in Wellington, going to the zoo (obtaining some good pictures, one in particular!), doing some shopping and frequenting some of the bars and restaurants. It was also here where Gav attempted to cook himself by not wearing sun tan lotion! Wellington was a really nice city though and definitely one I'd like to come back to.

After Wellington we took the ferry to the south island and headed to a place called Nelson. We stayed in a really nice hostel that felt more like a big house than a hostel. We went to the beach for the day and enjoyed the good weather - Gav this time applying plenty of sun tan lotion! Gav and Butts kindly offered to cook a meal one evening but unfortunately a dodgy wok handle meant that the kitchen floor saw more of the meal than us! However, the Thai take-away we got was still very good!

After Nelson, we headed to the Marlborough region and stayed in a place called Blenheim (our hostel was kak). Here we did a wine tour by bike and had a great day visiting about 10 different wineries and tasting well over 50 different wines. After the wine tour we went into Blenheim for a few beers and a McDonalds!

After Blenheim, we drove to Kaikoura and spent most of our day here in the pub due to the rain. Greymouth followed Kaikoura and the less said about this place the better. The highlight of our time here was probably the probably the curry we had at a local Indian.

We headed to Franz Josef & Fox Glacier after Greymouth and had a couple of nights here in a pretty decent YHA hostel. Here we went to some glacier hot pools and chilled out to the point of almost falling asleep in the water! On our second day we took a helicopter ride up through the 2 glaciers and stopped for about 10 minutes on the top of the Fox Glacier and got some great pictures. It was a really good trip and saw some amazing sights... we just wouldn't do it in flip-flops next time!

We're now in Queenstown and have been luging again today (see Rotorua blog) which was again great fun with the 4 of us. More importantly, we booked our sky-dives and bungy jumps earlier and are doing them both tomorrow (with the exception of Gem who's not doing the bungy). Our sky-dive is a tandem 9000 ft jump and our bungy is the Nevis Highwire Jump (134 metres - worlds highest). I hope to be able to tell you about how they go afterwards and we'll no doubt get the pictures, DVD's etc to prove our bravery!

Anyway, be in touch again soon. Laters...

Dan