Queenstown, 18th - 22nd August 2010 We got to Queenstown late Tuesday afternoon and Gemma was at the hostel to meet us. :) No-one else on the Magic bus was staying here and quite frankly for very good reason. It had been taken over by new owners and has changed its name from Resort Lodge to 'The Lab' - seriously did they think they were a bunch of mad scientists or something? If you're ever thinking of coming to Queenstown, a word of advice - don't stay here.Th...

Franz Joseph, 13th - 18th August 2010 Franz Joseph is home to a 15km Glacier, rainforest, hot pools and sky diving. We decided to stay 4 nights as we wanted to do a full day's Glacier hike. It amazes me how small some of these towns are. When we got here we went for a walk to 'the high street' which consists of a tiny supermarket, 2 souvenir shops, a coffee shop, a combined bar & restaurant, a petrol station and 2 local activity stores. Add the 3 hostels...

Nelson, 10th - 13th August 2010 Sorry for the radio silence for a while peeps.We've been pretty busy and wifi has been awful, but here we go ... Word of warning this Blog is huge - Uncle Raymond, you might need to turn the forks over before you start reading this hahahaha. We left the frozen town of Kaikoura behind and headed up the east coast to Picton and then over to Nelson. Our bus driver was doing our head in so we decided to stay in Nelson for a few nig...

Kaikoura, 9th - 10th August 2010 Kaikoura is situated on the coast and where it's not surrounded by the sea there are vast snowy topped mountain ranges. The sea here is one of the prettiest I've seen and there's such a diverse range of colours it looks like a painting. The sky is moody and is a dark bluey grey and the sea is completely green. Nearer the shore it is a sage colour and looks icy, like its just broken off of a glacier. The deeper the sea gets th...

Christchurch, 6th - 9th August 2010 Travelling down We got up oh so early (well for us anyway - about 8am) and caught the shuttle to the Ferry terminal. We bumped into a lad called Mike who was one of the people on the Magic bus that had booked the same rugby package as us due to the amount of noise we'd been making about it.As he would be the only guy in our group and as he was from ozstraya or Australia as any normal person would say, we decided to call him ...