This is a quick summary of our fantastic time in South Island, New Zealand, aboard the Magic Bus with a great group of travelling buddies!

We flew into Christchurch and spent two days seeing the sights of strangely English city... Another tram ride took us around the major sights, including the Canterbury Museum, Botanical Gardens, Art Gallery, parliament buildings, Arts centre and to see some traditional Cambridge-style punters on the river. We stayed at Base Backpackers, which had an amazing location, with a view over the cathedral and central square from our dormitory window. An amusing couple of hours were also spent on a fudge shop tour - munching our way through a wide variety of fudge flavours, whilst watching the creation of the most enormous slab of white chocolate and rasberry fudge!

We then started our trip around the island, catching the Tranz-Alpine train from Christchurch to Greymouth on the west coast across Arthur's Pass, which gave us some great views... until the rain came down... a regular occurence for the wet west coast! A very fun evening spent on a Monteith's brewery tour - the highlight of the town of Greymouth and where we met all the people we'd be spending the next two weeks with.

Next stop was Franz Josef glacier, where the weather cleared to give us perfect blue skies for our amazing full day hike up the glacier. Wearing spikes and carrying ice-picks we made our way up across the morraine at the base of the glacier and then up through crevasses and archways, with the ice becoming cleaner and bluer as we got higher. Free soup and spa at Chateau Franz hostel made the day complete!

Two days were then spent at Wanaka after an amazing scenic coach journey, taking in mirror lakes, views of Mount Cook, mountains and waterfalls. Wanaka was small but beautiful, with our Alpine-lodge style hostel - The Purple Cow - having the most amazing view over the lake and snow-capped mountains in the distance. A couple of amusing outings to 'Puzzleworld' - with an impossible maze - and Cinema Paradiso - which had yummy homecooked cookies as well as a car, sofas and lazyboy chairs for seats!

We then spent four days in Queenstown, which was where we made the most of the nightlife, sampling cocktails from teapots in World Bar and rather large 'Fergburgers' the next day! We did, however, manage a full day trip to Milford Sound, for which we also had perfect weather - snow was falling in the morning but there were blue skies as we cruised round the fjord and loads of rainbows over the waterfalls. Another day was spent riding the gondala up for fantastic views and a couple of goes on the luge, as well as a jetboat ride on the Shotover River - very exciting!

The return journey up to Christchurch was a little less exciting... We stayed a night in Dunedin and then a night at Lake Tekapo, seeing the world's steepest street, views of Mount Cook from the other direction, some strangely spherical boulders on the beach and the Church of the Good Shepherd on the banks of Lake Tekapo. And then it was back to Christchurch, stopping at the Antarctic Centre en route, where we saw blue penguins, travelled on the Hagglund vehicle and learnt about New Zealand's activities down in Antarctica.

This was also the last stop on our Magic Bus pass and the start of a rather different New Zealand adventure in our little Ezy Cruisa campervan!