Hi there,

We are currently in Queenstown in the south island of New Zealand. We have just been bungy jumping, well Rob has been jumping, Steph has been watching on in terror.

After our last blog entry we spent 4 days in Sydney, catching up with a few friends, doing the tourist things such as open topped bus trip, the ferry to Manly beach, a day at coogee to Bondi cliff walk, climbing the Sydney harbour bridge ( this allowed us to dress up in very attractive jump suits) and of course checking out the bars and restuarants of Sydney. We had a great time, spent far to much money but loved it!

We did have a campervan at this point but as all the caravan parks were miles out of the city we decided to get a hotel room for the 4 nights and give ourselves a rest from the van since we would be spending 40 days in another van in NZ. We managed to get a great deal for a 4*hotel in the city centre (extravagent i know but we're not 21 so a dorm room in a hostel was not an option!)

after a few particulalry boozy nights with Alan, Kirsty and a few friends we made from the outback tour, we left Sydney to head to Christchurch...not lot to report here as it was raining and we decided to head out of the city the next day ( we'll be sure to head over there on our way up the island since we are meeting a mate from the Africa tour. You guys have no idea how popular we are around the world at the moment....we are soo hot right now!)

We headed straight down to Mount Cook. We were lucky since the rain cleared up so we had a great view of the mountain over the blue lakes ( and i do mean blue, it's like they are painted on)

Now Steph has been here before but Rob hasn't. He knew that the country was supposd to be breathtakingly beautiful but he was never really sure, up until the point he drove over a hill and caught the first glimpse of the southern alps ( or Snowy mountains if you're a Lord of the Rings geek). The views out here are incredible. Rob keeps taking lots of photos of the same mountains since they tend to look better from around each corner we turn.

We eventually made it to Mount Cook and managed to do some hiking around the base of the valley. However, the rain decided to come in again and we heading back to our camp site.

Now it tends to stay lighter later on as summer approaches...at 10pm it was just getting dark. This means that our initial stash of books, jigsaws and booze has been depleted at a rather alarming rate... by the time we reached Te Anua ( Milford Sound) Rob was going a little stir crazy with cabin fever, on the 2nd day!

He manged to pull it together as we went for a day trip around the Milford sound. These are Fiords on the west coast. Once again more amazing sites to take pictures of, if only Rob hadn't forgot to put the battery back into the camera! nevermind, Rob's always thinking and used his camera phone instead.

As i said before, we are now in Queenstown and intend to stay here over the christmas period since it has a good vibe and lots of the bars and restaurants are open over this time. Rob has just done the Nevis Bungy jump. It's 134m high and has 8 ses of freefall, its the third highest in the world. After the initial "why the !@#$ am i doing this?" he did it without hesitation. Quite an amazing sensation that 'plumetting to your death' feeling.

Now we do some white water rafting tomorrow down the Shotover river, which has grade 3-5 rapids and apparently the hightest commercial waterfall rapid which i think we'll be doing if Rob has anything to do with it..now that he's an adrenaline junky..duuuude!

Well we guess since it's chrimbo and we're e-mailing everything to your work addresses you won't get this until after New Years.

So a belated Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to you all.

Catch you later Rob and Steph