Our bus broke down just as we were about to leave a rainy Franz Josef. We had a five hour wait for the bus to miraculously fix itself (mechanics looked at it but coulnd;t find any problems). Anyway we left Franz Josef and the rain forest, driving past and through some incredible mountains and huge waterfalls that were cascading down the mountains. We stopped in a small place called Haast and read about some of the conservations projects going on in the area. We c...

The ferry over to Picton was very scenic but also made Jeff feel very sea sick so not the best combination. Lots of cool views but we didn't see any penguins or seals which is meant to be pretty common. San really enjoyed the hot home-made scones in the café. It took ages to get off as a lot of the docking gear at Picton had been damaged during the earthquakes. We headed through the Abel Tasmin National Park towards Golden Bay. It was a lot of driving but we ...

We left the freezing and snowy National Park and started on our way to a place called River Valley, a lodge in the middle of nowhere. It took a while to get there but was a really nice place to be, big fire in the lounge/bar with a river running outside that you could white water raft on. After River Valley we headed on to Wellington which was a long day of driving away. On the way we stopped at a place called Bulls. So called because they were the first plac...

We got dropped off at National Park to try and do the Tongario Crossing, a day walk through waist high snow long canyons, volcanos and up mountains. We checked into our hostel which has its own climbing wall. Pretty soon we found out the crossing was closed due to avalanches so opted instead to spend the next day snowboarding. Of course this being New Zealand this was snowboarding on an active volcano, it erupted about 5 months ago and Kiwi's continued to board...

We arrived in Taupo and stayed in a hostel that was designed for the summer. It was very cold so all our layers came out here. We met some interesting people here and met a winter guide for the Tongario Crossing which we both wanted to do. He was saying that there was currently a huge snow storm passing over and that the walk had to be cancelled for the last few days. There is a huge lake in Taupo called Lake Taupo surprisingly. This is the largest lake in N...