NZ South Island

We picked up another little hightop campervan in Christchurch and took a wander around the town to pick up supplies (ie. teabags) before we set off. It was really, really cold, much colder than the north island, so we had electric heater, extra duvet and sleeping bags piled up at night!

Our first stop was Kaikoura, a bit north of Christchurch, which is the best marine mammal-watching place in NZ apparently. There is an incredibly deep canyon in the ocean just off the shore which is full of visiting whales, sharks, giant squid etc, so basically you sail off the edge of this underwater cliff and below you is hundreds of metres of ocean. We got there about 5.30 in the evening so it was getting dark, and the town was a bit of a one-street wonder, which didn't look promising - but in the morning we could see the beautiful snow-topped mountains ringing the bay, providing an incredible backdrop to the glassy blue water. We were lucky and absolutely got perfect weather conditions, with blazing sunshine and smooth water which made the whales easy to spot! Within ten minutes we'd found a sperm whale and after oohing and aahing over that for a bit, watching it dive, we went hunting some more hapless, camera-dazzled creatures. We spotted another sperm whale (these are the most common whale at Kaikoura, though they get everything from blue whales to killers from time to time) and then a humpback, which was fantastic. Honestly, we couldn't tell one shiny black big swimmy fin thing from another, but humpbacks are rare there, so we oohed especially hard. The weather was perfect, incredibly bright, the water crystal clear and we were able to get right up to the whales, about 50ft away (though aways in a non-threatening, whale-friendly manner in accordance with the Cuddly NZ Statute of Eco-Whalechasing) so we could see them clearly. First time whale-watching for both of us!

From Kaikoura we drove up through the lovely wine-country of Blenheim to Nelson, described by the first inhabitant we spoke to as 'the arsehole of the universe.' So, a brief overnight in Nelson saw us driving to Abel Tasman National Park the next day, which is faithfully described by everyone as gorgeous. We braved the mad windy roads through to Kaiteriteri and Marahau, both beautiful little towns with lovely yellowy-orange sandy beaches. We hired sea kayaks for a few hours to head out to the little islands about 3km off the coast of Marahau (didn't look that far so I chose not to believe the dude when he said that, but having paddled it I thought maybe he had been right), which was my first time in a kayak, and John's in a sea kayak (he apparently having been sadistically flogged through a swimming-pool based kayaking course at school conducted totally in winter for the purpose of drowning small boys). The water was utterly transparent, amazingly, staggeringly clear so that you could see the bottom metres and metres away (and as the metres dropped away I became more and more nervous - being in a tiny plastic seat over deep ocean known for its giant squid (up to 20m long found at Kaikoura). We've all seen the films. Anyway, we were not capsized by the monster from the deep, or erratic paddling movements, so we had a good few hours on the water, paddling up to the islands, and around the coastline of the bottom end of the park. You can do a hardcore three-day hike through the park, as my friend Clare just did (on her own - brave girl) or you can paddle around a bit in the sunshine, which we chose to do. John had the steering on the boat, so naturally we were doing as many rock-slaloming races as we could fit into our trip. We beached ourselves on some rocks and much ground was ground, but as he was not in the front of the boat John thought heading straight for the rocks was great fun. There was a very large sandbar around one side of the bay where the water was only about 3ft deep, and at one point John was trailing an arm in the water looking for fish (only saw one little grey one) when a big grey carpet shot under his hand. His belated yelp got my attention and all I saw was a big shadow driving its own surge of water above it - this thing was HUGE!

We decided we wanted to head down to the Franz Josef and Fox Glaciers next so we began that mammoth drive the next day, making it to Greymouth, an unremarkable town with nothing open at 9.30pm on a Sunday night. on the way we stopped to see a phenomenon called the pancake rocks, so called because they all all funny and layered like pancakes. What can I say: we went, we saw, we carried on driving. We drove on from Greymouth to Franz Josef through some really lovely countryside, including a beautiful lake of which there are some pictures up. They take pride in NZ in their lakes and rivers being crystal clear, and so far they have all been very, very clean, even the ones the locals told us were dirty looked a hell of a lot better than what comes out of the tap in South London. (I hasten to add that we did not try drinking from the lovely-looking water, because it often comes with lots of lovely parasites and things like amoebic meningitis).

Franz Josef is billed as the more spectacular of the two glaciers, and it was bigger - probably more impressive but we did not actually hike up to it, we just looked at it from a distance. We drove to Fox 10k down the road and decided to wak down the valley to the foot of the glacier, which was very cool. The canyon is enormous, carved out by the glacier a long time ago, and the glacier itself was huge. It also smelled amazing, like a giant block of ice (QED, but I didn't expect it to smell of anything!) We had been trying to catch up with Clare, my housemate from Cambridge, for ages, as she was doing a NZ tour at the same time we were doing ours, and when we realised she was in Franz we drove back to say hello. Spent a nice evening chatting in a local bar, then we left for Queenstown the next morning while Clare did her glacier hike, of which the pics look amazing and I am hugely jealous!

The drive to Queenstown led us past some stunning lakes and rivers, mountains and allsorts - the NZ scenery really does take some beating! The lakes were so reflective that the mountains were perfectly mirrored in them all the way along, even so that the different coloured rocks and trees showed clearly. The white-water rivers through the gorges are this amazing turquoise colour, and with the bright red trees and bushes it makes for incredible landscapes. Apparently NZ is lovely and green in the summer but the autumn is definitely a beautiful time to go. Queenstown is a lovely place, set in the hills around a lake with snowy mountains all around (there are loads of skiiing areas within a few km, including Queenstown's own, reached by the gondola in the town centre). It was cold but very pretty, and there's plenty going on in the smallish centre to keep you happy for a couple of days. The weather was pretty bad at this point, with low cloud, constant drizzle and snow forecast for the next day, but because time was the one thing we didn't have enough of (ok, along with money, headroom and cupboard space), we decided to make a break for it and drive to the jumping-off point for trips to Milford Sound. Te Anau is a cute little town, and the drive there is impressive - when we arrived we decided to take a chance and booked a coach and boat cruise tour to Milford for the next day despite the weather forecast (weather changes in no time at Milford so we thought we might get lucky). We were lucky, and the weather cleared up quite a bit, the cloud lifted and our boat trip was amazing. The drive down to Milford is pegged as incredibly tough, and we got plenty of advice from locals on whether to do it ourselves. They all warned us off, which is why we got the coach, but after our Canadian trial by fire it was nothing we couldn't have handled in our sleep! Unfortunately both our cameras were destroyed by salt spray on the boat trip, so the last bit of our trip had to be done with a disposable - the shots are ok, but they look like they were taken in the 1970s!

Queenstown to Mount Cook was a beautiful run, and Mt Cook national park was so incredibly worth seeing. There's a glacier, mountains and huge lake, and in the winter it's all very forbidding and majestic. We weren't quite set up for long hikes so we did a couple of short walks up hills and to a few lookout points, which gave us some amazing views.

We shot back to Christchurch to meet Olly for a few beers on Saturday night, which was great fun - the nightlife of Christchurch is not bad at all (though I admit my memory may be...sketchy, in parts!). Next day we staggered to the airport for our flight to Oz, promising we'd go back to NZ one day.