Day 8 ... or 12

What a week. Well after travelling from Palmerton North down the west coast of the North island, we camped beside the beautiful Hutt River in the Hutt Valley Between Upper Hutt and Lower Hutt. (Catch the drift?). A quick stop in Wellington to see the parlimentary buildings, and we were off on the ferry trip to the south island. Really weird trip - You leave Wellington and you say farewell to windy, rolling,grassy hills. Three hours later and you swear you've been on the ferry to Vancouver Island. The weather is calm, the hills are covered with green bush, and you're in a beautiful sound.


After driving off the ferry, we raced along coastal roads that make the Norquay drive seem like a walk in the park. After passing numerous campervans, we drove off the road about 10kms to a little hole-in-the-wall caravan park with nobody around, no owners, no tourists, nobody. It was awsome, somebody left the power and water on so we camped out and found some trails to a cave with glow worms all over the walls. pretty neat.

Turns out the owners WERE home, so in the morning we paid our $25 and left.

I guess this could turn out to be a really long writeup, so I'll make the rest as quick as it can be:

Anyways, we paid and left Canvastown, drove to Murchison that day (too many rivers to stop by, so we didn't get far) Turns out that the Buller river that we camped beside has had its fair share of didymo, and all I could find were eels. Not brown trout, not rainbow trout, but eels.

Anyways, looong drive to Franz Josef (The red track) Where we stayed the night in a rainforest. I'm pretty sure it was just undeveloped bush, but some genious drive through there with an earth-mover, laid a bunch of electrical cords, and now it's a famous "Rain Forest Caravan Park". Now they're millionaires.

Say the glacier after driving up a narrow road that specifically said "no motorhomes or campervans". I just thought that was a pretty racist sign biased against tourists, so we went anyways.

Then off to the Fox Glacier, and lake Matheson, then the looong haul down to Haast, and a pretty hairy, wet drive through the southern Alps where we are now, on the east side of the Alps in a windy town called Wanaka. Pretty cool. Wanaka and its neighbour town (across some mountains), Queenstown are supposed to be the equivilant of Whistler. Good nightlife though. I had a big-ass plate of lamb backstraps with a few pints of NZ's Finest. Boy I slept well.




Anyways, Keep in touch and we'll do the same.