NZ Tour Part Two

Long overdue post, but I have a great excuse... I WAS BUSY SECURING AN AWESOME JOB. More on that later.

So where were we?

Ah yes. Queenstown.

This is like the party central place for the South Island now that there is nothing left of Christchurch. So its full of obnoxious young travellers much like us, and actually tourists of  many other ages cultures and walks of life. There's a fair bit to do, whether your passion is long walks around pretty lakes, throwing yourself off high things or burgers.
We spent a couple of days here and had some fun, then on Sun 11th left to go on to Milford Sound. There's just one road to and from Milford so we drove up the day before our boat trip, stayed the night at Lake Gunn and cooked outside in the dark, before getting up at 7 the next morning to get to Milford to catch our Cruise.

It was bloody gorgeous, by the way. It rained so there were hundreds of waterfalls and beautiful scenery. The highlight of the trip was, of course, the free tea and coffee on the boat. Jolly good. Milford Sound is not in fact a sound. Its a Fiord. Something to do with glaciers? Depth maybe? I dunno I was too busy taking stupid pictures of me and Barbara to listen to closely to what the boat driver was saying.

The road to Milford and back was a bit of a nightmare, made worse by the one lane bridges and multiple busses and coaches, as well as the rain, hairpin turns, and creepy tunnels. Glad we got out alive.

As we had an early boat trip we left Milford in good time to be able to drive for a good stretch to get to a small town just outside of Dunedin (so we went from the west coast straight across to the east coast, missing out most of the bottom of NZ. It was a long drive, but the views were bloody amazing). That night we stayed at a super weird campsite which had showers that were so hot they had to be set to 'cold' to be able to use them.

Tuesday 13 May

Walked around Dunedin for a bit like proper tourists we even went to two churches. TWO! They were lovely. We then walked up (and down) the worlds steepest residential street (Baldwin St) and then ran out of things to do in Dunedin. So we went to Shag Point to look for penguins and the sign saying Shag Point so we could take stupid pictures. We found neither.

Briefly stopped off at Moeraki to look at the spherical boulders which were pretty cool.

Stopped for the night at Oamaru, and all through the night we heard a noise that sounded like an eagle mating with a goat, and it turns out that was the penguins. We didn't see them as it was dark and our torch was totally rubbish.

Wednesday 14 May

Walked around Oamaru. They have a Victorian precinct, which was kind of cute even though it was mostly deserted, and a steam punk museum, which we didn't want to pay $10 to go in.

Once we finished there we headed back inland again, as we wanted to go to Lake Pukaki and Lake Tekapo, so after stopping the night at Twizel (pronounces Twy-zel not Twizzle) we went straight to the lookouts and had a look around the lakes, which were awesome, and had super nice views.

After a night spent freezing our butts off we decided that enough was enough, we didn't want to hang around Christchurch to much anyway, so we just kept driving until we got back to Blenheim again, which from Twizel was about 580Km. Worth it, for the bed and electric blanket.

Thus ended our South Island tour. All in all, pretty spectacular.