We left Lumsden before eight in the morning and arrived in Wanaka at about eleven - another beautiful drive filled with sheep, mountains, lakes and sunshine - and after checking in to our cabin (we’ve been staying in Top Ten holiday parks all across NZ) we visited Puzzleworld where there were several illusion rooms including one with a floor set at 45 degrees and everything feels off-kilter, and a two-storey outdoor maze which was great fun. Afterwards, we headed for Lake Wanaka, hired a kayak and paddled out across the lake (well, across some of it - it’s actually quite enormous) which was a really peaceful way to spend the afternoon. In the evening, we made spaghetti bolognese in the communal kitchen and got chatting to a couple from Canada who are cycling around NZ and Australia, and a young couple from England and ended up playing Monopoly Deal with them over a cup of tea. We’re now giving travel advice to other travellers about places to go which feels strange but I guess we’re pretty well travelled now and have lots of advice to give.

The following day, we did one of the walks we’d been recommended by the holiday park owners which was a really steep hike up the side of a mountain which overlooked lake Wanaka. It turns out that it wasn’t the right one but the view was still pretty cool, and we’re enjoying long walks together and getting fitter too. We came back down rather quickly - certain parts were actually harder to walk down than run down as they were so steep - and then headed back to the lake for a jet-boat ride. The jet-boats are really cleverly designed so that you only need about four inches of water when you’re going fast, and so after jetting out into the middle of the lake we went down the Cluthra River and were able to get right up against the edges where the water was really shallow. Jet-boats also have a very small turning circle and so we did lots of doughnuts too which was quite exhilarating. Afterwards, we had lunch in a nice cafe called Tango (the decor, as you might imagine, was orange) and we stole lots of sugar sachets to use in our tea as we go along to save us having to buy a whole bag of sugar (travelling makes you very resourceful/kleptomanic). We spent the afternoon driving to Franz Josef (four and a half hours) and the weather was grey and very wet, and we checked into our hostel which was the epitome of backpacker lodgings - we met lots of other people there to climb the glacier, and had free soup at six o’clock before making a dinner of cheese and tomato on toast.

We were up early the next morning, packed lunches in our rucksack, to catch the tour bus to the Franz Josef glacier. We’d got kitted up with waterproof jackets, thick warm socks, mittens and crampons, and boarded the bus with fifty three others. A five minute drive later and we were all walking through a small section of rainforest towards the bottom of the glacier. As there were so many of us, we separated into teams and Simon and I went with the first group which meant that our guide had to cut small steps for us with a pickaxe. The weather was beautiful (we ended up zipping off our trousers into shorts) and it was an incredible day - we hiked all over the glacier, over ridges and through crevices, and we even picnicked half way up. We had a great group of people (apart from one know-it-all who we all nearly voted to be pushed off the glacier), and we got chatting to a girl who it turns out was in a show which Simon worked on at the Palladium - what a small world! All in all it was an awesome day, and we topped it off with an hour in the hot pools before buying a fish and chip dinner and driving for a couple of hours to Hokitika for an overnight stay before driving on to Abel Tasman.

The next morning we visited the jade factory in Hokitika, and stopped off at lunchtime in Punakaiki to look at the Pancake rocks and do a little more hiking. We had a nice lunch in a tavern, and then drove on for a couple of hours, through Greymouth where the mining disaster had just happened, to Motueka in Abel Tasman where we checked into another Top Ten. As you can tell from the amount of time we spent at Hokitika and Punakaiki, they were quite nice but didn’t warrant more than a couple of hours each.

Over the next couple of days, we did quite a lot of hiking in the Abel Tasman park, mostly along the coast so we discovered lots of deserted coves and had lunch sitting on rocks on the shore. At the end of our second day, we finished our hike late in the afternoon and drove for a couple of hours to Picton where we would spend the night before catching the InterIslander ferry to Wellington, where we’d planned to meet up with Mel, an old friend from London. Tim had recommended we stop in Blenheim instead of Picton, but when we got there we discovered that the only thing of interest there is wine (great if you’re a wine connoisseur but not so great if, like us, you don’t really drink) so we decided to give it a miss and continue on to Picton. We found a nice holiday park to stay at, and for dinner we discovered a bar called The Flying Haggis where we had a lovely meal, then an early night before catching our ferry the next morning. Farewell to the South Island - North Island here we come!