The rest of our holiday was a lot less eventful and much more relaxing ...

From Milford Sound we made our way across the bottom of the South Island to Dunedin, an interesting little city on the east coast.

One of the days we were there we drove out along the Otago penisula - which is a really beautiful area - avoided all the "wildlife tours" which sounded like complete scams and went to see Larnach "Castle", supposedly New Zealands only castle.

Larnach "Castle".

Now, if you're from Ireland or you've been around some of Europe, then you're bound to have seen some real castles ... and this was no castle. An imposing country home ... sure. Interesting, though, to wander around inside and around the grounds.

Pretty cool gaff, though.

Another typical touristy thing we did was go on a tour of Speight's brewery. The tour itself wasn't great - got the feeling the tour guide was trying to finish up his day as quick as he could - but it was cool to try out some of Speight's more unusual ales and beers.

Its funny ... New Zealand television ads are, on the whole, absolutely appallingly goofy and cheesy. Speight's series of "southern man" ads are by far the best, though. They're about the only ads over here with some decent dry humour. I was actually tempted to by a video of the ads - very unlike me.

Speight's Brewery.

After a few days there we continued up the east coast. The roads up there were all pretty flat and boring with not too much to see apart from farmland. About the only interesting thing we saw was Moreoki Boulders, which were weird spherical boulders in the sand. Good excuse for a break from driving.

Along the way Betsy started giving a bit of trouble so we stopped off in Christchurch to get a new fuel filter and some tools with which to change it. We'd spent a few days in Christchurch before and weren't impressed, so we weren't bothered spending much more time there.

Moreoki Boulders

In Kaikoura we went on a whale watching tour. I wasn't much impressed - it felt weird flying around on this mad big. brand new. high powered speed boat which could hold about 60 people. Every time they came across a whale that had come up from a dive the boat would slow down and everybody would be allowed run outside to catch a glimpse of the whale while it was at the surface.

It was very informative, though. While the boat was flying around looking for a whale there were some pretty interesting talks about the whales in the area and stuff.

On the way back we passed through a pod of dolphins. There were millions of the mad little buggers ! Really amazing to watch as they did all their acrobatics.

Whale watching.

In Picton (where you get the ferry to Wellington), we went on another wine tour with the same company as the last time we were there. A bit of fun, but we probably would have been better off going with a different company and seen different wineries.

On our last night on the South Island it stared pouring rain and was the first bit of rain the whole time we were there, which was really lucky. We turned out to not be very dedicated campers and got a cabin for the night :-)

Railway bridge in the pouring rain.

The day after we got back it was Catherine's birthday, so Linda and Andy came over for dinner. Linda made this massive monstrosity of birthday cake ... I think the photo is definitely on of the worst "stupid faces" photo ever. I'm sure they'll be delighted at me putting it up :-)

Afterwards we went off to watch the deciding match of the Six Nations between Ireland and England at 2am. High hopes, Irish rugby jerseys and lots of drinks did us no good. Ireland were hammered 44-6 :/

"Say cheese!"

Milford Sound is one of the most amazing places I've ever seen. Although most people take one of the many cruises we decided to go kayaking. We stayed in Te Anau about 120km from Milford Sound. After being collected at 7am by our (very cute) guide Matt we drove through some beautiful countryside. I was amazed by how energetic he was at 7am but then we got to see his office ...

Matt the kayak guide's office.

They provided us with all the gear for going kayaking including some very lovely orange stripey thermals. Thankfully their outer gear was just plain purple. After being eaten alive by sandflies on the beach we finally got onto the water.

"Team Ireland"

We were on the water before all the cruise boats so it was really peaceful and quiet. Although the water was calm at first it soon got really choppy. It was tough going at one stage to get from one side to the other but then Matt pulled out "Rosco's famous scroggin". This was a mixture of nuts, chocolate chips, sultanas, banana chips, jellies and god knows what else but it tasted damn good !

After all the kayaking we were treated to Tex's safari tour back to our accommodation i.e. we stopped at all the interesting points along the road. All in all an excellent day but our arms and shoulders were a little stiff and sore for a while ...

Duh Chasm.

The day after visiting the glacier we drove time down the West Coast towards Haast and onwards through the mountains to Wanaka.

We took our time, taking loads of breaks along the way. We only lasted about 2 minutes on this beach, though. We planted ourselves down and started reading our books and were instantly ravaged by evil little sandflys that eat insect repellant for breakfast ...

Us being eaten alive by sandflys.

The scenery on some of the South Island is absolutely stunning - particularily the stretch from Haast to Wanaka which goes through huge valleys amongst the snow covered peaks of the Southern Alps.

Knight's lookout.

Droozy, our puppy, did his fair share of the driving.

Puppy Power !

Wanaka, along with Queenstown, is famous for stuff like sky diving, bungy jumps, rafting etc. We didn't do a whole lot in Wanaka and moved on to Queenstown.

One thing we did do was visit Wanaka's "Puzzling World" which has a couple of rooms with visual illusions and stuff which were kinda fun. What was actually a great laugh was their outdoor maze which on the face of it didn't look like it was going to be that hard but actually ended up taking us fifty minutes of tramping around.

The challenge.

In Queenstown we stayed in a really nice hostel right down on the edge of the lake, had a nice mexican and got pretty plastered.

Next day we went up to the "Skyline Gondola" up to a place with great views of the area ...

Cathy on the chair lift.

Up top they've got a pretty cool downhill racing track called the "Luge" where you sit in these little carts and tear down this winding track down the hill. Good fun.

On the luge.

What we really went up there for was to do the paragliding off the top which flys down over the town. In the end, because the wind was coming up, we were brought out to Coronet Peak ski field (in winter) and did the paragliding there.

The paragliding was really well worth it. I was expecting it to be like a sky dive with a real adrenaline rush but it turned out to be really smooth and we were in the air for over twenty minutes.

Of course, it can be an adrenaline rush .... My guy ended up catching some really great up-draughts and we were miles up. When he realized he had to actually come down sometime that day I asked for it with a casual "so how freaky can these things get, then?" and put us into a really tight downward spiral for a good minute our so. Great stuff.

Just landed.