No, that is not a sexual reference. Since the campsite was one of the more pleasant we have found and since the sun was out and time was not pressing, we spent a lazy day in Geraldine. After a coffee…

Our mountain weather seemed to be collapsing this morning, whereas the weather further east looked fair, so tour director Francine decided we should leave Omarama (I think) and head for Geraldine. Our route would take us a mere 180kms through…

The road heading north out of Omarama (I think) leads through Twizel [pronounced Twyz-l, not Twiz-l] to the southern end of Lake Pukaki. From there, zoom up the western edge of Lake Pukaki and you come to a dead end…

Many years ago, back in the 70’s, I remember thinking that on every campsite there was some twat who thought they knew how to play a guitar and who was determined to prove conclusively that they couldn’t. Fortunately, that campsite-guitar-playing…

Today we left Queenstown to head east across country to Moeraki. Where? Moeraki as in the Moeraki Boulders. The Moeraki Boulders are large, marble-like lumps of rock on a beach, much beloved of landscape photographers and are one of Francine’s…

We are spending two nights in our sardine can of a campsite near Queenstown. Francine was interested to see Arrowtown, another old gold mining town which is only about 20kms away. In fact, it used to be where the Top…

After early morning on board the Milford Mariner, we disembarked to retrieve Busby from his overnight car park. (Actually, it was a coach park so his personal space was accordingly larger.) We headed back along the road towards first, Te…

Our Milford Sound overnight cruise was one from Francine’s bucket list. She’d booked it back in February. At 16:00, our check-in time, the nice folks opened up the bus parking area (the buses now had departed) for overnighters car parking.…

And so we approach the main event. Francine booked our overnight cruise aboard the Milford Mariner on Milford Sound way back in February; some dates were full even then. The cruise was tonight. Today we made our way from Te…

Our Wanaka Top 10 campsite left a little to be desired – all soap dispensers in the washrooms empty, for example – but it was quite well situated as we left to visit the shores of Lake Wanaka itself. We…