Today would be a conservative 160kms from Hanmer Springs to Christchurch. Apart from a 10-minute drive to hand Busby back to Maui on Monday, that’d be it. We’d spent a relatively sloping night in Busby which leads me to comment…

Our Greymouth morning dawned sunny and bright. I’d awoken once or twice during the night and lay there listening the soothing crashing of the Tasman Sea surf on the nearby shore. It soon lulled me back to sleep again. We…

Yes, it may look mad but we’ve done it. We’ve driven across from Akaroa on the east coast to Greymouth on the west coast and we did it through Arthur’s Pass. So, Arthur’s Pass – tick. ‘T was a distance…

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…