This morning we bade farewell to Busby, our Mercedes Sprinter 313 CDI campervan/bus. Busby was easy to drive and has served us faithfully without missing a beat – he has taken every opportunity to beat my head. Busby took…

Our Christchurch campsite offers a few suggestions under the heading of, “what on earth shall we do today”. One of the suggestions is to visit “Museum – Quake City”. Well, for our last day in New Zealand, we skipped the…

It seems that Busby may not have been quite as level as I had imagined, so the camp cat came into its own after all. Here’s the camp cat positioned in preparation for levelling Busby. And here’s the camp cat…

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…