A perfect holiday?

New Zealand! What can I say? The most incredible scenery! There's no chance that I'll be able to describe it ... especially as it's now half-past midnight in New Zealand and I'm tired. Tonight, I'll just give a brief itinerary of the journey and then fill in the details later. I guess I should start by saying that Anna and I went to New Zealand. Even the flight out was incredible - passing low over the snowy Southern Alps into Christchurch.

I set off from Epping at some stupidly early time, picked Anna up in the taxi and then we got to the airport. Sydney airport was completely covered in fog, but, for some unknown reason, our flight was one of the only planes that took off exactly on time! We flew into Christchurch, picked up the hire car and then immediately set off South. We stopped for a pie (and an ale) at the first pub that we came to and then continued towards the mountains!

We spent the first night in a great hotel overlooking Lake Tekapo and the surrounding mountains. Anna doesn't like to rest (except for at 6:30am - she doesn't like that time much) and so we immediately went ice skating outside (and next to the hot tubs).

Oh dear! I'm really not doing this justice. Let me just present the itinerary. After Lake Tekapo, we drove along the most incredible passes to Queenstown. In Queenstown we stayed in an "interesting" hotel and drank all the beers on offer at the local brewery. After Queenstown we drove to Lake Wanaka and ... errr ... well we jumped out of a crop duster plane at 15000ft! It was amazing. Before that we'd walked to the top of a mountain - the temperature must have been -15C - and then slid all the way back down on the snow! Then I was lucky enough to drive on the most amazing road that I've seen - between Wanaka and Haast on the West Coast. Spectacular (and also very slippery - at one point I had a whole heap of alarms/warnings on the dashboard indicating that the car was slipping all over the place and that it was zero degrees outside.) We spent the night in Haast.

We got up early to drive up the Coast. This time Anna had the fun of driving in the mist coming from the ice evaporating off the road. The ocean views were spectacular. We drove to the Fox Glacier and had a long walk up through the rainforest to the bottom of the glacier. Then we drove to another glacier! Then we kept driving North (oh ... with a few stops to walk next to some huge rivers) until we got to Hokitika where we spent last night (after another amazing meal and a few pool games - I won the last game ... someone else won the other games).

This morning we woke before the sun and headed off across Arthur's Pass. Incredible. Watching the Sun rise over the mountains actually made Anna get rather emotional - I don't think that she wanted to leave New Zealand!

We ended up with a kea sitting on our car. We weren't sure what to do with it. Anna wanted to bring it back to Australia, but we didn't think that we'd get it back through customs!

Then we drove into Christchurch and then to the airport.

Lots more to come (whether you like it or not!)

(BTW .... some of the photos are panoramas and will expand if clicked).

Sorry about this exhausted sounding blog entry. The trip was really amazing!