"Is them sheep?"

Hurray! The storm seems to have buggered off. We started today with a nice drive west from Queenstown to Twelve Mile Delta. I prattled about Lord of the Rings filming locations while Claire made plans to buy a house at Wilson's Bay. This is going to become a common theme.

The lake was beautiful, with nice clear views over to the mountains. Look:

That little hill on the left there in the last photo - that there is Amon Hen. Well, the filming location for Amon Hen. Just about. I geeked. A lot. And that one in the second one down below, that one turns up when Sam sees the oliphaunts.

Then we headed back to Queenstown and went out through the back and into the hills to find Arrowtown, which is an old gold-mining settlement.

It's very pretty but obviously geared towards tourists. We didn't care - the sun had come out, there was an amazing sweet shop and the bakery did really nice smelling pies. So we bought some fudge, had a stroll around the remains of the Chinese settlement and bought some pies to go. We're so cool.

 

 

Then came the drive to Dunedin. First stop came at Cromwell, which is pretty and we want to live there too. We're going to need a lot of holiday homes. Another stupid selfie of the day.

I liked the dam at Roxburgh because it just appealed to the geek within.

Dunedin itself is nice enough but there isn't that much to do. We decided to have tea out and picked a place that does stonegrill. Basically, choose your meat and some sides and it comes to you raw on a very hot stone so you can cook it how you want. We had lamb, because we had to try New Zealand lamb. It was delicious and I don't normally like lamb. Yum. Oh yeah, pictures of raw meat.

And then a fairly early night because tomorrow we get to have the uber-long drive up to Kaikoura. By which I mean 7 hours. Ack.

Scary Bananas

Very early start because today we are going to Milford Sound. Drag ourselves out of bed at stupid o'clock, stumble into town, wait in the cold.

Told by bus driver that the Milford Road is closed. Bugger. There is no other way to get to Milford Sound so we decided that we'd drive ourselves as far as Te Anau and find something to do there. So we start on what turns out to be an epic road trip.

First we head down the shore of Lake Wakatipu, which would be pretty save for the slightly damp haze. After a 2 hour drive we arrive in a very soggy Te Anau and are given many suggestions for things to do by the helpful lady at the i-Site. We decide that since it's rainy and cold we'll just stay in the car and take a trip down to Invercargill on the south coast. But first, we need food. Which turns out to be an early lunch of pretty much the best venison burger I've ever had. Much yum.

We have decided by this point that the storm from Franz Josef is now following us around the island. Which is shit. It becomes even more shit when it just won't stop raining all the way to Invercargill and twice we have to get out of the car to check that the flooding across the road isn't going to drown us. This, in Amy's words, is scary bananas.

Invercargill, we decide, is like Cleethorpes. A bit run down and sort of dodgy looking. Which means Bluff, the port settlement hanging off the end must be Immingham. We think the Grimsby analogue must have fallen into the sea. The view from the lookout in Bluff looks like this:

We have also started taking "stupid selfie of the day". Have you noticed? This is one of today's.

The drive back up to Queenstown was just as wet, with the added fun of it sort of turning into snow at some points. ARGH. Hopefully the drive to Dunedin tomorrow will be better.

"Diversion Not Applicable"

HURRAY!! Haast Pass wasn't closed, which means we didn't have to take the 12 hour detour. We still got up at a decent time though, which meant we got to have a nice leisurely drive.

The views were amazing. We started off on the coast road down to Haast Township, which took in temperate rainforest and massive cliffs.

Then we hit Haast Pass itself. Huge mountains, beautiful forests and the Haast River winding alongside the road.

As we came to Makarora at the southern end of the pass, the sun decided to make an appearance. We attempted to get some photos at Lake Wanaka, but we got bitch-slapped by nature again, so we fled in the car.

Fortunately by the time we got to Lake Hawea on the other side on the range the rain had stopped, the wind had dropped and the sun was well and truly out. We want to live here.

What should have been a 4 and a half hour drive turned into about 7 hours with all the photo stops we took. It was just that amazing.

We weren't so taken with Queenstown. The hostel there remains our least favourite so far. Cramped and full of drunk people. Ugh.