New Zealand - what an experience!

We've had just over a week exploring and experiencing this fabulous country, three days in the amazing geothermal volcanic country on North Island and six days driving around South Island. 

Only a quarter of the country's population live on the larger South Island, which makes it fabulously easy to get around, especially by car. The roads are good and there simply is no traffic. Two cars and a bus constitute a traffic jam.  Once the Transalpine train left us in Greymouth, we drove over 1,000kms exploring the island's west coast and the dramatic wonderful scenery that is Fjordland.   The highlights would be too numerous to list, so we'll pick out the few lowlights!  Mostly they would be food related.   

Despite our best efforts to pick restaurants that gave the impression that someone within knew how to cook, the food overall was only adequate. You would think that somewhere amongst the 70 million sheep that occupy rather more of the land than their minders, there would be one that tasted really yummy, but no. Several excursions into the culinary adventure park that is NZ cuisine failed to find this elusive creature.  'Must try harder' is how we'll leave that.

Our final drive to Queenstown's airport provided a last look at the Remarkables mountain range in the morning sun. Wow!!  We shall now put the wow-ometer away until
We head out into the Australian outback in a few days time. 
For the next few days New Zealand's landscape will be replaced by an Aussie cityscape.     

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