After returning our mountain bikes to Dunedin we went to see Baldwin Street. Baldwin Street is a residential street about half a mile long and it is supposed to be the steepest street in the world with a maximum gradient of 1 in 2.9. We met a nutter on a mountain bike who spends his time cycling to the top and freewheeling back down again at 60mph, narrowly missing cars and groups of sweating Japanese tourists. He holds the world record for managing to do this seven times in a row!

We left Dunedin and headed north up the coast to the geological reserve of the Moeraki Boulders - a cluster of more than fifty big spherical rocks which formed in the mud at the bottom of the sea and now lie on the beach for everyone to write graffitti on. The biggest one was about two yards in diameter, the smallest about a foot in diameter (most of the small ones have already been stolen). They certainly looked pretty odd but you'd have to see some photographs to see just how surreal they are.

Our next home was Oamaru, the 'Penguin Capital of New Zealand'. As usual, at the Oamaru campsite, there weren't enough wooden picnic tables to go round and, also as usual, the few tables that were available had been taken by campervan people who really shouldn't need them. In the early evening clip and I sat on our kagouls on the grass, playing cards and eating soup, next to a campervan whose driver was using his picnic table to read a newspaper whilst pretending not to see us. Half an hour later he got out a beach towel and laid it across the table to prove it was his, got in the campervan and drove away. He didn't come back for several hours. Ah well. It gave me plenty of time to walk past the table a few times and throw big handfuls of mud and dirty leaves all over the towel. It was a right mess when he came back but he didn't say anything. The next time he went out he left the table clear. 1-nil to clop methinx.

There is a Blue Penguin colony at Oamaru and clip was so desperate to see them that I softened and paid for us both to go on the official tour. What a joke. They've taken an old quarry next to the sea, landscaped it with grass and native trees, added more than a hundred wooden nesting boxes, built a concrete ramp out of the water, installed bright overhead arc-lighting, constructed a giant wooden grandstand, and fenced off the entire area to stop anyone seeing the penguins without paying. It was a true Penguin Disneyland; the penguins might as well have been in a jamjar. Part of the entrance fee goes towards 'introduced predator control' by way of killing stoats, weasels and ferrets. Blue Penguins live all around New Zealand and Australia so why kill other innocent animals to maintain an artificial population as a tourist attraction? I know I go on about this a lot but I don't see why certain animals are more important than others. Dolphins, penguins and whales are no more important to me than wasps, rats and tuna fish. They are all amazing. I don't believe in widespread slaughter to selfishly preserve any species from extinction whatever the cause. We object to past human interference in ecology and yet continue to interfere in ways we arrogantly reckon is best for (certain) animals. I'm interested, what's your opinion?

Our next stop was Mount Cook National Park. Mount Cook, at 3754m, is the highest peak in Australasia and permanently covered in snow. We camped on the outskirts of Mount Cook village and spent a couple of days tramping in the area. On the first day we walked eleven miles along the western lateral morraine of the seventeen mile-long, five mile-wide Tasman glacier, and also saw Dorothy glacier, Murchison glacier, Ball glacier and Hochsterter glacier. We started some very impressive (and, umm, dangerous) rockslides down the 100m high morraine and had some soup while the glacier thunked, clunked and banged along below us. On the second day we climbed 600m (twice the height of the Eiffel Tower) to the Sealy Tarns and looked out across the Hooker valley at Mount Cook, Hooker glacier, Mueller glacier, Caroline glacier, Huddleston glacier, Te Wae Wae glacier, Eugenie glacier, Hayter glacier, Stewart glacier and Tuckett glacier. Glaciers very much the theme as you can see. Despite all the snow and ice we still managed to get sunburnt.

Then it was back to Christchurch to dry the tent, pack our rucksacks, clean the car and drop it off, and make it to the airport in time for our flight to Melbourne. As the plane climbed away through the clouds I looked down at New Zealand with mixed emotions. I didn't really want to leave and I know it is somewhere I would like to live in the future, but I still can't come to terms with the country's bloodthirsty attitude towards 'pest' animals. Even if the possum population is only being held at the current level three million of them have been poisoned, shot or have died shrieking in agony during the time I have been in New Zealand. Why can't someone find a way to control them that doesn't involve so much suffering?

The New Zealand bubble has rather burst for me. Yes it is a relatively clean green country but this seems to be more down to its short human history rather than any deliberate design. Official figures show it has the second-highest CO2 emissions in the OECD. New Zealand still imports cars that are not even allowed in many other countries. For fifty days of each year Auckland's air pollution is worse than that of London. Every day more than a billion litres of sewage and industrial waste are discharged into rivers and the sea.

I will remember New Zealand for the following things

Nice Weather
Nice Scenery
Nice People
Millions of animals dying in agony while everyone laughs

Last day in New Zealand!! I can't decide if it feels like we've been here ages or hardly any time at all. Ah well. I'm ready to leave - not because I didn't like the place, I'm just ready to explore somewhere different I guess. We have no idea where we're gonna be travelling in Oz, but, one thing I'm certain to try and do is visit the Neighbours set! Yippee I can hardly wait. The only thing better would be to visit the Eastenders set but that's not really possible at the minute.

Overall I did enjoy New Zealand. They do have some very strange ideas and ways of going about things, but I suppose if you were to spend a long time anywhere you'd find similar problems. I'm mainly talking about their love of hunting and their barbaric ways of dealing with the possum, stoat, ferret and weasel trouble, but I won't go into that because I think clop has covered all that nasty business.

The best things for me were seeing all the fantastic animals that we just don't get to see living in England. Whales (how I cried), dolphins (no crying but they were still lovely) and penguins; yellow-eyed (rarest) and blue, also known as fairy and little (smallest). I think the blue ones were my favourite; the biggest they grow is 30cms. Think of your shatterproof ruler at school that wouldn't fit in your pencil case, yep only diddy. But the noise they made was ridiculous - it was a very loud baby's cry then a gurgley Chewbacca styley noise - clop does a very good impression of it. I'm definitely planning to work with all these critters somehow when I return home.

I don't think I'll come back to New Zealand; I feel I've seen everywhere just about and it is rather far away. I've been missing home a lot recently, not for any particular reason I don't think, but clop has been really nice and understanding about it. He's much more patient with me than I am with him, bless.

We were woken up very early the next morning by a gang of itinerants, with marks on their inner arms, serving their community service by digging a long muddy trench outside our hut door, and it was no little relief to finally see Invercarquicklet'sgetoutofhere receding in the rear view mirror as we drove off along the Southern Scenic Route towards Dunedin.

Most of this portion of the Southern Scenic Route was composed of gravel roads which clip hated driving on (my foot was still out of action for driving so I concentrated on drinking lager instead) but the scenery was very nice - quite smooth and undulating compared to the craggy peaks of Fiordland. We stopped at Slope Point, the most southerly point of the south island, and then at Porpoise Bay where we looked for some Hector's Dolphins again, but of course we didn't see any.

Dunedin is quite a big city, sprawling along the coast and surrounded by hills. It had the same scottish feel as Invercargill but it was much cleaner and the people were more friendly, maybe because the weather was so nice. We hired some mountain bikes and took them in the car to Portobello on the Otago Peninsula which is home to a wide variety of bird and marine life; we cycled the whole length of the peninsula and back again (33 miles) to visit the Royal Albatross colony and see some Yellow-eyed Penguins.

Royal Albatrosses are massive (they have a wingspan of three metres) and spend most of their lives at sea. They mate for life and have one chick every two years at the colony of their birth. It takes one year to raise each chick and the parents spend the following year flying around the world in opposite directions before returning to the colony (sometimes within a few hours of each other) to raise another chick. The albatross colony on the Otago Peninsula is the only mainland albatross colony in the world - I haven't been able to find out how the colony got started but I know it definitely wasn't there before the 1900's. Despite the albatrosses being wild animals that nobody owns, the New Zealanders have fenced off the entire colony and built a visitors' centre so that they can charge you 16 pounds to look at them. I wouldn't really mind if you could see the birds through the fence but they've built it right over the other side of a hill so there's no chance of seeing the colony without paying the greedy bastards. And they use part of the entrance fee for 'introduced predator control' (aka murdering stoats, ferrets and weasels) even though these predators were in the area before the colony was there. Luckily a few of stray birds flew over the peninsula so we got to see them anyway. Ha ha ha.

We cycled up a big hill to the Yellow-eyed Penguins visitors' centre and guess what? You can't see the penguins without paying 21 pounds because they live on private land. Amazing isn't it? Why can't these people just fuck off. However, after a bit of detective work, we discovered that some penguins live on Sandfly Beach (public), so at dusk we walked down over some huge sand-dunes to a hide and watched seven Yellow-eyed Penguins come in from the sea, feed their chicks and waddle to their homes. For free. HA HA HA.

Last year I liked Queenstown a lot. This year I hated it. It's too big and it's too commercial. Give me Wanaka any day.

Many of the towns in this area are gold rush towns from the late 1800's and there is still a relatively high amount of gold present in the rocks and rivers. Hoping to boost our adventure funds (mainly so I could stop eating instant noodles for tea every day) we stopped off at Arrowtown, hired some goldpanning pans, put on our flip-flops, and spent two frustrating hours crouched shivering in the Arrow River searching for our dream nugget. We failed. Somewhat resentful, I wrapped some cigarette packet gold foil around a pebble and left it in a prime position - I only wish I'd been there to see its discovery.

Our next temporary home was the picturesque lakeside town of Te Anau, the starting point of some of New Deutschland's most celebrated walks. The scenery around this area is a permanent jaw-slackener. We camped up a hill at the Fiordland Holiday Park; this soon became known to us as HMP Fiordland on account of all the bloody rules we had to abide by. First names and departure date were not enough - our food was taken out of the fridge and left warm all day because we failed to to write our surname on the sodding carrier bag. A two pounds deposit was required to borrow a spoon. A ten pounds deposit was required to use a barbecue, only returnable after passing a "cleanliness check".

From Te Anau we drove to Milford Sound for the day, a glaciated sea fiord only accessible via an extremely avalanche-prone road and a 1200m unlit sloping tunnel through bare dripping rock. I can't really describe the scenery well enough to convey it properly so I won't bother trying.

At this point I'd like to discuss backpackers. For some reason I can't understand, most backpackers find it absolutely necessary to talk to other backpackers at every available opportunity. How friendly, you might think, but one of only two conversations ever takes place. Rarely, you'll be disturbed by someone who wants to talk about something worthwhile, like a good local walk, the interesting wildlife, or places to shop for cheap food. More often than not the so-called conversation is just the same five boring questions, designed to feign interest whilst actually setting them up to brag about themselves.

"Where are you from?"
"How long have you been here?"
"How long have you got left?"
"Where have you been so far?"
"Where are you going next?"

Then starts the tedious one-up-manship. Here's a typical example:

"Air hair lair, we're Zak and Tabitha from Priggishtown. We're travelling round the world for nine months."
"Oh really? We're doing ten months."
"Er yah, so far we've done Australia. Oh, Sydney was so beautiful."
"Yah, we did Sydney for six weeks. It was beautiful wasn't it. Did you do Brisbane? It was so beautiful."
"Yah, it was beautiful. Then we did Melbourne. Have you done Melbourne? Melbourne was so beautiful."
"Er, we drove past Melbourne, yah, it was beautiful. Have you done Ecuador?"

I'm sorry but I really could not give a flying arse about this stuff. It's just not a real conversation. It's like being forced to watch fifty episodes of This Is Your Life every day where you've never heard of the person being featured. When people speak to me I must come across as a right self-centred uninterested git because I refuse to ask this kind of crap.

Yet another irritating thing is that no one "visits" or "spends time" anywhere, instead everyone "does" places. Oh yah (insert horsey overbite), last month we "did" Hawaii and this morning we've "done" the glaciers, tomorrow we're "doing" a museum. This concept of "doing" places is beyond me - it sounds like everything is on a big checklist, waiting to be ticked off. The next time some dweebo tells me they "did the glaciers" I'm going to say "what? you did the glaciers? jesus christ, where did you get all that fucking ice from?"

Our holiday park in Manapouri was surely the queerest in New Deutschland. It was hard to decide whether it was simply quirky and fun, or sinister to the point of having to sleep with a torch switched on. Run by an eccentric, loud, argument-loving, limping Dutch couple, the park consisted of about thirty alpine cabins arranged around groups of rusting Morris Minors, Morris Maxis and Ford Cortinas. There were swings, tyres and treehouses for adults to play on, an underground tunnel network, Monty Python cartoons in the toilets, and a dingy garage with monochrome video games from the late seventies. We loved it! It made a nice change after staying at so many sterile formulaic sites.

In the sixties the residents of Manapouri were involved in a bitter dispute with the government over plans to raise the water level of nearby Lake Manapouri by twelve metres, a scheme designed to boost the power production of the newly-constructed hydroelectric power station on the opposite side of the lake. The local community fought the plan, claiming that the higher water level would "reduce the natural beauty of the lake" and "devastate the fragile shoreline ecosystem" (no surprise there then), and the scheme was finally abandoned. More than forty years later the Manapourians are still very smug about their little victory but I can't help thinking they are just unthoughtful self-serving twerps. Environmental issues are global not local - these people only cared about their own back yard. Hydroelectric power is clean and renewable and the Manapouri region gets more than five metres of rainfall each year. For the sake of a few trees and a pretty view, a dirty great fossil-fuel power station will have been built somewhere else instead (not in Manapouri of course, lord no). An environmental triumph. Well done.

We sailed across Lake Manapouri to the end of West Arm then crossed Wilmot Pass in a 4WD to Deep Cove on Doubtful Sound, one of the most remote and unspoilt fiords in the National Park. We spent the rest of the day in sea kayaks, circumnavigating Elizabeth Island and paddling to the far end of Hall Arm for a well-deserved swim.

Like Milford Sound, Doubtful Sound was originally carved out by a glacier and is now a deep saltwater fiord with a thick surface layer of freshwater. For ecological reasons, access to the sound is fiercely regulated and we only saw one other boat the whole time we were there. Dark walls of rock climb almost vertically out of the sea and tower more than a mile above the surface of the water. Below the snow-line, trees, ferns and moss cling to the rock by their fingernails as thin silvery waterfalls spill their way down between them. Several pods of dolphins swam right by our kayaks. It was a very wild and isolated place.

As I was climbing back onto the boat after my swim I slipped along a piece of submerged metal and cut my foot open under my toes. I didn't want to worry anyone so I rinsed the blood off the deck, put my shoes and socks on, and kept quiet. By the time we got back to the holiday park blood was coming through my shoe. clip used her vet nursing skills to sort everything out but I've been a bit pathetic - I hate being injured, especially when it means I have to hop everywhere.

It came as quite a surprise to discover that, of all the people who originally settled New Deutschland, the Scots were the only ones who chose not to integrate; consequently the whole of the south coast of the south island is a miniature Scotland. The rivers, hill, towns and streets all have Scottish names. They even talk with a slight Scottish accent!

We got held up by some sheep.

We went caving at Clifden and saw some glow-worms. We didn't get very far underground because we had no helmets or boots to wear.

We stared through binoculars at the sea for more than an hour, hoping to catch a glimpse of the small stripey Hector's Dolphin. We didn't see any.

We saw some eerie trees that have grown lop-sided because of the strong southerly winds.

We looked at Monkey Island.

We are now in the city of Invercargill. We're staying in a raised wooden shed in a carpark next to a prison by a railway line on an industrial estate under the airport flight path. It is a dump. We've even got a key each to get in the toilet blocks. I don't like it here. I want my foot to get better and I want to go back to HMP Fiordland.

As we were leaving Wanaka, a Dutch man asked me to help him carry a wooden picnic table which was near our tent over to his tent. As we carried it along he told me "it is terrible, sometimes I go out for the day and when I come back my table is gone." I said, "the tables are for everyone to share." It is flabbergasting.

As we pitched at the campsite in Queenstown we knew there was going to be a problem; too many tents too close together with too many spliff-toking drunken people sitting outside them. We went to bed at eleven o'clock but it was impossible to get to sleep with the laughing, shouting, talking, banging and music playing. At midnight I asked them to be quiet but it didn't work. If anything they got louder. Another three people asked them to be quiet but they just got louder. We were surrounded by more than a dozen pissed-up idiots. At 3am I asked them to be quiet for the second time but they ignored me again. They started talking about me, the fifty year old British "party killer". There is nothing you can do in this kind of situation. Things quietened down for a bit until a possum stood in a leg trap in the woods and started screaming. Then another possum got caught in a trap and joined in. Then another one. As we were getting up this morning we heard the gunshots as they were finally killed. Then the noisy people woke up to go to the toilet, flicked their fag end at our tent, then banged it as they walked past. Yes, they were German. It was the worst night's sleep we've had in last two months. We've moved our tent to a different area of the site for tonight.

Today we've been in a cable car to the top of Bob's Peak, did some luging, watched some tandem paragliders, played a round of crazy golf, and watched some dithery girls fall off a bungy bridge.

Next stop, Fiordland.

Hi ho yippee yi yay! And greetings from an UNBELIEVABLY hot and sunny Wanaka (no prizes for guessing what we call it).

After our distant squint at the Franz Josef glacier clip somehow agreed to wade barefoot through a river of freezing water and we had a somewhat more successful eyeful of Fox glacier. Of course the Maori had already given these glaciers beautiful names centuries ago but the europeans decided to rename them after yawnworthy policitians instead.

clip has decided to drink less wine in the evenings because "getting out of the tent for a wee in the middle of the night is such a bloody performance; it's like trying to do a Rubik's puzzle with your legs crossed."

It wasn't long after we'd commented on how deserted the roads were that we stopped to look at a remote waterfall and locked the car keys in the car. And for once the stupid mobile phone was in the boot. We spent half an hour pathetically trying to pick the locks with bits of twig until a couple in a hire car exactly like ours pulled over and let us try their key. I didn't really expect it to work and it didn't, and neither did the guy's attempt to jemmy the boot with a wheel brace. They wished us luck and left. The sun suddenly got much hotter and sandflies started biting our bare legs. The car had thrown down the gauntlet. It had been almost two months since I'd had to find a solution to a practical problem, something I used to do every day as an engineer, and I needed the challenge. We broke an arm off my three quid metal sunglasses, bent it into a twisted hook, pushed it down the front of the passenger window into the door, turned the hook under the bottom of the glass, then lifted the bottom of the sneck so that it unlocked the door. WINNAAHHHH!! Since then I've been practising quite a bit with my twokking tool. I can now get into our car (and hence any other hire car in New Zealand because they're all the same model) within five seconds. I'm keeping it on the pretext that we may lock the keys in the car again but really it's in case we need a new tent or a towel or some pans :o)

We drove south past Kidd's Bush and we are now in the alpine adventure town of Wanaka on the edge of Lake Wanaka and it's been a thrill a minute! Yesterday we tandem skydived together from twelve thousand feet, falling from an aircraft just over two and a quarter miles high! The one and a half mile vertical freefall took about forty five seconds and then we had five minutes under a parachute before landing on some grass. The best part of it for me is the moment where you're actually tipping out of the plane and you have the sudden sickening realisation that there is nothing under you. Freefall is very fast and very loud and seems to go on for a very long time before the gusset-damaging wrench as the parachute opens. clip left the plane about ten seconds after me which meant that, after my parachute had opened, I was able to look up and see her plummeting down through the sky towards me at 135mph. We both want to do it again! It's awesome.

In the afternoon we relaxed by going jetboating for an hour up Clutha River. The lad at the controls tried to scare us by skimming around rocks and performing 360 degree spins but it was all a bit tame compared to the skydiving.

We continue to be sickened by New Zealand's pest control agenda. Everywhere we go there are signs warning of poison and traps. Dogs are not allowed in poison areas because the poison they use (1080, which is banned in every other country in the world) is ten times more poisonous to dogs than possums. We've seen two kinds of trap - sprung traps on the ground which close on the possums' legs and hold them in agony until they die and sprung traps nailed to trees that close on the possums' snouts and hold them in agony until they die. We've found a few dead possums hanging by their faces from these traps with their claws extended into the bark. I've taken some photos which I'll send if anyone wants them - something should be done.

And here's the stupid thing. There are supposed to be 80,000,000 possums in New Zealand and they normally live for between six and ten years, so let's say an average natural life expectancy of eight years. They reach sexual maturity after one year and each female has one baby each year. Therefore, assuming 10,000,000 possums die each year of old age and an eighth of the remaining females each have one joey, there are 30,625,000 new possums each year. The possum population is growing at 20,625,000 per year. That's 40 per minute. Just to keep the possum population as it is now they would have to kill 60,000 of them every day. I just can't believe this is possible but they love it. Newsagents are full of hunting magazines with photographs of little grinning kids holding rifles over bleeding carcasses. We were kept awake last night by the sound of a hunting dog barking and someone shooting animals in the woods near us. This is a barbaric country.

clop

Could someone please pop across to Germany for me and see if there is anybody there. The entire German population has surely been transported en masse to the west coast of New Zealand. clip says she is "losing her mind" as a result of "their fucking incessant buzzing". I have to admit, it can be quite difficult to relax in the tent at night with all the shouting going on. In addition, the campsites seem to have turned into motorhome conventions. clips moans "it's like trying to get to sleep in a sliding door factory. I need a door and walls between me and these freaks." And Jon cajoles me for my xenophobic rhetoric!

From Motueka we went on a 'day trip' to see the Te Waikoropupu Springs near Takaka. These freshwater springs pump out between 8000 and 14000 litres of water a second which produces a pretty impressive river and makes the springs the largest in the country. The water coming out also has the tenuous honour of being the clearest spring water in the world. It was, I suppose, quite clear.

The next day was a tramping day. We drove up, up and up into the Kahurangi National Park, finally parking our car in Flora carpark at an altitude of 950m. The lids on our instant soups cartons were bulging out. We had planned to climb right to the summit of Mount Arthur but by the time we reached the halfway hut at 1400m (air pressure 87%) we were already into thick cloud so we changed our plan and walked back to the car via Flora Hut instead. Mount Arthur is made of marble and was created when limestone, which had been squashed under the sea, was pushed upwards to make a mountain. There were sheer marble walls with trees somehow growing out of them, marble pebbles lying around, and car-sized lumps of bright white marble jutting up out of the ground.

After an uneventful night in Murchison we headed east over Lewis Pass to Hanmer Springs, an overpriced Lourdesesque resort complete with hot, stinky pools of bubbling sulphurous water and busloads of arthritic wrinklies. It was like being on the set of a german remake of Cocoon. In typical capitalist fashion these naturally occuring thermal pools have been fenced off by a set of money-grabbing wankers who now charge you four pounds to dip your toe in. People like this are taking over the world. Before you know it we'll be paying good money to stand and look at The Strid. We walked up to the summit of Conical Hill and enjoyed the lovely view as a heavily-tattooed Maori lad and a girl in a pale blue bra and red g-string simulated sex against a nearby railing.

We stopped off in Christchurch to collect some mail then made our way back across the southern alps to the west coast via Arthur's Pass. Arthur's Pass is named after Arthur Dobson, a European who 'discovered' the pass in the 1864 after he heard about it from local Maori who had been using it for hundreds of years (this kind of thing is a recurring theme here). The road across the pass is a miracle of civil engineering. The views are stunning as the road winds up, down and around jagged snow-capped mountains clad in lush green rainforest. Misty waterfalls cascade down sheer rock faces along the sides of the road. Just below Death Corner the road becomes a teetering viaduct across Otira Gorge. An entire river pours along a huge concrete aqueduct suspended over the road and then plunges freely down into the chasm below.

Immediately after crossing Arthur's Pass it started raining so hard that it was difficult to drive. The region gets around five metres of rainfall each year, much of it falling as snow, and this means that many of the thaw rivers are hundreds of yards wide. To minimise construction and maintenance costs the long bridges over these rivers are all single track affairs and can be quite frustrating if the road is (relatively) busy. We thought we'd seen it all until we came to one particularly long bridge where you not only had to worry about other cars but also about trains running along a railway track sunk into the road surface!

It was still pouring down when we reached Greymouth. We drove slowly through a horrifying gothic cemetery and into the holiday park with a sense of doom. In view of the downpour we opted to stay in a 'basic cabin' and played cards and drank cheap wine together under a bar heater for the rest of the evening.

Funnily enough, the bad weather greatly enhanced our trip to the pancake rocks and blowholes at Punakaiki in Paparoa National Park. Years of erosion by the sea has transformed the protruding layers of limestone into towers of stone pancakes. It has also created tunnels up through the limestone cliffs which roar loudly and spew out great fountains of water as the sea moves around at high tide.

Our visit to Franz Josef glacier became something of a non-event when clip stubbornly refused to walk past a general warning sign more than half a mile from the glacier, despite the fact that hordes of people on the official 'guided tours' (where you pay a lot of money which we can't spare to look smug and wear a blue kagoul) were skipping back and forth along it in complete safety. Needless to say, we didn't get on too well for the rest of the day.

Until next time.. clop

For me, camping isn't just about tripping over guy ropes, sitting on warm toilet seats and waking up every morning with a stiff neck. It's also about being part of a community, albeit a transient one, that places importance on sharing and consideration for others. This brings me rather nicely to the subject of today's rant: Wooden Picnic Tables.

The people who run campsites thoughtfully provide wooden picnic tables for the campers to use. Unfortunately there are always more tents than there are wooden picnic tables. So, do the campers share the tables nicely with each other? Do they chuff! They wait until no one is looking, carry the table over to their tent, put something on it, like some old flip flops, a carrier bag or half a bottle of warm pop, and then go out for the day leaving the rest of us feeling bad simply for wanting to sit down. Maybe it's just a coincidence but the people who do this always seem to be German.

On one occasion we pitched our tent next to a tent that had a picnic table literally inches from its front door. Carefully, we dismantled their beautiful handcrafted pebble masterpiece (claim of ownership), then moved the table about two yards closer to our tent so that we could share it with them. Later that evening they returned from their day out shouting and, as I watched from my tent in utter disbelief, picked up the table and moved it so far back round the other side of their tent that we couldn't even see the frigging thing anymore. And yes, they were German.

We sailed back to the south island on The Lynx, a very sexy catamaran ferry that whooshes along at 50mph where it is allowed to, (the ripples it makes are, predictably, "destroying our forests" so it has to tiptoe along like a canal barge whenever it comes within sight of land) and, after the pleasant surprise of discovering that nobody had broken into our car, we headed west to the geographical centre of New Zealand, Nelson. Nelson was very much a Lilliputian Grimsby so we weren't too bothered to find that the campsite was already full. Instead, we carried on the Motueka, a small sunny coastal town surrounded by vineyards, just south of the Abel Tasman National Park.