Franz Joseph

As with most of the journeys we stopped a few times on the way, once to go to the bushman museum, a small museum that is run by a guy called bushman Pete who is a tad extrovert who loved the old ways, your are shown a short film of the history of deer, hunting and then live capture in New Zealand, with a few shots of Pete pretending to shoot things thrown in for good measure.

 The rest of the shack is filled with possums alive and dead strung up in way so that on walking through a door they might come down on your head and a café which is a lot busier than you would expect.

Unfortunately the weather finally caught up with us so not long after arriving the clouds close in and the rain comes down, our friends that had done a Heli hike were not sure if they were going to have to stay on the mountain overnight due to the hazardous conditions for the Helicopter, luckily they were just collected a little sooner before flights were grounded.

The first night in Franz Joseph and Kane our driver was celebrating his birthday, we decided to make him a cake before the big night in Monsoon bar drowned him.

Monsoon Bar has a slogan that seemed very fitting when we were there “it rains, we pour” that night we also had the results in for the fancy dress in the Poo Pub, although not winning this I did come joint second with my ginger lightning outfit and so won myself a free photo and video voucher for when I do the Nevis Bungy worth $89, definitely worth dressing up for. A few hours later and a pool tournament down in which I managed to win myself a free half day mountain biking pass for the gondola in Queenstown and Kane was really starting to feel the effect of a birthday. By the time it reached 12 and his actual birthday there were barely more than 10 people left but it was a great night.

The next day with everything still postponed due to the weather we used some vouchers and all went to the hot natural spa pools and did lazying around for a few hours, the rain actually became a blessing as the pools were so warm you could use the trickle of rain water coming off the covers to cool down. After quite a while in the pool and discussing plans for food we went off to put these into practice ending with a huge sausage in mash dinner with all the trimmings followed by melted chocolate with biscuits and banana for everyone to dip in like a fondue.

That night and another competition, this was a rock paper scissors knock out tournament, this clearly shows theirs views on the mentality of backpackers although it was quite fun, no winnings for me although Bex and Jamie both won something for themselves. With such good prizes on the table in most of the stops it is definitely worth taking part even if you are useless at whatever they are doing as you could even end up with something for being the worst.