NZ

Right, I'm a little bit behind on what's happened. In fact I have a little surprise for you all at the end! How exciting.. But no cheating, you must read through this first..

Neighbours night was the final night for me in Melbourne and so I bode my farewells to my traveling compadrés and headed for the airport. After narrowly making the check in time I flew out to Christchurch, one of the main towns of the South Island. A little bit of banter with the [lovely] stewardess and a few drinks later, I were quite pissed! I met a couple of girls on our flight through discussing the lovely family in front of us (they were threatened proper infant school style with being left behind if they didn't stop causing problems. I think the steward might have been gay, he had a stern but camp tone about him) and that was the start of the most awesome 2 weeks of solo adventures...

Christchurch has a very similar English feel to it. But, as one would expect, it was far nicer: Weather, people, buildings. We should learn from this! But there isn't much to do there so I booked a Kiwi Experience tour of the South Island. This is a bus full of like minded individuals! 'nuff said.. Traveled down the East coast doing some cool things - for example, we learnt about the NZ method of catching deer (the country was once overrun with them) by jumping out of helicopters and tackling them to the ground! And I fed a BIG pig (see pics): a very scary moment for me.

Also, during this time I had left my wallet behind in Christchurch so thankyou to Laura for getting it back and Laura and Tracey for being my personal bank for 3 days! I would have been done for without ya help.

Queenstown, the centre of Extremeism in NZ. Was our next stop. Cos I'm your typical no messin' type of fella, I jumped the Nevis bungy (134m, or 440ft, whichever sounds more impressive (feet I reckon)), a lovely leap from a cable car into a huge valley. Surprisingly this was not as intimidating as I had anticipated. I think the pig actually takes the biscuit (geddit?). I also rode a motorbike up and down muddy hills for a bit, then hopped back on the bus to CT to fly to Auckland on the North Island.

There I stayed with Adam Griffiths' Mum and Sis for one night (thankyou people!) to be shown the sights and eats of the Capital city. (I had the nicest eye fillet steak, gorgeous). Thus proceeded my longest journey of all: the trip back home...

Yes, it's time for my surprise....

I'm back home! In Gloucester. One serious conteding city for the centre of the chav world. It took 22 hours of flight to get here and by 'eck was it worth it.