Hi guys! Hope you're all well! It's been a while since we updated the travelog, but we have been on the move a lot lately.

We did the Tongariro crossing after all, it was a long, exhausting walk, which took us approximately 8 hours to complete, 17 kms over volcanic terrain mostly and some reaally steep parts. And because I am as fit as a fiddle I had to stop every 5 minutes or so to rest :D. Plus I had Vassilis reminding me constantly how resilient he is despite the fact that he is a smoker :). BTW, he is trying to give up smoking now or rather reduce it and he is doing very well :D. It was a nice walk I am glad we did it, we reached an altitude of almost 2000m. This place was also the setting for "Mordor" in the "Lord of the rings" and you could really see why.

Although we couldn't move the next day we decided to go to Napier, a nice little town full of art deco style buildings. From there to Wellington, New Zealand's capital where we spent 2 days (a bit to much for a small city like this though). Wellington is nicknamed "windy Wellington" and this is so true, it was extremely windy everywhere. We took the ferry from there and crossed the Cook strait to the South Island.

There we went straight to the Abel Tasman N.P. where we met our dear Italian friends, Stefano and Elisa. It was so great to see our friends after such a long time! We did sea kayaking in the Abel Tasman together, which was great. They are useless, could not keep up with the mighty Greeks and were slowing us down all the time. Anyway, what can you do they are our friends after all :). We only stayed together for 2 days which was very little, there was so much to talk about! The guys also introduced us to free camping which is great not only because it's free, but also because you get to camp in some amazing spots near lakes and rivers. We are really thankful to them for this! It was really sad to part, we really enjoyed the company. We moved on to the south of the South Island and the guys went north where they would do a 3 day walk (they are mad) and then on to the North Island again.

So we drove along South Island's west coast, where we saw so many amazing natural wonders. Mount Aspiring, the Milford Sound, you name it. We were a bit unlucky with the famous lake Matheson and the Franz Josef and Fox glaciers as we happened to drive by in the worst possible weather.

New Zealand is an overwhelmingly beautiful country, you have to see it to believe it. You want to keep taking pictures constantly, so you end up driving 100kms in 5 hours instead of just 2 or so (BTW the N.Zealand highways resemble a lot the Irish ones and when I am driving, distances seem almost infinite :)). We camped in some really nice spots with our campervan, we had breakfast, lunch, dinner by lakes, rivers and beaches, it was amazing! We ended up staying for a total of 25 days in N.Z. instead of the originally planned 14 days, and I could easily have spent one more month here. I would love to have done a bit more walking or "tramping" as they call it here, but with such limited time we were rushing from one place to the other trying to see as much as we could, so we ended up spending a lot of time driving. But still, N.Z. is a great place, it's almost a must-see-at-least-once-in -your-our-lifetime :).

Our final stop was in Christchurch, South Island's biggest city and a very English-looking one too. We dropped the campervan there and boarded the plane to Sydney where we are at the moment. Sydney is an amazing city but more on that in our next entry :D.

Take care!

Pinelopi