Hey man, we were on the south island Jan 1 - Jan 14th. Check Flickr. We toured it with Active NZ, very good company. It'd be funny as hell if we were in the same town at the same time or something (Christchurch?). And I came back to 20 degrees and shitloads of snow too.

Welcome back. IT's gonna be nice for the next week at least, thank god. After that I have no idea but i'm sure we're not out of the woods yet.

oh, and the 5 Spot burnt down.

I was in Picton around the weekend of Jan 20, but then didn't get back to the South Island until Jan 31, so I probably missed you by at least a week.

Were you on the move a lot, or did you just limit yourself to a few places?

On the move the whole time. We usually spent one night at each place, sometimes 2 nights. We hit both coasts, saw the Fox and Franz Joseph glaciers, some fjiords, etc. Again, I threw lots of it on Flickr. I almost don't like thinking about it - it was really, really nice.

I had 19 days to tour around the South Island. I pretty much skipped Dunedin and Christchurch (a few hours in each), figuring that I didn't come to NZ to hang out in the cities. But that let me hit just about every major spot on the island, and stay 2 nights in a lot of places, and I spent 3 in Nelson. But I was still moving fast, and towards the end I started getting fatigued. The only place I wanted to go but didn't make it to was Golden Bay.

I'll go back someday, and will make the time to allow me to move a little more slowly.

see if this works...

http://www.flickr.com/photos/13898328@N ... 487384290/

It's my (abbreviated I promise) NZ picture set, with captions.

I took two cameras, and Delta lost the good one on the way back, so I got hosed there. But these are from the cheap digital.

Sorry to hear about your camera, I'd have died had I somehow lost my pictures. You took some great shots though.

That sheep farm, is that on the shore of Lake Pukaki? Or Lake Tekapo?

Tekapo. Or as we called it, "Take-a-poo." It was called Breamar. God I want to move there.