Quiet day
Charly and I hung out for our last day together messing around town and sorting her photos out on her camera. We said goodbye around 1-ish as she headed to catch her bus to Christchurch. It has been a fairly random adventure with her (if you're reading this Charly-girl, you better post me a comment!)
I slinked onward back to Queenstown where I now reside till I meet Laura and Jenny for our newly planned roadtrip.

Dunedin
To start the day I headed out with my newly acquired Irish friend, Ciaran. (I say newly acquired but I actually first met him in Christchurch a week ago.) We headed to the Speights brewery to take in the tour and see what was happening. The tour was informative, funny and our guide took absolutely no prisoners. Afterwards we were given small glasses and shown the taps. We leapt on them like men possesed and I managed to fir in around 10 small glasses of beer before our time ran dry.
Ciaran and I scooted over to the brewery bar to sample some more of the Speights' finest. After around 4 pints each it was starting to look like it would turn into a bit of a session. Luckily for me Ciaran had to catch his bus, because God help me if I start drinking with an Irishman at 11 in the morning without any breakfast!
I wandered around town and got some sushi to quench my drunken hunger then headed to the hostel to await the return of Charly.
She returned in due time from her wildlife tour and showed me some of her penguin pictures. We hung out for the rest of the night playing silly board games and generally having a laugh.

Dunedin to Queenstown
After a very early start (and a very rude bus driver) Charly and I headed onward to the city of Dunedin. Dunedin is a nice city with some excellent building and a history (apparently) rooted in presbyterian Scotland... who'd have thunk it?

CANYON SUWING!
Charly and i got up this morning and, feeling we hadn't had an adrenaline rush for at least... oh... 48 hours, booked a canyon swing.
A canyon swing is basically leaping off a 109m platform attached to a cable into 60 m of freefall followed by a 200m arc of swing. Fun stuff.
The guys on the platform were pretty hilarious, titalating the fear factor as much as they could with dumb jokes and general mockery.
However... once you get off that platform: OH MY GOD! What a rush!
The rest of the day was spent in hazy after-rush mode.

Hung...... over
After the feeling I had this morning I swear I won't drink again for at least two days. (Yep... nothing can stop me!) Btw Queenstown is quite pretty.

Puzzles and Planes
Jenny, Laura and I were picked up at 9 am to go and jump out of a plane while Charly headed off to do some skiing. Once the girls and I reached the airfield disaster struck: There was too much cloud! We were forced to abandon until the afternoon.
To further console ourselves we headed to Puzzle world to take in some fun. We headed to the corridor of holograms which included very sophisticated holograms; including a holographic microscope which you could actually look down the eyepiece. Next was the tilting room which messed with your heads balance and made you feel like you were always standing on a slope at the wrong angle. Through clever use of mirrors and tilting floors sometimes it would seem like water was running uphill.
The Ames room was next which was based on the technology used in Lord Of The Rings to make actors look bigger or smaller according to their in film height. It was a single room that utilised false perspective to make a person on one side seem huge and the person on the other side seem tiny.
We then headed to puzzleworld's main attraction: The Maze.
Letting Laura lead us at first she turned out to be the mistress of mazes, queen of conundrums, duchess of disillusionment and princess of puzzles... for a while anyway. Then it was up to me to use my patented "left-hand" technique to successfully guide us through the maze.
Once we exited puzzleworld we got the good news... THE JUMP WAS ON! We headed to town and got a pick up. Heading to the jump field we were all on edge, our adrenaline mixing with out gut-wrenching terror as we prepared to get thrown out of a plane.
I could go on and on about the feelings and emotions you experience when you jump out of a plane... but I won't because nothing can quite compare to it!
Afterwards we headed back to the hostel with a bottle of tequila to have a very drunken night.

Franz to Wanaka
We headed off from Franz Josef down to the ever beautiful town of Wanaka. On the way we tried to book ourselves into a skydive in the afternoon but upon arrival we were told that it was far too windy to do a jump... more than gutted. We consoled ourselves with watching Snatch and generally messing around.

The Glacier
Today was a rather sedate of 6 hours of climbing a glacier. My god it was knackering!
Early on in the day I got the nickname, Flash: King of the impossible, Saviour of the Universe etc due to my fantastic T-shirt... or my disposition to doing the impossible and saving the Universe, I'm not sure which.
After fastening on our rather fetching ICE TALONZ to our boots we began to hike our way up and across the Franz Josef Glacier (named after the beard of Franz Josef). It was pretty hard going with some tough squeezes and hard going paths but was worth it for the views.
After that the girls and I hooked up with a new friend from the Glaciers, Mhadri (or something... unable to remember her name I simply refered to her as Miss Ireland 2006) for some pizza. Afterwards I made hot chocolate sauce and everyone passed out in bed.

Actually Caving
Using the intense powers of luck and sheer fluke, Charly and I managed to catch a caving trip before our bus was scheduled to arrive in the afternoon. The cave was cool with a lot of scrambling and sliding. There were even some small tunnels for us to squeeze our bodies through and wriggle to freedom.
After that it was onto Franz Josef Glacier to meet up with Laura and Jenny. Was good seeing them again and we arranged to go on a glacier walk the next morning.

Not quite caving
We went out to try and do some caving. Our guide was a cool Ozzie named Mitch who was chatty and had some good banter. Unfortunately the weather was against us and the cave was too flooded for us to get down and scrabble through. So we headed back to base and chilled in the hot tub with some beers. Not much of a day. Just chilling.