Happy birthday your majesty!

Thursday 2nd June

As I am sure that all of you are no doubt aware, this coming Monday is the Queens birthday.

What's that you say, do you mean you had no idea?

Well hang your head in shame!

How old is she you ask?

Hmm yes I believe she will turn eleventy seven.

OK yes, I hold my hands up, I too had absolutely no bloody idea when the queens birthday was either but that was before, when I was doing silly things like living on the same piece of land as she was.

Now that I am12000 miles away however it is literally drummed into our brains every single time we turn on the radio, watch TV or pick up a newspaper.

And get this, the country has the day off, they get to lounge around in their boxer shorts watching queen like quality entertainment all day why you poor suckers back in the UK have to work your little weiners off.

If for some reason they did feel like pulling their idle bodies away from the picture box for a few hours and heading down to the local shops they would be spoilt for choice as literally every single store has a blow out sale to celebrate someone that probably only visits them once a decade.

That basically sums up the entire country for me, everyone is so bloody nice that when our queenie visited long ago and asked them if they would be so kind as to worship her, they made bloody well sure that they did a top notch job of it and they do that for everything else too, they just go the extra mile.

They are also exceedingly proud of the indigenous history of the country and celebrate the Mouri culture at every possible opportunity and this got me thinking.

In Australia they have real issues with aborigines, there is hardly any integration with the indigenous communities and very little acceptance of local cultures yet fundamentally the two diverse groups are pretty similar.

So my theory is this, the reason that the aborigines have had little success integrating where their distant cousins have been widely adopted is that they lacked a cool dance.

OK, so it may not be the most scientific of theories but if you think about it there is some substance, everyone is familiar with the native Maori dance but I would bet that most people would struggle to name anything significant about aborigines.

If their ancestors could have pulled off a passable robot or hula then perhaps we would have been looking at a very different environment indeed.

Anyway there I go again off on a complete tangent so I had better get back to actually updating you on what we have been doing I suppose.

Well, having given up completely on the whole Billy Connelly itinerary as he was far more energetic than us, we limped through the remainder of the south island.

We visited Milford sound ,which ranks in the top 5 must see destinations and to be honest we were all a bit underwhelmed, having seen so much incredible scenery during our time here it would have had to have gone some to blow us away and frankly it really didn’t.

We were fortunate enough to have arrived on a completely clear day which apparently was a bit of an achievement, it seems that with an average of 258 days of rainfall its either raining, about to rain or cloudy.

We took a cruise out through the sound and whilst it was extremely pleasant it was much like the remainder of the country which meant that Tyler was mostly playing the DS and I was mostly snapping hundreds of blurry pictures that will never see the light of day.

They did park the ship beneath one of the waterfalls for a while which gave Tyler the opportunity to get completely drenched and me the opportunity to come dangerously close to breaking another camera.

Following that we put our foot down and hammered back up the coast to Christchurch, this time actually driving around the CBD and witnessing the devastation that has been caused by the recent earthquakes.

Whole sections of the centre were closed and the damage was apparent in the majority of the city, yet there was an underlying sense of community spirit, everywhere you looked their were fund-raising activities still being organised and donation boxes on every spare centimetre of worktop.

I have no doubt that within a year or so it will be business as usual for the community but because this is New Zealand they will ensure that something good comes from the destruction and you can bet your bottom dollar that they will do it beautifully.

Whilst in Christchurch we visited the Antarctic centre which was cool and probably the nearest we will ever get to the real thing, they had a staged snow storm which consisted of no snow but plenty of wind chill and brought the temperature down to a toasty -18 degrees.

Not that Tyler would have noticed , he was too busy bouncing off the walls and sliding down the ice slide with reckless abandon as if it were a seaside resort, it seemed that the colder they made it the more accelerated his actions because until I was vaguely aware of a blurry form whizzing past.

They also had a really cool caterpillar 4 wheel drive snow mobile thing that they drove you around in on a custom off road course which was cool, all of the fit peoples boobs bounced and all of the fat peoples bellies bounced as you were hurled viciously from side to side and floor to ceiling.

Unfortunately there wasn’t a lot of boob bouncing on our side of the cab which is a very good indication that our diet hasn’t been overly successful as yet and probably contributed to the unstoppable tank breaking down mid course.

From Christchurch we headed straight up the coast to Picton where we caught the ferry across to Wellington, the single most expensive journey we have done so far, it cost an absolute arm and a leg and made us realised that we are merely paying a fortune to courier a motor home from Christchurch to Auckland for the rental company.

Upon arrival in Wellington we met a family of like minded crazy people who had also packed up their lives and wandered around the world with their kids, however they had 4 so it kind of put us to shame!

It was great because Tyler had kids to play with and we had adults to talk to and believe me after only having Pauline to converse with for the past 8 months, talk we did, in fact we didn’t shut up and I think they were a little glad when we finally parted ways.

Wellington also made us realise that it was pointless to just drive constantly without really spending any time anywhere so we completely changed our plans and decided to spend multiple days in fewer places.

This gave us the opportunity to visit the fantastic Ta papa museum which is absolutely massive and full of interactive exhibits associated with New Zealand, we literally spent an entire day wandering around poking things and cooing in admiration.

We have now made it up to Lake Taupo a place for adrenaline junkies, hiking enthusiasts and of late rather rotund English families who want to have a lazy few days.

So far we have not done sky diving, bungy jumping, Arctic hiking, high wire trapeze, jet boating, kayaking, the climbing wall or the giant swing across the canyon and if we play our cards right we may even be able to avoid them by the time we leave too.

I am normally up for anything but being here and finally having a chance to relax has taken its toll on me to the point where I don’t want to do anything other than sit around in my boxer shorts and prepare to watch queen like entertainment on the picture box.