After the glacier climbing, we were only too happy to get the hell out of Franz Josef. We looked at the map and saw that Wanaka was 300km away. No problem! 300km at 100 km/h = 3 hours! Sweet action!

Ha ha ha ha ha, we were so foolish. We had forgotten that in NZ, 300km = 3 days of driving. And so we started our journey down the west coast, through valleys and past mountains, and to a scenic vista infested by sandflies. We had some sandwiches as we watched the sun set lazily over our shoulders, and began to be attacked by the little bastards. We killed as many as we could and then continued on, worried about running out of gas.

We got to Haast at about 8pm and everything was closed. We found a petrol station that claimed to be the last for 28km, so we stopped. No one was there, so T was forced to feed cash into the manual paypoint so that we didn’t have to freedom camp in the petrol station car park. I had opened a little window in the back of the car so that the flies could get out, and I proceeded to start a massacre inside the car.

Unfortunately, the petrol station was even more infested than the viewpoint was, and they were swarming in. We spent the next two hours smacking down flies and screaming “All your dreams are dead!” as we checked for blood spurting from our limbs.

Good times.