!The pictures are in the German version!

My dear friends,

I wish you a merry Christmas and lovely holidays! I can?t believe I made it home safely and on time, since Frankfurt airport was closed completely for a day just when I was having a stopover in Singapore! I am very thankful to be home for Christmas, since I saw flights cancelling there, so that people I saw on the airport are probably now spending these days in Singapore without their family.
So finally, I have enough time and my own computer again to upload the pictures of my travels through New Zealand ? because of my jetlag, I wake up between 4 and 6 am every morning so that I have nothing to do. :-)
All in all, seeing New Zealand was mainly rainy but still very pretty and I had the best fun living in a campervan with 5 friends and 3 surfboards! After 2 rainy days in rather ugly Auckland, we travelled down the Northern Island rather quickly just to get away from the bad weather. After we bought an artificial Christmas tree and decoration for our camper, we started our trip full of excitement for what was to come. Listening to the best off cd of the eagles (one of these nights, you have to love this song: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1yo8pPsZpz0&feature=related), you can imagine we all have memories of seeing thousands of sheep, idyllic landscapes and two crazy Dutch guys who were travelling with us.
So the first night, we found a gorgeous viewpoint in Raglan for wild camping ? obviously we were pretty naïve, since it was too beautiful for wild camping: the next morning, we were woken up by a ranger and had to leave immediately. This never happened to us again, but we still camped at beaches and other nice places.
We had one stop in Hobbiton, where parts of Lord of the Rings have been filmed. After that, we drove to Rotorua, a town with natural ?Hot Spot? with lots of geothermic activity, where you could smell the sulphur. We continued to Te Puia Nationalpark to see Geysirs and hot water springs. Finally, we stopped at one of the hot springs and had a beer in them ? the price we paid later for weeks was the bathing clothes, the towels as well as our entire shower stinking like sulphur. :-)
Our first short hike we had in Tongaririo Nationalpark, which you can see photos of. The much bigger hike we did was at a sunny day in the famous Abel Tasman Nationalpark, where we took amazing pictures of the beach! The walk was a bit above 10 miles and we had no food and almost nothing to drink for 8 hours. The ?reward? we had was Mc Donald?s Angus Burger food at the end of the day ? including a discussion about the quality of Mc Donalds food, and, you cannot believe it, I could not convince the guys of the food being disgusting! I guess that?s the way it goes if you travel with 5 guys.
Throughout our trip, we stopped several times for smaller sights and viewpoints on our way, like the ?Pancake Rocks?, which look like pancake stacks and have been formed like this over time as well as the ?Mirrorlakes?, which mirror their surrounding landscapes perfectly. We have had a lot of time in the camper itself due to the lot of driving we had to do, so I could just enjoy the beautiful landscape, which reminded me of the alps and the largo di garda in Italy a lot, and daydream.
Right before Dani?s birthday, which we wanted to spend doing a day trip to Fox Glacier, it started to rain like crazy ? we even saw how trees went down with it! So our tour was almost cancelled and we would have had to go on without it in order to not miss even further sights, but we got lucky and the rain stopped in the morning. And then, the glacier had been washed blue and cleansed by all the rain water, which made it the perfect experience! Our tour guide created entire steps with his ice axe so that we would not fall on the ice. In between, we got lucky and saw stones as well as ice coming down the glacier, but the tour guide only let us go places that were safe. So all in all, it was an amazing experience. There was also some sort of special mud on the glacier, which is good for your skin, so as poor backpackers of course we put it all over our faces and looked pretty ridiculous! The tour was a lot of fun and since we visited the private Fox Glacier instead of the commercial Franz Joseph Glacier, we were mainly the only group on the ice.
In Wanaka, we visited the ?Puzzle World? museum with all kinds of optical illusions, as you can see on the pictures.
In between, the guys climbed on the roof of our camper to take 360 degree pictures with Dani?s tripod, so I uploaded these really amazing pictures for you as well!
Besides a ship cruise on Milford Sounds, where you can enjoy huge waterfalls in a foggy atmosphere, we went to see Mount Cook as well, doing a hike plus we went to Queenstown twice. There you can do the craziest sports, like bungee jumping and skydiving, which originates there, and you can do the world?s biggest swing as well! As you know me, I just enjoyed partying with the guys, not spending any money on terrifying myself with my fear of heights! A few pictures you see of Lake Pukaki, which is so turquoise on the pictures just as in reality. It is truly amazing how many beautiful pictures we have taken in these weeks without even ever having to edit them at all!
After 2 weeks of rain and a rather pale tan on our faces, we immediately burned in the sun when sleeping for an hour next to Mount Cook ? if it ever does not rain in New Zealand, the sun is really strong and intensive.
Unfortunately, only the first row of pictures is really in chronological order, after that I have pictures from other cameras, but I have titeled them for you, so enjoy!
In case I wake up so earlier tomorrow again, I can upload my last pictures of Melbourne and Sydney, since I made one old dream come true ? I saw the Great Ocean Road including the 12 Apostels, a famous rock formation!

After this, this blog will end, since I have no budget left to travel at all and next to my student job in Düsseldorf from January onwards, I will find myself a proper job for a master graduate and return to real life :-). However, the last 4 months have been unforgettable and I made many crazy experiences, which I would have normally never dared to make! I can only recommend everyone to take some time off after studies and travel ? just watch out you don?t get too addicted and never come back ;-)

I hope you are having awesome holidays with your families,

Yours Judy