Having run down my five must do’s on the North island of New Zealand, it only seems fair to address the south island as well.

We spent two months touring the south island in the late Autumn of this year, going from the very top to the very bottom and pretty much as many places in between as possible, and left just as the island was encased in the grip of a seriously frosty Antarctic blast. Lucky us!

The south island differs greatly from the north island. It is less densely populated for starters, and is home to the quite phenomenal southern alps, a mountain range which runs down the entire island and boasts a number of seriously spectacular peaks – dwarfing anything that the north island has to offer.

It is also home to stunning beaches, rainforests, glaciers, and New Zealand’s largest national park. Lots therefore to see and do on any trip! Here are five of my most favourite destinations from that two month trip that no visit to the south island should be without!

I recently had the strange pleasure of visiting a large festival in Germany. Unlike most visitors to Germany at the moment though, this didn’t involve giant jugs of beer and lederhosen, rather, it was a more science based affair.

How intellectual of me, you are probably thinking. And you would probably be right, although any man who turns down the opportunity to wander around giant bits of machinery with accompanying red buttons and warning signs that you can’t read should be questioning their status of manliness.

The festival in question, from what I could glean, was mostly about space, and also about planes, mostly of the planes-that-help-in-space-research variety. It took place in a very large and very barbed wire surrounded facility that was home to a great many machines that clearly did very interesting things, given the number of wires and buttons that were attached to them, and the length of their names in German. German not being a language that is afraid of a nice long word.

The entire Lord of the Rings trilogy, as imagined by Peter Jackson in the film adaption of the books, serves as a highly effective tourism advert for New Zealand.

Having seen all the films, and being a bit of a Tolkien fan, it was inevitable that New Zealand would make it onto my list of places I must visit.

And so it happened that I spent a year travelling around New Zealand in 2010/2011

I wanted to visit as many of the real life locations from the films as I could, both because they looked stunning in the films, so should look stunning in real life, and because, well, I’m a bit of a geek.

In today travel blogging tips interview I am delighted to be interviewing Todd of Todd’s Wanderings.

Todd has been traveling for over ten years, combining his love of travel with his work as a conflict resolution and human rights expert. He has lived in Japan, Thailand, Timor Leste, Sri Lanka, and currently spends much of his time in Kosovo.

As well as his travel blog, Todd runs the Travel Blog Challenge – a community driven effort to help fellow travel bloggers.

Today Todd talks about monetization, balancing traveling and blogging, and what success means to him in terms of his travel blog. On with the interview!

After just about a year in New Zealand, we have now returned to Germany. To be honest, being in Germany isn’t that much different from being New Zealand.

Well ok, the mountains aren’t quite as stunning, the buildings are definitely older and there is a somewhat greater headcount, but overall going from one developed country to another isn’t a major culture shock. I just have a sturdier roof over my head.

In fact, in some ways, Germany is more of a foreign place than New Zealand to me because of the language barrier. Luckily, insanely cheap beer is one of the ways that Germany differs from New Zealand, and beer is a fabulous way to conquer any language barrier.

We’re living back in the house we left a year ago. This is in itself very much like living in a hostel in New Zealand – full of friendly people who all speak German. (If you’ve not visited New Zealand or Australia recently, you may not have realised that roughly 80% of all travellers appear to be German. You’d think this would mean Germany is empty, but it turns out not to be the case).

A year in New Zealand gave me plenty of time to visit quite a lot of this spectacular country.

Due to New Zealand’s handily compact nature though, you don’t need as much as a year to get to see most of the splendour on offer.

If I was visiting New Zealand’s North island, and didn’t have all the time in the world, then these would be the places and things that I would absolutely want to visit.

Here are my five highlights of the North Island, from my year in New Zealand. I hope you enjoy it - a south island version is also available!

For nearly a year now I have been travelling around New Zealand. That’s what all those posts about New Zealand have been about, in case you were wondering.

I’ve been travelling as a twosome, with my ever patient other half, who has allowed me to visit a lot of, quite frankly, odd locations. But a third member of our troupe was ever present, always reliable, always patient, always cosy.

I am of course talking about Bernie, our van. She started off her life with us as just a four wheeled pile of metal who seemed to be a little more mossy on the inside than you might expect (turned out she used to belong to a gardener), but who with some very careful ministrations, became our home.

Despite conveying us nearly twenty thousand kilometres around New Zealand, on surfaces varying from good solid seal to ice covered grit and every form of gravel in between (for some reason Kiwis refer to gravel as metal. I have no idea why), she never let us down. We didn’t suffer so much as a flat tyre in our whole trip. At her services we always received tremendous thumbs up from the grease coated mechanics, who reported that she was a solid little van.

Not that she was that little. At just a little over five metres in length, she was, if not “spacious”, at least roomy. There was space in her for a gigantic double bed, plus a chest of drawers. When it rained, we could shelter inside her and cook, without the hassle of playing around with tarpaulins and other such complicated nonsense. She was also the only travellers van I have ever seen to come equipped with a gorgeous, if highly impractical, cream shag pile carpet.

We slept in her by beaches, at the foot of mountains, by rivers and by seas. In sub zero temperatures at the foot of Mount Cook, and almost warm temperatures on the Coromandel. When things turned a little sour in Rotorua, she got us out of town with dignity and composure. She was always there for us, and we really loved her for it.

And now, trip over, the inevitable has had to happen. Bernie is gone. On to new adventures, with new people. To greet new horizons. To be home to… someone else.

The good news is that the new owners are terribly nice people. They even liked the name Bernie, so Bernie she has remained. I’m sure they’re going to be very happy with her, as we were.

So thanks Bernie, for all the good times, and all the memories. You’ll be missed.