Update: **For those of you who have not been reading the full posts (we completely understand) you may have missed our photos page which has heaps more photos than are on this post. Head to our Week 3 InFocus page for a look at even more photos related to the post below!**

We realize it’s been a while but time is flying by! We are now on to our second continent and second city in Asia: Chiang Mai second country in Asia: Laos and hopefully on to Siem Reap, Cambodia later today. We have been working on updates but internet is still that unreliable, or reliably slow and unreliable, however you want to look at it, that we are just now getting to our third post. Oddly enough the most reliable and high speed internet we’ve had lately (which is why this post is getting out) is from the tiny Luang Prabang International Airport where we are waiting for our flight that was unbeknownst to us delayed 3 hours. Side note about travelling in Asia: flights are often delayed or cancelled and they will not contact you for either. You have to either continually check online (if their website works), call in before heading to the airport (if their lines aren’t busy and they’re actually in the office that day or hour), or simply show up at the airport to find out whether or not you’ll be on your scheduled flight. A definite difference from flying in the US or Europe but then again the Asian airlines seem to treat their customers a bit better after they’ve boarded (looking at you United Airlines) – we even got an unexpected free meal on our 1.5 hour flight from Singapore to Bangkok!

In this week’s adventures we left Auckland, yet again, to revisit the South Island and actually get outside of Queenstown. New Zealand can hardly be done in one month and you’d be very hard pressed to do either island well in a single month. With a limited amount of time planned for New Zealand in our overall ‘plan’ we tried to pick out a few areas that would be a good tasting of what the South Island has to offer for when we come back! In the last post we landed back in Queenstown and drove south to Te Anau, our home base for a couple of days exploring the Milford ‘Sound’ area. Here is the rest of the South Island and our trip back north to Auckland before leaving for Australia.