What do they eat, when they can't get hobbit?

Those sixty seconds falling through the air I can safely say were the best sixty seconds of my life. I had expected to be scared. I had had expected to be terrified. At the least I had expected a hint of apprehension. It never came.

Amy and I are in the first group to go up, since we are jumping the highest. Waiting to board I am somewhere between disbelief and unbelievable excitement. My tandem master (the man I will be strapped to) is friendly and funny and keeps joking about death. “If we part mid-air I'll meet you back here,” he tells me. I think they know whether you're nervous or excited and act accordingly. We board the plane and once we're in the air the scenery is just too beautiful to leave time for any feeling but wonder.

We circle upwards from the ground and mountains unfurl around us. It is the most beautiful day we've had so far. The sky is the purest blue, reflected perfectly in Lake Wakatipu below, and the grey sands of the River Isen trace a familiar pattern through the end of the valley. Of course it is not really the river Isen, it's the Dart River. I can but dream.

Enough of MiddleEarth. As we draw higher we can see further and further. Mount Aspiring shows itself, the tallest and grandest in this part of New Zealand, then Mitre Peak and Milford sound where we were the day before. Beyond them the Tasman sea paints a strip of darker blue below the endless sky. As we approach the fifteen thousand feet we will jump from my tandem master points to the North. There, beyond the countless snowy heights that form the bottom of the Southern Alps, protrudes a great flat peak. Even from this distance, one hundred and twenty three miles away, is it august and imposing. Aoraki, or Mount Cook, the highest mountain in New Zealand. There could never be enough time to take in the beauty I am surrounded by. However much time there is, it is soon over, it is time to jump.

Crammed into the tiny plane there is barely room to move. There is only just enough room for the six of us; three tandem masters with three expectant travellers strapped to their chests. We are in a line, sitting on each others laps, and I am at the front. He slides open the huge clear door and swings one leg over. I swing mine over to join his. There is not even time to think. We tip forwards.

This is a moment I will savour for a very long time. I cannot describe the feeling of leaving the plane. It is simply amazing. There is no feeling of peril or impending death. Apart from the fact that you are strapped to someone who does this up to ten times a day, who just to get the job had to have done it a thousand times already. Apart from the fact that you are more likely to die driving to work. Apart from the fact that you are more likely to drown when going fishing. Apart from all that, you are just too far away from the ground to feel any danger. You may as well not be moving, nothing looks like it's getting closer to you. You are suspended in a bright world of light and air.

That makes it sound calm and quiet. It is neither. If I wasn't so excited I could see that it could possibly be quite calm. Quiet? Never. The wind rushes and howls past me in an endless roar, but I barely notice it. There is too much to see, too many places to look. Every direction holds a wonder the like of which I have never seen. It is simply unlike anything I have ever experienced. Yes, you see similar views from planes, but that is like comparing stepping in a puddle to diving into an icy lake. True you get wet in both scenarios, but only one is immediate and arresting, in only one are you completely submerged and surrounded, only one do you experience with ever sense you possess.

It is over before I have time to take it in. The wind stops and the noise cuts away. The parachute opens and everything becomes still. At five thousand feet I am still too far away from the ground to notice its approach. We glide over the lake, still high from the free-fall, and do some spins and loops before soaring over the heads of those waiting on the ground and coming to a land directly in the middle of the landing zone.

The second I touch the ground I want to be up there again. I want to relive the moment of tipping over the edge and being transported into a clear realm of infinite marvel . I would do it every day if I had the money.

On the journey back, as on the journey there, I gaze out the window at this paradise I have landed in. New Zealand has never looked more beautiful than it does today. Lake Wakatipu is crystal clear. The mountains are reflected in the perfect glass below them and they rise up and down into oceans of eternal cerulean. White caps blaze like beacons in the afternoon sunlight. We arrive back into Queenstown and lie in the baking sun with some friends we made in our hostel. It is one of those moments you wish could last forever. Sun, friends, conversation and, of course, beer.

Missing the thrill of skydiving we take a plunge in the glacial waters of Wakatipu. The water steals our breath and numbs our limbs. It is a case of jumping off the pier and swimming back to shore as fast as possible to warm up once more in the fading sun.

The next day we get the bus to Wanaka. Or we try to. Amy and I, along with six other people, are all told the wrong bus stop to go to from our bus service. The bus driver, upon arriving at the only other bus stop in Queenstown and finding eight booked passengers missing doesn't think to check our stop (which is about thirty seconds around a corner) in case there had been a mix up, he just leaves. We go to check the other stop but it is too late and he has already gone. We have to spend an extra thirty five dollars on a local bus ticket instead. This bus had also just left but the man at the office phones the driver and she kindly turns around to come back and pick us up.

Half way over the highest pass in New Zealand our bus brakes down and we have to wait for a recovery vehicle. Unfortunately we are in the clouds so don't get the magnificent views I'm sure surround us.

The highlight of Wanaka is undoubtedly Puzzling World. It starts with a not hugely inspiring collection of optical illusions and an admittedly very fun slanted house. After this though is The Great Maze!! We have all of the fun trying to reach the four coloured towers in the order specified. It takes us almost an hour and we end up visiting certain parts of the maze altogether too many times. Don't even mention the yellow tower to me.

On our second day we go for a walk along the edge of Lake Wanaka and up a hill beside the town. Although probably the smallest lake we've encountered so far it is still larger, by quite a long way, than anything in the U.K.; almost three times the size of Loch Lomond and deeper than Loch Ness. Across its waters we can just see Mount Aspiring behind a row of imposing peaks. Nestled between the two is the Rob Roy glacier, one of hundreds on the island.

Glaciers are our next port of call. We will be visiting the townships of the Fox and Fraz Josef glaciers on the West coast. Fox, at over eight miles long, is one of the larger glaciers in New Zealand and is the location of my first ever glacier trek.

The town itself is tiny. It consists of hostels, hotels and motels along with a petrol station, a couple of pubs and the Foz Glacier centre. We arrive at the centre in the morning and are quickly fitted with boots and crampons and warned about rock falls, avalanches, floods and tidal surges before we are on our way. The sides of the Fox Glacier valley are sheer, I can see where the glacier has carved them away. The floor of the valley is a great layer of rubble and dust, grey water wends its way through to the sea. The tops of the hills to either side are covered in the verdant green of rainforest that crawls its way downwards and tails off into steep rocky faces or the great swathes of debris that mark a rock fall.

Rock falls and land slips are extremely common in this kind of landscape. These hills and cliffs, gouged into shapes they would never have otherwise taken, have been supported by ice for thousands of years. When that ice is removed they become unstable and crumble away day by day. The valley we walk down not so long ago was full to the brim with gleaming blue ice.

A few hundred years ago the glacier came down almost to the town itself, and our entire path would have been under hundreds of meters of ice. During this time the glacier underwent a huge retreat, year by year it melted until one hundred years ago when it was even smaller than today. From then if had a brief growth spurt and ploughed its way down the valley once more. We see a photo from 2009 and it is a completely different place, the glacier extends down into the valley where now we cannot even see it. In the last five years though it has been melting at a viscous rate and soon it will be the smallest it has been since humans settled here.

None of this, although achingly sad, changes the fact that it is still a wonderful sight. We reach the point were we will descend onto the glacier itself and it stretches through the valley before us. It is hulking and huge. The front of it looks relatively smooth (appearances can be deceiving), but further up it becomes cragged and pitted. Great crevasses show themselves as distant cracks. In the summer, as now, when the glacier is melting quicker it is covered in rocks and dust (or rock flour) that gathers on the top as it melts. During the winter it is clean and white and after rainfall is said to gleam blue in the morning light, the compressed ice reflecting the suns light with a wintry glow.

We enter a world of ice and what appeared small from the viewpoint above reveals itself to be vast from up close. Our guide carves steps into the ice before us and we visit caves and moulins in the ice. A moulin is a hole where a stream on the surface finds a weak point in the ice and drops into its glacial depths. These start as narrow tunnels winding through the blue and can grow to great caves or caverns, eventually revealing themselves to the world above. The glacier changes every day. We visit a small cave, just big enough to stand in hunched over. There a small tunnel stretching out the far side, no more than a foot wide. Our guide takes note of it, soon he says he will be able to take groups walking right the way through.

Whenever we descend from the surface we see the beauty that is frozen within this ice. It is as the guides say, blue. It is the blue of Lake Wakatipu, the blue of the frigid streams we have seen pouring from the mountainsides. It is a colour we do not get at home. In this country I can be presented with a landscape and everything I see has been lifted straight from Great Britain. Then with one glance at a river I see that I am nowhere I know. For the water is infused with the clear frozen blue of a glacier.

We stop for lunch. Amy and I have prepared ourselves some couscous, of course. What would you think to eat on a glacier other than couscous? We continue up the glacier until we come to a great broken wall of ice. The glacier here is flowing down a steep hill while turning a tight corner. This breaks and tears it apart and reveals huge crevasses and fissures in its surface. We unfortunately can go no further without the use of more equipment so we must turn around, I am surprised by how high we have climbed. We make our way back past crystal falls that seems to freeze and meld into the ice as they flow over, under and through it. All too soon it is over and we must return through the valley of dust, through the rainforest, to our hostel. The next day we go for a walk around yet another lake, thought this one is more of a large pond, before catching the bus to Franz Josef. We attempt to hitchhike while waiting for the bus but no one is biting. We tried this once (successfully) in Australia to get to a supermarket. It's always worth a shot.

Amy and I are camping now. Many hostels let you camp in their gardens and still use all the facilities, for a discounted rate of course. Anything to save money. Our hostel in Franz Josef finds us camping two feet from the edge of the rainforest. We are reminded just how close we are at five a.m. every morning when whatever ridiculous bird life lives nearby decides it is time to wake up. Whatever they are they make the strangest noises I have ever heard from a bird (apart from the Kukooburra's in Australia; they sound like howler monkeys on a particularly bad day). These ones sound like an experiment in electro-pop. They are mechanical and computerised. They start at five a.m. and continue until about twenty past six when the normal birds start to sing. For three days I do not get an ounce of sleep between these times. The calls penetrate earplugs. They even penetrate my noise-cancelling in-ear headphones while playing my music with the volume turned up. I recorded them but the phone unfortunately can't pick up the most electronic sounding ones of the bunch.

We visit the Franz-Joseph glacier and are presented with the same scenes as at Fox. A wide grey valley, rainforest peering over the edge, snowy mountains looming in the distance. Walking through what could be an endless grey wasteland is slightly disconcerting. It feels like the desolation of some great beast, a dragon perhaps? Something so terrible that no life will dare approach. Of course it is just that life has not had the time to establish itself. You can see it begin though, it starts with a red algae that grows over the rocks. Then comes pale green lichens and rich dark moss before the broom and other shrubs and finally the trees and endless variety of life of the forest.

On our second day in Franz we go for a walk into the hills, it takes us to a tunnel carved through the mountainside, built to pump water through the tunnel to supply gold mining operations. It is just big enough to stand in and runs for about five hundred meters through the earth. Icy water flows through it at ankle depth and we wade through the darkness with our fading torches providing a scant light. Amy turns back but I want to make it to the end. I continue on alone and glowworms dot the ceiling. I turn off my light and am plunged into utter darkness, tiny blue lights burn unwavering all around me. They could almost be far off stars, blazing with the fierce blue of the newly born, if it weren't for their steady light, devoid of the flicker that identifies a star.

Out the far side of the tunnel is a small wooden walkway clinging to the side of the hill. Slightly ahead it returns into the earth but I am blocked by a wooden barrier. I head back, feeling my way though the dark and the water, with no company but the glowing points of light above me.

We make our way though ancient mossy woodland and come to a gorge where steel grey water carves its way through the pale rock. We decide to return along the river instead of going back the way we came, The edge of the water is littered with pieces of dead tree, fallen from the cliff-tops as their bases crumble under them. They are strewn across the rocks like a scene of destruction, providing the only colour in a world of broken grey. You do not need colour for beauty.

In total we spend five nights between the towns of Fox and Franz, much more than we had originally planned. We probably would have only spent two or three days here if the buses had not forced us otherwise. It turned out to be a welcome break. In Australia, especially near the end we were in such a rush. Every day we were in a different place and every morning we had to rise in time for our next bus. New Zealand so far has been much more relaxed, we have been spending more time in each place and, best of all, getting to lie in! I am sure it won't last. In a weeks time you'll find me once more getting up at six each morning to catch the next bus.

It is always a shame to leave a nice hostel, and this one was no exception. Free soup, free breakfast, free wifi, run by a lovely couple with a new baby girl, and with a wonderful wood burning stove ideal for passing hours in front of with a book (or patching ALL your clothes with your new sowing kit). Not to mention it was the cheapest accommodation we've come across so far. But leave we must and leave we do. We have tickets booked for the trans-alpine railway crossing to Christchurch, supposedly one of the best railway journeys in the world.

The one thing I will not miss will be the sand flies. They are tiny and awful and painful. The West Coast has been full of them, I sat down to start writing this outside my hostel and within two minutes had to make a mad dash inside because I was covered. Funnily enough we are close to scenes where Aragorn and the hobbits were filmed being eaten alive by midgies. Oh what I would give for mere midgies! Where midgies pierce your skin these knobheads stretch it apart then cut in with their mandibles, covering the whole area in their saliva,  is packed full of anti-coagulant. Anyway Merry, in answer to you question, they eat me and Amy. Especially Amy.

With only one week left in South Island and then what will no doubt be an extremely hectic two weeks in North Island I am starting to feel the end approaching and it is coming all to soon.

I have nothing bold or dramatic to end with today. No jumping out of a plane, no new countries, no insights or personal revelations, not even any songs that have struck me recently. All I know is that Amy and I our treating ourselves to a pizza in Christchurh tonight and it's all I've been thinking about all week. It will be the first time I've eaten outside a hostel since Sydney. I can't wait.