We were there just long enough to see its pretty facade pockmarked by the fatal stabbing of a taxi driver. True to form, the locals were genuinely shocked. Murders just don't happen in Christchurch, they told us. Within days, a substantial fund had been raised for his widow and their five children.

An easy southbound drive from the rental company in Christchurch led us to Dunedin (the Gaelic for Edinburgh), a quirky, medium-sized town with a particularly impressive Flemish Renaissance train station, plenty of Victorian and Edwardian architecture and, of all things, the steepest street in the world.

We couldn't make it to the top in the campervan, so we parked and walked it, and received a NZ$2 hand-written certificate to say so from an enterprising local. Andy hoped to make it to the Scottish shop to get his fix of Haggis, while I was looking forward to a tour of Cadbury World, but we ended up missing both, having become captivated by the town's corkscrew coastal drives and losing track of time.

Milford Sound, of course, is New Zealand's premier pin-up star. Coming all this way and missing out is like going to New York and not even bothering to look upwards at the Empire State building. We nearly didn't get to it, since the long and winding road that takes you there terminates there too, making it very out of the way indeed.

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But we decided to go for it, crossing the island from east coast to west, in order to arrive on the same day. The incredible scenery - meadows cloaked in pastel-coloured lupins with snow-capped mountains for a backdrop - added almost a full hour to the journey, due to obligatory photography pit stops.

This meant we reached Milford at sunset, too late to see anything of the sound itself, but just in time for the ravenous west coast sand flies to attack us as we cooked our spaghetti bolognese in the back of the van.

Next morning, we awoke to a downpour, which meant we saw even less of the sound than we had at sunset, and had to turn around and drive the two hours back to the main highway. Yet it wasn't a wasted journey. The drive to Milford was my favourite of the tour, and the place has an eerie sense of peace I don't often experience.

What's more, the curious, cheeky Kea birds that gather along part of the route, and practically chat to you when you pull over to photograph them, are worth a few hours driving alone.

Turned out, the weather was against us everywhere else too. Queenstown, world capital of extreme sports, was viewed from behind an overworked set of windscreen wipers. Adrenaline-junky Andy had to cancel the heart-stopping 134m bungee jump he had planned for the following day.

I can't say I was very sorry about that, being the sort of person who would need to be drugged, blind-folded and then pushed in order to experience a bungee jump. We compensated for our lack of heart-racing excitement with a helicopter tour over the Franz Josef and Fox glaciers - an unforgettable experience, not least for the pilot's kamikaze sense of humour.

By the time our rental company had inspected and approved our returned camper van, we had some intriguing news from up north. Andy's brother Douglas had just arrived in Blenheim, at the heart of Marlborough wine country, where he and his Czech girlfriend Jana are to spend a few months working on the vines.

And so, on Christmas eve, surrounded by family and new friends, sporting Santa hats and sipping on mulled wines, we made our decision. To be honest, we were both exhausted from being constantly on the move, pre-armed with temporary working visas and keen to gather some spare pocket money for the final leg of our trip, South America. So we postponed our flights to Santiago by a month.

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