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My first Overseas Holiday by Tom Dart

It was the day after school finished at the end of term 4 in year 8, and my family and I were at the airport ready to fly to New Zealand for a 3 week holiday. Once we had made it through getting our tickets, and through customs, we headed for the departure lounges. But on the way, my dad decided to get some stupid tax refund on a camera we had bought the previous week, which almost caused us to miss the plane, and in turn made my mum become all stressed and upset. Once on the plane, we had to buy the food because it was jet star and they like to rip you off. So I grabbed a steak pie and sat back and enjoyed the flight.

A couple of hours later, I realised that we were now flying over mountains and open fields, as opposed to the blue Tasman that I had watched for ages. The colours were magnificent. Anyway, we flew for a bit longer and then landed in Christchurch. Once we had rented out a motor home to drive through the whole of the South Island, we found a nice little caravan park to stay in for 3 days. During this time, we had a look through Christchurch and got to see the main sights.

After Christchurch, we started our journey down the cold and wet West Coast of the South Island, usually stopping and sleeping on the side of the road as the motor home allowed us to dot his quite well. After visiting several different towns, we arrived in Queenstown, which for me was probably the highlight of the whole trip. We stayed in a nice caravan park, right next to the mountain that had a great restaurant at the top. But on our first full day, in the morning we had to be ready outside of the caravan park to be picked up by the company that was taking us jet boating down the river that is in Queenstown. They drove us in a four-wheel-drive truck into a hard to reach place known as Skipper's Canyon, where the boats were waiting there.

As well as being an exhilarating experience, we were able to see some places where Lord of the Rings was filmed along different parts of the canyon.

After getting back to the caravan park soon after lunch, we took what's called a 'gondola' up to the top of the mountain with the restaurant. What we found up there as well as the restaurant was a luge track, one of the few in the world. A luge is similar to a billy cart, but you control how fast you go down the track with the handlebars, by moving them towards or further away from yourself. It was so much fun, I think I had three or four goes throughout the afternoon.

It was getting late in the afternoon and our parents surprised us by taking us to the nice restaurant with a view over the whole of Queenstown.

After finishing at Queenstown, we continued on in our motorhome and visited places such as Milford Sound, and Dunedin, where the Cadbury chocolate factory is.

Then, we drove to Picton, caught the Interislander ferry, which takes you across the Cook Strait to the North Island, and continued our journey up through the rest of New Zealand, and finally to Auckland where we eventually caught the plane back to Australia.