Some of you have started following us because of our portrait work. Some of you joined us when we were on a pretty amazing adventure a couple of years ago. For those of you who don’t know, Gareth and I spent 17 months traveling in 2011 and 2012. We never finished sharing our shenanigans, and one of our goals for 2014 is to finish up that chapter of our story.

Welcome to Travel Tuesdays. Every Tuesday we will feature a travel story. I cannot guarantee they will be in order. I can’t guarantee you will see the same country every week. But it will be personal, wonderful, silly, fun.

If you you want to check out some of our other travel stories, we would be honoured! You can find them here.

Let’s begin, shall we?

Stewart Island is the third island of New Zealand. The one a lot of foreigners don’t know about. Gareth and I had heard great things about it, so we had decided we needed to check it out.

We left Bingo the Bongo van (our home for the year we lived in New Zealand) parked at a home we had camped at the night before we caught the ferry to the island. Taking a car across is an astronomical price and given that there are only about 20km worth of roads, frankly pointless, so we stayed in the YHA on Stewart Island and used our own steam to get around. That was the whole point of heading somewhere for a hike after all.