New Zealand Travels, Part 3

I will be leaving Queenstown tomorrow morning, heading west towards Milford Sound.  Most tourists coming to Queenstown take a day-trip to Milford Sound.  It's a long day for a 1-day trip because the drive there takes about 5 hours.  In the afternoon we'll take a cruise around Milford Sound.  Instead of coming back to Queenstown the same evening, we are staying at nearby Gunn's Camp, a historic town.  The next morning we head south towards Invercargill/Stewart Island.  Both are at the southern tip of New Zealand.  Stewart Island is as far south as you can go without going to Antartica.  We take the ferry to Stewart Island, and after spending the night there, we take the ferry back to South Island and head back north again to Queenstown.
Then we'll start our journey back "home" to Auckland.

So, who are some of the characters on the second part of the trip?  Again, it's mostly Europeans and this time I am the only American, unless you consider Canadians as North Americans.  Canadians, however, always differentiate themselves from Americans by putting a Canadian flag on their backpacks.  I understand they don't want to be associated with the bad reputation of Americans or get mistaken by the terrorists.
We have 2 drivers on this trip, which is very unusual.  Our regular driver's name is Scratch and our backup driver is Python.  The drivers all have nicknames and these are based on something that they did or associated with.  Python is a young 24-year old, who used to drive for Stray Travel and decided to come back and drive again this summer.  He spent some time studying landscape architecture at Penn State and lived in New York City for a few months.  It's easy for me to talk to him because he knows quite a bit about the US and can relate to what I am talking about.  He grew up in Queenstown so he is very familiar with the area we've been going through the last few days.

3 high-school students studying English in Dunedin, 2 from Germany, 1 from Italy

Python, our backup driver

The group listening to a tour of town of Blackball