Hi Guys,

Greetings from 'Windy Welly' (Wellington), NZ's capital. The Kairkora and Abel Tasman blogs will have to be quick unfortunately because parking in town is really expensive and we only have 30 mins left on our ticket!

Dunedin-Kaikora 12th-16th February

The drive up from Dunedin to wildlife rich Kaikora was fairly uneventful, we stopped off for a night at Oamaru and managed to see some blue penguins despite the wind and horizontal rain (It didn't take us long to decide the pub was a better option). The weather was so bad we had to delay getting to Kaikora to whale watch because the planes can't spot the whales in cloud. Instead we stopped off at Hanmer Springs (natural hot springs) and spent a day in 36-41o thermal pools.

Once we were in Kaikora it was well worth it, we went on a dolphin and seal swim for our first day and we were literally surrounded by a pod of 200+ dolphins. The dolphins were jumping, flipping and swimming right up to within touching distance of us.

The next day it was the big event, a whale watching cruise! We were dubious at first because of the weather but beautiful clear skies in the morning were a welcome sight and it went ahead. Usually a cruise only spots 1-2 whales but they were out in force on our day and we spotted 6 sperm whales (on top of 2 Orca's we had seen during the previous day's dolphin swim). The whales were magnificent creatures, they would hang around on the surface for about 5 minutes before diving and poking their tail out of the water at the last moment (made for a good photo).

We left Kaikora pretty speechless after the things we had seen there and headed up to Nelson through the famous Malborough wine region.

Next up was the Abel Tasman national park, north of Nelson….