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We haven't done half as much interesting stuff in the last week or so as in the previous blog but we're gonna tell you all anyway! If you bore easily, find something else to do now! So since the skydive we've held back the spending a little, though we've still done a few pretty cool things. The day after the dive we just chilled out, we were both on a bit of a come down from the high of it possibly. We left for Queenstown the day after that having done what we came to do in Wanaka.
It was quite a short drive to Queenstown but another pretty nice one. Queenstown is the 'adrenaline capital of the world' but that's only if you have a fair whack of money to spend. And after the expense in Wanaka we didn't. So with lots more ahead we decided to be smart and ignore the mad side of Queenstown. Bungy jumping will have to wait for a future holiday. We had a pretty crappy hostel in Queenstown too so that also had a hand in the fact we only stayed 2 nights. We did have pretty amazing burgers both nights in a place called Fergburger which seems to be the most popular place in town! They were awesome, possibly the best burgers we've ever had so they're worth mentioning. We also took a trip up the gondola in the town which gave some pretty amazing views over the Remarkables mountain range which lies across the lake from the town. There was a ride up the top too called the 'luge' which is basically a track of free-wheeling go-karts that use the hillside for acceleration, pretty fun.
So we left after just 2 days and headed for a little town called Te Anau which we used as our base to head out to Milford Sound. The hostel we had there made up for the dive in Queenstown. It was set in the middle of a deer farm and every room was a log cabin with an ensuite and amazing views all around of, guess what, yip, snow capped mountains! They also had a really cosy communal area heated by fires and a free pool table. So that was a nice few nights.
Milford Sound was one of the things we were most looking forward to about New Zealand and it's worth putting a little fact in here before we describe our day there - Milford Sound is one of the wettest places on earth with an average annual rainfall of around 7 metres (metres!) - you can see where this is going. It was a 2 and a half hour drive from Te Anau to Milford and it was possibly the most impressive drive yet, which is saying something. The mountains around us were encased in an early morning fog at the base, and the sun was blazing onto the upper slopes when we set off which made them look awesome. As we started to climb up the slopes though, clouds were descending and once we passed through the also impressive Homer Tunnel, we were right in the middle of them. There were mountains either side of the road, but we couldn't see them at all because of the cloud, though every now and then the clouds would break a little and there'd be steep slopes right at the side of the road. It was weird, and then the clouds opened and it rained all bloody day. So the boat trip around the sound was a bit tainted as the clouds covered the tops of the mountains and we couldn't really make them out but it did make for some pretty moody photos! The sky cleared and the sun came roaring through as we were about an hour away from Te Anau on our way back. Typical eh?
We left Te Anau to head across from the west coast to the east and the city of Dunedin. On the drive we reached a town called Balclutha where we stopped for a photo because as we turned the corner into the town it was a turn that marked the furthest south we'll be on the trip. Every kilometre from that corner now takes us a little closer to home. Isn't that nice! We had another great hostel in Dunedin which Claire especially liked but that was nothing to do with it being called Hogwartz! The atmosphere in Dunedin was pretty cool cos the All Blacks were playing France there 4 days after we arrived in the first of the test series. All the main street shop windows were decorated black and white, the buses flashed up displays saying 'Go Blacks' on the route displays and there were street parties being set up the day before the game. That put us right in the mood for the game we're heading to in Wellington this Saturday!
In Dunedin we visited the Cadbury World Chocolate Factory. Apparently it's the only one in the world still doing tours due to health and safety, but Charlie and the Chocolate Factory it wasn't, though they did have a chocolate waterfall. We learned loads of useless information about the machines on display, how much chocolate is eaten in NZ and the best bit was the smell of chocolate the whole way round. But it wasn't very glamorous or colourful. If they hadn't given us free choc it would've been pants! We also visited the Otago Museum which had a few pretty cool displays but other than that we just chilled out around the hostel. The drives have been pretty tiring as amazing as they have been so we're slowing down a bit now.
We stopped off at a wee town called Oamaru for a night on the way between Dunedin and Christchurch, and this placed is obsessed with penguins. The whole town seems to exist to allow people to see rare penguins. There's penguin crossing road signs everywhere, penguin colonies and the Penguin Club bar. So we spent an hour and a half on Saturday afternoon staked out in a bird watching hut hoping to see some yellow-eyed penguins which are the rarest in the world and so they proved. Not one in an hour and a half. So we jumped in the car and darted round to a managed colony where you can pay $20 to watch a heap of little blue penguins come out of the sea and scuttle across the ground to bed for the night. We were determined to see some penguins in penguin town so we went for it and saw about 30-40 of the wee guys struggling to get out of the strong waves and onto the rocks to go home. Pretty cool actually.
We headed up to Christchurch the next day, just passing through again for one night on our way north. So to make it feel like something a bit different as we'd already spent 5 nights in Christchurch we decided to stay in the Jailhouse hostel which is an old jail which was decommissioned in 1999 and the cells turned into bedrooms. It was a really cool place and still really resembles a prison outside the rooms and also has one cell that has remained unchanged just to show you what it would've been like to be locked up.
The next morning we went into the town square where we had been told by daddy T that there was a plaque worth finding. We found an area which commemorated the first four ships of settlers to arrive in New Zealand and upon one of them was Edward Toomath. Possibly a distant relation to Claire's family it was pretty cool to find the Toomath name so far from home. We had a look around all these plaques for a while and discovered that Christopher Moore was also on board the same ship (spooky... or just weird?). So that was a pretty cool wee way to kill a morning.
After we took off to the Antarctic centre, which is the base for many of the expeditions to the Antarctic. The centre claims to be 'the best in the world' and it was pretty good. It had far too many walls for geeks like us to read in the time we had there and an area for hurt or injured little blue penguins that would not survive in the wild. One of the cool things about this centre was a room you could go into, put on a big warm coat and slide down ice slides, throw snowballs then every half hour or so a summer storm would be simulated with high winds, snow and a wind chill of -18°C. Now that was cold, even though we were layered up. We could easily have spent the entire day here however parking fees meant we were on a limit and we had to make our way to Kaikoura that afternoon at another attempt to go whale watching.
So we're now back in Kaikoura and it seems we have brought the weather with us. The whale watching has been cancelled again due to high winds and it is damn cold outside with the occasional snowy storm. Defiantly a day to stay cosy and get this blog up to date.
8 weeks today until we're home! Where is it all going??!!
Hope all is well, keep phoning us, we've got lots of wet weather ahead to chat to ya all!!
Love Chris and Claire xx
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