Profile
Blog
Photos
Videos
As soon as we left Christchurch for the drive north it started to rain, and got worse and worse as we went. Luckily it only took a couple of hours to get to our next stop; Hamner Springs. The roads were much better there too so we didn't feel like we were going to get blown off the side of the road. When we arrived at Hanmer Springs the rain was even worse so we just had to sit in the van until it stopped a bit, then chill out at the campsite. It carried on all night so there wasn't much else to do. The next morning when we woke up the sky had cleared and we could see that we were actually surrounded by mountains. We hadn't noticed that day before as it was so foggy. Once we were up and dressed we left to do the thing that we had come to Hanmer for; go to the thermal springs! As it was such a freezing cold day it was probably the best thing we could have done. The pools are natural thermal pools that are out in the open air in the middle of the town. I found it really hard to make myself get changed into my bikini as it was so cold, but once i jumped into the first pool I was in heaven! We spent about 2 hours there and it was lovely, and the area was full of steam coming off the pools. There were loads of different pools, all different temperatures and sizes. It was really nice and relaxing and we both really enjoyed it. My favourite one was about 36 degrees, but just before we left we thought we would try the hottest one which was a sulphar pool and was over 40 degrees. It was really nice in there, even though the water smelt a bit like eggs, but it was much hotter than I realised and when I got out I nearly fainted! Everything went a bit blurry for a bit, but I was fine after a minute in the cold air.
Once we were dry and dressed we went into the village for some lunch before we carried on on our way. The town itself was really nice and is apparantly a very popular place with the locals for their holidays. We had some nice hot food in the bakery there, and then carried on driving up to Kaikora. The drive up there was really nice as most of it was along the coast or through mountains. The town itself was quite nice too but it was getting late when we arrived so we thought we would leave the exploring to the next day, and just went on the internet. We went to the information centre to ask where the nearest holiday park was, and were told there was a Top 10 Park just up the road. Top 10 Parks are normally really good so we thought we would go there as all the others were out of town. When we arrived the place was a complete dump, and I wasn't sure we had the right one but it was exactly on the map where we had been shown. So we ended up staying there and it was awful. Nothing worked in the kitchen so it took us forever to cook dinner, and the only TV was in the kitchen. It was so cold in there that we just went to bed really early. It was definetly the worst one we had stayed at, and to make matters worse it had started pouring with rain again. We weren't happy!
When we woke up in the morning we the weather was still rubbish so we decided we would just get up and leave as soon as we could. It hadn't stopped raining all night, and our site was just on grass so we got covered in mud when we got out of the van. We had paid for a powered site but the power hadn't worked either so we weren't happy. We had wanted to go for a walk around and see the seal colony as Kaikora is famous for it's wildlife, but we just had lunch and left. We wanted to get out of there! Our next stop was even further north in Nelson and the weather was supposed to ge much nicer there so we drove off as fast as we could. On the way out we drove past the Top 10 park, so we had been in the wrong one after all!
- comments