The next day was the 20th of June, Mel's 23rd birthday!! I had managed to convince her that I wasn't prepared at all, and would have to buy her a card and present in Queenstown. Little did she know I'd sneakily bought her a card and presents in Christchurch while she was getting her hair done. So that morning I got up and made her breakfast in bed: sausages, scrambled eggs, hash brown, fried bread and toast! Then we headed into town and found a campsi...

It was going to take us 2 hours to cross the pass to Milford so it was another early morning start, and the fog was down! We could hardly see a 100ft infront of us! About an hour into our drive we came to a tunnel going through the mountain. The Homer Tunnel is a 1.1km tunnel that was dug by 5 men with picks, shovels and wheel barrows. Not surprisingly, it took them 18 years whole to complete! Driving through it you could tell it was dug by hand, it was rather ...

We woke up early the next morning to the crashing sea on the beach behind us. It was about 7.30am and it was still dark outside. I could just see the shapes of a couple of seals playing in the surf. Today was planned to be a big day. We were going to go and see the Purakanui Falls, Jack's Blowhole which is a 55m blowhole where the waves shoot out of the top of it, then we were going to Cannibal Bay, where it was possible to see Elephant seals. Unfortunatly th...

Feeling a little lazy and just because we can, we had a lie in and didn't leave the campsite till around 10.30am. We were still on the way to Dunedin today for the chance of some more penguin spotting and a bit of nightlife. Along the way the radio told us about the Moeraki Boulders, which are calcite formations strewn along the beach. They are made similar to a pearl, just a piece of rock, bone or wood where calcium has built itself up over millions of year...

We came to the town of Oamaru, and the radio piped up about nearby penguin colony, which was a must-see for Mel! We detoured to the beach and went penguin spotting. We never actually saw any, but we did see a very large fur seal making its way out the sea and chilling on the beach for the night. There are other places to see penguin colonies down the coast so hopefully we will spot some further down. By this time the sun had gone down, so we thought we'd bet...