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We spent two nights in Christchurch first time round, and that was plenty. The middle of town is still cordoned off due to the recent earthquakes and everything else is quite spread out and hard to get to when you don't have a car. The town is starting to get back on its feet and things are re-opening (like the punting on the river) but it is thought that it will take around ten years for it to get back to its former glory. Sadly, at the moment it feels a bit like a ghost town and we ended up spending most of our time at the hostel playing pool, surfing the internet and watching DVDs.
On the 23rd we caught an Intercity bus to Kaikoura, a small coastal town situated next to a beautiful snow-covered mountain range. It is probably the best place we've visited in New Zealand, even before you take the lovely hostel we stayed at into consideration (free baking box, art corner, guitars, board games, tonnes of books, free bikes etc etc, and great people - we didn't want to leave!). We wandered round town the first day before heading back to the hostel for a few games of Upwords and a few drinks.
The next day we tackled the three hour walk around the Kaikoura peninsula, stopping at the fur seal colony along the way to admire them lazily sunbathing and generally being cute. They didn't seem the least bit bothered by humans even though there was no fence and we got pretty close. The walk overall was more strenuous than we anticipated as some of it was uphill but the views were worth it and it's one of the few free things you can do in town! That evening England were playing Romania and New Zealand playing France in the rugby world cup so we were in the pub for the long haul. I'm actually beginning to understand rugby now; it no longer looks like the players are just throwing themselves aimlessly around the pitch and/or at each other.
On Sunday we cycled a few kilometres inland to a small farm where you can feed and pet llamas, alpacas, emus, wallabies, very ugly pigs, a very cute baby deer and tonnes of other farm animals. This was a lot more fun than we expected it to be; you could practically see Jak regressing to his 5 year old self. In the evening we went to the town cinema to watch 'Horrible Bosses' - not because we wanted to see the film but because we wanted to see the cinema! It's tiny and old and still uses a 1940s projector, which meant that halfway through the film the curtains closed on the screen so that the reel could be changed!
The next day we only bloody swam with dolphins!!!!! !!!! :-)) We'd been umming and ahhing over whether to do it because it was quite expensive but I'm so glad we went for it in the end. We were kitted out in wet suits (mine was so tight my feet felt all tingly and in danger of turning blue and dropping off), driven out to the part of the sea where it suddenly gets really deep really quick (Kaikoura's seafloor plummets a few hundred metres offshore) and chucked off the side of the boat when we spotted a dolphin pod. The water was FREEZING, despite the wet suits, but it was amazing to be within touching distance of the animals. Jak made eye contact with a few and swam in circles with them and we both made a spectacle of ourselves by singing loudly down our snorkels in an attempt to grab and hold their attention. Eventually they moved on so we jumped back on the boat to find a new group to swim with. We were probably in the water for around half an hour overall so we were incredibly grateful for the hot chocolate and blankets provided by the skipper. As we turned the boat around and headed back to shore dozens of dolphins followed us, with several skimming the waves at the front of the boat. Amazing.
Yesterday we headed back to Christchurch. Jak swears he felt an earthquake aftershock about 5am this morning as he woke up and the house was shaking but I slept right the way through. We fly to Melbourne this afternoon - a whole new country to explore..!
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