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New Zealand part 3 - The South Island & The Bay of Islands
Ok, so I left you in Wellington - a very nice cosmopolitan city with a full on awesome museum. We journeyed across the cook strait to to Picton in the South Island. We spent a night here, and entertained ourselves with the hilariously slow internet in a video store (letters appearing on the screen a good few minutes after they were typed in) and the next morning a really nice walk with beautiful views over the harbour and a secret bay. (well, not actually a secret, but there wasn't anyone else around!)
The next day we journeyed to Nelson, which was the base for one of the highlights of the south island - a walk through Abel Tasman National Park. The Park is a coastal national park famous for its beautiful coast line, and we got a bus out there followed by a boat up the coast line and a walk back. It was a really nice place, but a lot of the walk seemed to be through forest only teasing us with glimpses of the coastline! It was a pretty long walk back took, about 20k, but it was definitely worth it because when you did get a view it was spectactular.
Our journey next took us south to Fox Glacier, where Nisha and I did a full day hike on the glacier. it was amazing! (Mum - don't worry -- this was in a grouup with equipment and everything) Our guide cut out steps into the ice and screwed in ropes for us if it was tricky and we just explored this whole other world! It was incredible! At one point she even set up a rock so we could go down inside a cave that had formed one at a time! It was really cool - (excuse the pun) - will endeavour to find somewhere camera friendly for an upload!
After heading south to Queenstown we flew back to Auckland and headed north to Paihia, in the Bay of Islands. This is fairly far north in New Zealand and we were hoping to swim with some dolphins here but alas no luck. We booked on the cruise and got to see loads - really close up too which was cool, but they couldn't let us swim because they had a young one with them - apparently the young ones need to feed every 3 minutes (!) and if you get in they forget because they'd rather play with you and then they can catch hypothermia!
Finally, a return to Auckland for our flight to Australia!!! (Coming soon!)
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