So this will be my last entry from New Zealand as we leave for South America in the morning. Even though i am really excited about having a bit of a culture change again i can't believe how fast this trip has gone!!! Going toooo quick!!!!

Anyway in my last entry i mentioned that we were going to hire a car and have a bit of a girly road trip up to Kaikoura. Well that is exactly what we had...only we could manage to turn a 3 hour drive into a 9 hour one!!! I'm not even exaggerating!

So in the morning we left to pick up our 7 seater from the rental place and then set off on our way. The right way at this point. We then decided to stop at a wine tasting place as NZ is renowned for it's wines and we hadn't been to any winerys yet. The wines were lovely and the gardens of the winery we absolutely beautiful.

After that we set off on our way again- still the right way- to the hot springs we had been told about. However these hot spings which we thought were natural were not. They were man-made and full of familys and fat hairy men and so we decided to skip it and just find somewhere nice to have lunch. This is where we went wrong..

I'm not quite sure where we decided to stop for lunch but where ever it was it wasn't in the direction that we wanted to be going in and so when we set off again we just kept going in that direction without consulting a map...needless to say two hours later we suddenly realised that we hadn't seen a sign for Kaikoura in quite a while and then realised we had very much gone wrong... 2 hours wrong!

So we turned around and set off in (hopefully) the right direction. 3 hours later it was pitch black, we hadn't seen another car/ house/ servise station in donkeys years... and we had already been running on empty for an hour. Isn't this how most horror movies start???

Well, to cut a long story short we got there in the end (Ten o clock at night to be precise- we left at 11am!!!). oops!

The next morning Rosie and Jess headed off to do a bit of whale watching whilst the rest of us went to check out a seal colony. Once we had picked up the girls we stopped at a fresh fish stall at the side of the road for lunch (i had seafood chowder- it was yum) and then headed back to Christchurch. And went the right way!!!!

We stayed in the penthouse of our hostel that night (trust me sounds a lot better than it actually was) and watched movies. The next morning we flew back to Auckland where we are at the mo.

Now we are jus killing time until we leave for South America- i think we are going to meet Jon at the pub tonight who is one of our Mar's bus originals so that should be good!

Laters

x