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Crossing To The South Island
Craig recovered from receiving a summons and we somehow navigated our way through Wellington to return our hire car and catch a ferry across the Cook Strait to Picton on the South Island. Because of the geography of Wellington and Picton it turned out that we were actually travelling northwards to get to the South Island which was quite strange. The crossing was pretty choppy but had gorgeous views of the narrow channels of the Marlborough Sounds. It is on that journey that we encountered the worst hot chocolate ever; disgusting stale water for only $2.50! We picked up another hire car (white this time, the last ones were blue) and set off along SH 1 (which we had stayed on for all of the North Island and would continue on until it ended at the bottom of the South Island) towards Kaikoura, stopping at a couple of beaches and Ohau Point, the South Island’s largest seal colony where we saw dozens of seals.
Whale Watching (sort of)
In our guide book, Kaikoura sounded like a pretty town completely taken over by tourism; it’s the whale watching capital of New Zealand and quite possible the World) and I didn’t expect to like it very much. In reality it is an amazingly beautiful place which is a tourist town but not in a bad-everything is completely over-priced way. We arrived late in the afternoon when most of the tourists had left and found a lovely little campsite right by the beach. We went to watch the sunset over the beach and found why it is so popular with surfers; the biggest waves I’ve ever seen were crashing fiercely on the sand and the wind was really powerful.
In the morning we drove to a view-point which had incredible views over Kaikoura: a bright turquoise sea surrounded by huge volcanoes covered in snow with a long line of cloud floating just under the peaks. We breakfasted on the beach (scones, chocolate milk and oranges) while Craig threw stones at the seagulls (in his defence they were trying to steal our brekkie). We didn’t see any whales apart from a fin but it could have been a rock, and disappointingly we couldn’t afford a boat trip. However, the scenery more than made up for it. We walked round to a seal colony on the peninsula and spotted a seal asleep on a grassy island in the middle of the car park!
The Road To Arthur’s Pass
We continued down the coast road on SH1 and stopped off at a couple of beaches (again) then the road turned inland and for most of the journey we passed farmland and tiny hamlets which were marked on the map as towns but turned out to consist of a few houses on one street along the highway. The highlight came when we drove 25km back towards the coast to Gore Bay where we found Cathedral Cliffs, named so because the cliffs had been weathered into a shape resembling a church organ.
Shortly after, we turned onto SH73 with Arthur’s Pass (the road which runs across the Southern Alps from the East coast to the West coast) insight. We passed through a few “towns” and came across Oxford! Deciding we had to stay we went to explore the town and found a small street village with a guy sitting outside the post office waving at everyone like he owned the place. We discovered a beautiful campsite set in Ashley Gorge with massive forested hills and mountains surrounding. Happily we set up our tent and relaxed in the last of the day’s sunshine.
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