Good afternoon all from Christchurch international airport. As we got here surprisingly early I shall update you on the proceedings following our last blog entry… So yesterday morning (Friday) we treated ourselves to a lie in seeing as we had no stupid 10am checkout, so after arising at around 10(ish) and performing such fascinating duties as washing and packing the majority of our stuff we departed for Hoyts cinema to catch the 2:30 showing of Angels and Dem...

Today we planned to visit the Antarctic Centre as we had overheard someone in Auckland raving on about it and the guide book recommended it. After another well earned lie in and some 'brunch' we set off. We spent the next part of 4 hours in the centre where we learnt all about life at Scotts Base and experienced a 'snow storm' which gave us a wind chill of -18ºc. I had said to Mark just before we entered the storm chamber that I wanted to visit Antarctic to see...

Today we had a nice lie in as we have no check out (not that that has stopped us before!), woop woop! Once fed and dressed we headed for the Orana Wildlife Park, where we could spot some Kiwi birds. Aswel as kiwis the zoo housed all sorts including an Africana section, native birds and reptiles, meerkats, gibbons, spider monkeys and a farmyard. Included in your admission you could participate in some of the daily feeding of the animals, so first stop was the far...

With everything on our 'to do' list done we began our journey to Christchurch today, even though the camper isn't due back until the Saturday 15th! We had planned to drop the camper off on the 15th then spend a few days in Christchurch before leaving for Australia but as we had nothing else to do we decided it would work out better for us to head there now, while we have the camper, so that we could use it as our transport. We managed to find a hostel/campsite ri...

We were up with plenty of time this morning (amazing how its so much easier to get up when there’s something you want to do awaiting) before arriving at Cadbury world at our report time on the dot. As you walk in there’s various displays on the history behind chocolate production as well as Cadburys itself. For example, as with Speights, Cadburys was founded by an Englishman by the name of John Cadbury, of who was at one point the official chocolate maker t...