13th May - 23rd May South Brighton to Motueka

We arrived in South Brighton in the afternoon, after driving around in circles not finding the place for ages - they don't seem to like sign-posting places in NZ. South Brighton is situated on the north shore of Christchurch. It seemed to look like it would be a holiday spot, but as it turned out, it was basically Christchurch suburbia. We filled our day by going to the supermarket, then going into Christchurch to update the blog.

It was really weird going back after a month, we parked up just past Charlie B's Backpackers, where we had originally stayed when we arrived in NZ, and walked to the nearest internet cafe. As usual, Christchurch seemed like a ghost town at this time of night.

It was another difficult drive out of Christchurch's suburbs to get to the main highway. We had to stop and get directions as there weren't any signposts what-so-ever. Eventually we made it back on to the highway and drove north through huge vineyards before reaching the coat line, where the highway hugs the cliffs, sharing this small bit of flat land with a railway.

We arrived at Kaikoura, a small seaside town and one of the best places to go whale and dolphin watching. We booked 2 nights thinking we were going to do some whale watching if it was the right season.

We spent the rest of the afternoon walking along the shore line towards the peninsula. You were able to get a good view of the town and the snow-capped Kaikoura Mountain Ranges behind as the sun set.

The next day was a cold and clear when booked the whale. The excursion was in the afternoon so we passed the time by walking into town and exchanging our books. Apparently it didn't matter what time of year you went on the excursion as there was a male sperm whale living just off the coast. In fact, they were so sure we would see a whale, they off to give you your money back if you didn't see one.

The sea was pretty rough as we sped out to sea. According to the whale watching company, Kaikoura sits very close to the continental shelf and therefore we didn't have too far to go before the sea bed dropped down around a thousand metres. This is where whales were likely to be. The boat stopped a couple of times to listen out for the sounds of a whale on the captain's listening devise.

The captain had heard from a sister boat that the resident whale had dived around 30 minutes earlier, this meant we had 15 minutes to get into position where we thought the whale would emerge to take a breath.

As a general rule, Sperm whales dive for around 45 minutes, and then stay on the surface for around 15 minutes. We were now waiting 50 minutes and were wondering when and where he was going to appear.

Luckily we spotted him pretty close to us and we had a great view of the whale. Well, when we say great view, we were only seeing the very tip of the whale. We watched for around 15 minutes before the whale took one last big breath before diving, displaying his wonderful big tale as he went down. So that was that. On the way back we travelled past a sea lion colony before returning to the coast.

We decided to stay another night so we could climb the small mountain that lies behind the town. Mt. Fyffe is 1602m and is one of the smallest mountains of the range, and was only graded an eight hour return trek to the summit.

We drove up to the carpark for the trek around 11:15am, there were no other cars so it seemed we had the mountain to ourselves.

The walk climbed steadily zigzagging up the south west ridge of the mountain. We got so far before we heard the familiar sound of a Fan-tail bird. He came chirpily up to us and landed on Vik's hand before fluttering in front of Carl's face then landing back on Vik's outstretched hand again. It was a very "Disney" experience and we were both shocked that he was so friendly. Although, the curiosity the Fan-tail had for us strange humans, didn't last very long, and he was gone as quickly as he had arrived.

When we reached a thousand metres, we came across a small DoC (Department of Conservation) Hut. It was much smaller than the ones we had come across at Milford Sound, but it was completely adequate. It had a couple of bunks surrounding a small wide burning stove. It looked really cosy and if we'd known, we could have stayed there overnight (for only $5).

The snow level began just past the hut, and it became quite difficult to walk up as it was quite slippy and got deeper the higher we went.

It had been a lovely clear sunny day all up until we reached the summit, so we didn't actually get the satisfying view as we would have liked. Instead, we just sat on a bench and ate our sandwiches in the mist, then walked back down again. Somebody was definitely having a laugh up there because as soon as we had got a third of the way back down the mountain, the summit had completely cleared.

Before leaving Kaikoura, Carl burned some of his photos to DVD before discovering that he had an e-mail from home which informed us that we had been fined for speeding on the Captain Cook Highway, Cairns, Australia. Oops, we had been caught on camera doing 17km over the speed limit. We had to pay $150 dollars. Bummer!

We were heading north again, almost as far north as you could go on the east coast to Blenheim. A kinda non-consequential town in itself, but is surrounded by many big vineyards with names you would recognise in your local Tesco.

We arrived in the Marlborough regional town around 1:30pm and found the town completely dead. It still doesn't seem natural for a town to be empty and lifeless like a New Year's Day in the U.K, but it was Saturday afternoon and traditionally all the shops close apart from the large supermarket, New World.

We found one of our Top Ten campsites (which we have discount card for) and booked a night. We ate our lunch in the warm sun before walking into town to find some sort of life that we might have missed, but we hadn't, so we went to the supermarket to get food for the evening.

It was Saturday night, which meant movie night, so we sat and ate our dinner while watching the last of the Indiana Jones trilogy films.

As there wasn't much to offer in Blenheim, unless you were a wine connoisseur that is, we headed west to Nelson first thing that morning.

Nelson is the second oldest city in NZ and is situated in the north top west of the south island and receives New Zealand's highest sunshine hours - which is believable as we had nothing but sunshine the whole time we were there, even though it was raining in the rest of NZ.

We stopped just west of the city centre at a place called Tahunanui near Nelson Port. It had a beautiful big long beach which was almost completely made up of shells. It was obviously a place of 'rich pickings' for the local Oyster Catchers.

We found a campsite very close by, which seemed to be an ideal spot for the city centre too. After having lunch (which as always, consisted of sandwiches), we walked across the road to the BMX park, where little boys were practicing on a very professional looking track. There were other kind of park activities, such as big slides, sailing boats for the lake, and an outdoor water park.

We walked to the beach again and walked all along to the port and into the city centre, this was when we decided to go and see the late showing of What Happens in Las Vegas at the cinema, which incidentally was really funny. We quickly walked back to the port and had fish and chips at the local fish shop before heading back to the cinema.

The fish from the fish n chip shop was really good, maybe the best we'd had since we'd been in NZ. Carl had Blue Cod and Vik had the fish of the day, which was Gem fish - we would really recommend the Blue Cod.

The next day we headed further west to the Abel Tasman National Park which we'd heard so much about from other people. We headed deep into the park to a place called Golden Bay where we found a campsite right on the beach at Pohara. We booked two nights so we could look around the area and go to Farewell Spit at the tip of the south island.

The rest of the day was spent walking along the deserted beach watching the Oyster Catchers, Shags, and Cormorants. We even stumbled across mussel shells that were as big as our hands.

That evening we had the kitchen and the TV room to ourselves, which was nice.

It was a warm night (first time we hadn't used our fan heater) and a cloudy morning as we made our up to Collingwood (last township), and Farewell Spit. We parked up and started the long walk towards the end of the spit.

After about an hours walking along the inland side of the spit, through deep mounds of shells, including massive Paua shells (giant, colourful looking mussel shells), we came to a sign stopping us going any further. The rest of the spit was a nature reserve for birds. This meant we had to cross the sand dunes to the other side of the spit (sea side). It was completely deserted and quite difficult to see the markers that would lead us to the other side. Eventually, we made it to the other massive empty beach, where nobody seemed to walk, only drive. We followed some car tyre markings to find our way back to the exit off the beach. We walked for hours, not feeling like we were getting anywhere, and it didn't help when Utes passed us by as stupid speeds, then disappeared into the horizon.

We thought that we hadn't really seen most of what Abel Tasman had to offer as most of the parkland was only accessible by water taxi, so took a detour to the coastal township of Maranau on the way to Motueka. The little town was a sea kayaker's haven, with plenty of hire places and water taxis to allow you to kayak further a field.

Here we discovered a map of the Inland and Costal Track that takes you deep into the park, where roads don't go. The track looked really interesting, so we made a spontaneous decision to do it.

We made our way to Motueka soon after making the walk decision, and found a motel that had SKY TV, so that Carl could watch the Champion's League Final in the early hours of the morning. Unfortunately our motel room didn't have ESPN channel, but Carl and arranged with the Motel owners to watch it in their house with their son, who was also a Man U supporter (and Welsh).

Carl got up stupidly early in the morning to go and watch the footy, while Vik relaxed in a proper bed (for a change). We decided to stay another night in the motel, as we were getting quite use to the luxury of not having to go outside to go for a pee.

The rest of the day was spent planning our trek, buying hiring a camp stove, and getting the DoC track details and booking our DoC huts over the internet. We then spent the rest of the day relaxing in our little motel room watching SKY TV - luxury!

Unfortunately we had to book into a campsite down the road, as the motel was a little expensive, but to make up for it, we were given free usage of the spa that evening. It was our last day in civilization before heading off into the wilderness for 6 days, so we bought our supplies and had a hearty evening meal.