An exciting couple of days...

Picked up Johnny the Juicy, a people carrier style camper, and our home for the next 30 days. Coming along for the ride was Sean, a stranded Kiwi we adopted and agreed to drive back to his home in Murchison, and as the next few days tales evolve, he proved to be most useful. So he sets up camp in the back, the most comfortable seat in the house (check out the photo) and becomes our talking map/guidebook/photographer - very useful, I recommend you get one!

All day we were wowed by the scenery out the window, and after arriving in Kaikoura and booking our Dolphin Encounter, pondered how in such a small, sleepy town, we were going to entertain ourselves until bedtime. We head up to the viewpoint to check out the seals, and were incredibly lucky to spot 5 killer whales just offshore. Then Todders and I head to the pub for a round of trip planning. The barman, Al, had better ideas. Sean joined us and we played our first game of 'Guess the ingredients in the shot', and our second, and our third...

8.30am came around way too soon, but the Dolphin Encounter was well worth the pain and could only have been made better by heating the water up a bit!! 14 degrees, and even full wetsuits complete with headmasks did not cut it. The dolphins didn't seem to mind however, and 150 or so of them rocked up to pay us a visit. The experience was amazing, and the best by far was swimming around in circles trying to keep up with them, made you very dizzy, must have looked ridiculous to the people still onboard watching us, but much fun. After all the excitement, we had a hot choccy, gingersnaps, a quick peek at the dolphins performing tricks, then donned a blanket and promptly fell asleep on one anothers shoulders. A quick stop on the roadside for our soon to be famous wraps, then head off in the direction of Blenheim.