We caught the early morning ferry to Wellington on the North Island. With childhood memories of going over to France, we were quite excited about being on a ferry for 3 hours, unfortunatley it turned out to be a rather long boring journey. We had a quick look round Wellington and visited the museum but it felt like any other city really with lots of interesting stuff to do for a high price. We drove another 3-4 hours North to another city called Palmerston North...

Queen Charlotte drive, from Nelson to Picton is supposed to be amazing, passing through all the sounds and valleys of the Marlborough region. The drive for us however was just one long grey cloud! We didn't really do much else during the day as the driving took up most of it, especialy when we had to turn round after 30 km because Dave had forgotten to fill up with petrol, again! We found a nice free campsite and got chatting to a couple of locals who were fishin...

On our way back from Golden Bay we took a really long gravel road detour, to the start of a track to Harwoods Hole - a 400 metre deep 183 metre verticle drop and 70 metre wide hole! You couldn't get too close to the edge as 1, you didn't want too! and 2, a huge boulder was fortunatley blocking the way. The walk there was fun over rocks and climbing through trees and things, it was also the setting for some of the Lord of the Rings films. We made our way back dow...

Feeling energetic we decided to do a few walks to explore the area of Golden Bay and Abel Tasman National Park. The first stop was Wainui Falls. You'd think we had seen enough waterfalls by now in New Zealand! The higlight of this walk was crossing the very unstable and quite scary 'suitable for 1 person only' swing bridge over a surging river below. Made it! We quickly checked out the memorial to Abel Tasman (first person to ever sale to New Zealand, though he...

We left Blenheim and started making our way towards the Abel Tasman National park. On the way we stopped in Nelson for a look round and for some lunch. Fortunatley its much nicer than its Lanashire namesake. There was quite a bit to do here but we decided to carry on and got all the way to Pohara Beach, from here we should be able to explore the national park tomorrow.