Hello hello and hello! As you can tell Mrs Cowan is very excited about having 5 nights left sleeping in a van....yes that is right just 5! We are looking forward to hitting Bali for some chilling.

Well I shall fill you in on what we have been up to. We are going to do a joint effort so I will start and then my hubby shall complete our wee entry. Well picking up from where we left off in West Port we headed up to Nelson. In Nelson we had a few days of R and R just lots of reading and some sunbathing as the weather was lovely. Oh I forgot to mention that we had a minigolf course to play on. I got a hole in one yes!!!!! But I then went on to play terrible I will not bore you with the details of every hole (if my name was Don Kenyon I would thought!! Sorry Dad!)

When we left Nelson we went back on ourselves a wee bit and went to the Abel Tasman National Park. I am so pleased we did because it was stunning. It felt like we were back in Thailand. We did the coastal walk and the beaches were amazing. As you will see in the photies when we get them on. We had a great swim when we hit the halfway mark. We walked for about an hour or so eachway. We did or should I say I had a stress halfway. I really needed the loo and when we found a portaloo in the middle of the forest it was full of wasps....well if you know me you know that I am not a wasps biggest fan!! Poor Chris ended up having to be on wasp check and slay a few as I managed to nip to the loo!! Sorry about the details but I thought it would make you laugh!! So from there we drove to Blenheim.

Well Blenheim was halfway to Kaikoura so we stopped there for the night. I will now swap with Chris and he can describe the campsite like no other!!!........

Howdy folks! what Frankie is getting at i think is that the campsite we stayed in that night was like the freaky Norman Bates style campsite from the land that time forgot! It was full of creepy frazzled old hippies and a number of potential serial killers, needless to say the van was locked up tight that night! I dont think the toilets had been cleaned this decade and the showers were from about 1935! SO we made a hasty retreat early the next morning and hightailed it down the highway to Kaikoura.

Kaikoura is a really nice place, the campsite we're in has amazing views of the Kaikoura seaward range mountains and just across the road is the ocean which round here is full of all sorts of marine life... So yesterday afternoon we went on the whale watch kaikoura boat trip out into the ocean which was amazing! we saw 3 sperm whales which were between 15 and 17 metres in length, they really were an amazing sight to see especially as they prepared to dive back down into the deep water and they flick their tails in the air as they go down without even making a ripple on the surface - not bad for something that weighs about 30 tons!! on the same trip we saw a huge pod (about 400) of dusky dolphins which were fantastic to watch they were swimming right up to the boat and jumping out of the water and doing backflips!!!

well thats it rna out of time im afraid!!!