Hello all, sorry we have been a bit lax with the blog since New year. We left Akaroa on New Year's Day and headed to Christchurch, over the hills just 85km away. Christchurch is still going through extensive rebuilding after the series of earthquakes from september 2010. From what we could see, the west of the city looks pretty normal but the centre and east are still rubble in places and still look very much worse for wear, even two years on. Cathedral square lo...

Monday-New Years Eve. We woke up to wonderful harbour views. We had been a little concerned that we might be moved on from our overnight parking spot - as there was some confusion about whether we were permitted to camp there over night, but we were undisturbed. So we toddled off to the I-site to see about booking a site for New Year's Eve, but as we expected everywhere was fully booked. We then went for a drive around the penisular, the weather was great and thi...

Sunday. We woke up to rain! Very disappointing! And we needed to think carefully about where to head next and where we wanted to be for new year - as we only have three nights left. With this in mind we drove 300km to the Banks penisula adjacent to Christchurch - and what a good decision this has turned out to be! The sun is out, we are camped for free next to the harbour in Akaroa and it is gorgeous. This town has lots of old colonial buildings and lots of Frenc...

Saturday - we finished up our drive round the peninsula this morning, getting ourselves thoroughly lost in the process- quite impressive given the small size and very few roads here! We very nearly ran out of diesel, but got off the rock just in time to find a garage - we were on fumes by then! Diesel here is really cheap, fortunately (given how many miles we have done), only £40 to fill the tank - bargain !!! We then went to Dunedin university (oldest in NZ) t...

Friday:- After a good nights sleep we headed across central Otago towards Dunedin, our final destination planned as the Otago peninsular. We drove for about 2 hours before we found a town that had a coffee shop, by this time we were gagging for a nice long latte - we told you left was hard round here! We had coffee in a town called Gore - and the next town was called Clinton, we both had a chuckle about that. We reached Dunedin in the afternoon and after a quick...