Hello everyone,

We are finaly in Christchurch. The drive down again was good and we're really enjoying this. It's a nice town but not a lot to do but we're here to sort out the hire of a campervan anyway.

Well, now our plans have changed completely. We wanted a campervan to tour the rest of the South Island and we both knew what it would cost but have now, after talking to a couple of locals, become aware of all the hidden costs that they forget to tell you at the campervan companies. You have to plug into to powered sites every 2 to 3 days to recharge the house battery which cost money. You have to pay a diesel tax every time you fill up and they work that out on the miles your doing so again more expense. So we worked out that evening we can hire a brand new small economical car and stay in motels every night for less money. So thats what we did. After dropping off the car we have used for the past few days. We have hired a nice little brand new car and got an amazing deal from which this company even pays for the car to go on the ferry when we go back up and they don't charge to drop it off at Auckland Airport either. It does loads of miles to the gallon so that way we can explore as much as we want and not worry about the fuel, which by the way is almost half the price here compared to the UK. So we're very happy that we've saved some money.

Can you believe it, Gemma has a cold. Even though its nice here and the sun is out most of the time, the temperature has dropped a little but it's still warm. Although it did hail here for 10 minutes which were the size of squash balls, ouch!

Speak to you soon from our next stop.

Love Darren, Gemma and George xxx xxx xxx