Hello again from Dunedin (gaelic for Edinburgh) a Scottish city in the south of the south island where it is very cold (apparently not always like this) and grey!! But on the up side we have just come from ta tour of Speights Brewery - the most popular beer in NZ!!! After a good few samples of their products we are feeling very happy and suddenly the cold has gone (or is the beer jackets that have just appeared??) as has lunhc - a lovely chicken sandwich ( a major change from the same old crappy cheese and mayo ones that we have been eating for lunch for about 2 months now!!!). We also went to Cadbury world for a tour yesterday which was great.

However, i will just track back a few days from when we picked up the car - who you will meet as soon as we can put photos up [the net here is s**t] - Dan orSunny D to his friends [all will become apparent]). That day we decided to head to the beaches of Christchurch which were nice, but not spectacular after the Cape town and Ozzy beaches due to the dull black sand.

The necxt day we set off for Lake Tekapo, an absolutely stunning turquoise blue lake (due to the minerals in the rocks). The drive on the way there was absolutely outstanding, within half an hour of the city we could see the snow tipped Southern Alps standing over vast fields of Lavender, with beautiful lagoons passing us as we slowly crawled along, mouths agape, in our white Nissan Sunny. I could go on for days trying to find superlatives to describe the scenery here, but instead i just bid you all to come out here and see it for yourselves! My camera just is not doing it justice as the views are all panoramic our cameras are not able to take 360 degree shots unfortunately!! We finally arrived at the lake and it was magnificent with a little church ion its shores called the Church of the Good Shepard which was really pretty. The town was tiny so we spent the time down at the lake taking pictures.

The next day we headed off to Twizel, our overnight stay and base to go and see Mt Cook - NZ's highest mountain. Unfortunately it was pretty cloudy and we could only see a tiny bit of the mountain, but it was still really stunning. We also visited our first glacier - the Tasman glacier that is shifting at a rate of 20 cms per day.

Not content with viewing the glacier from a nice designated spot at the top of a mountain i thought it would be more fun to climb down the side of a steep cliff made purely of loose rubble and rocks to try and reach the lake - it only looked like a 10 min descent and a 10 min walk - boy was i wrong!!! the terrain was very deceptful what looked like 250m was more like 1 km!! Sarah, not wanting to sit at the top and watch me kill myself decided to follow - so began a slow descent down a limb breaking cliff - not knowing which rocks were stable and which were lose. I pretty much fancied myself as a bit of a gollum, whipping down in no time, but Sarah experienced a few hairy moments with a bashed ankle or 2!!

About an hour later we finally had crossed the treachorous ground (which looked flat but was more like constitution hill [swansea ppl will know this]) we were rewarded by a fantastic view of the icebergs floating around the lake, i even managed to pull one about the size of a 25kg sack of spuds\!!! and abviously very very cold, especially when sarah takes ages to get the photo we wanted whilst my arms (i was obviously wearing shorts and tshirt at this point) were bright red and burning from the cold!! After this we headed back along a path we noticed which was a nice steady, flat, easy 10 min walk to the carpark - "paths are for losers" i told Sarah as she cursed me all of the walk back!!

That night we met a really nice older couple from gloucester and spent the night chatting to them about all sorts of things.

We are now in Dunedin as i said, and just about made it here. we were determined to get here on our 1st tank of fuel, so when the pin was past empty but no petrol light came on i began to worry!!! Sarah was asleep in the passenger seat and i was cruising along 2 hrs of highway (dont have motorways here) at about 60 - 70 kmh getting beeped at by angry ppl all the way!! and free wheeling down the 15 degrees hills at about a million miles per hour!! all fun and games!! we made it safe and sound and have now covered just under 800 km's!

Cadbury world was the nexy stop - again one of Sarah's favourites for obvious reasons! unfortunately as it was a sat the factory was not actually operational, so out tour was a bit of a let down on that part! but we had loads of free choccies to make up for it - which put a huge broad beam on Sarah's face!! i even won a choc bar by getting a question right!! The display area was really freaky - with weird puppets and pics everywhere and this scary, creepy music playing ( like from some 1620's kids toy or something)! But all in all it was fgood fun! However, not as good as the brewery tour! Again the factory was not operational but it was a lot more informative and set up for tourists!

Speights is NZ's no.1 beer, and justly so, after a 1 hr tour through the whole complex learning about the history of beer, we got to the good part, the beer tasting! we could try 6 of their most famous ales and even have a go at pouring them ourselves! My fave was their classic 3 star gold and Sarah following in her fathers footsteps like the deep dark Speights Old ale - we even found out why Sarah so obviously likes her dark ales - they use a more extensive mixture of malts - including ...chocolate malt - now that explains a lot!! And did you know ... that hops one of the key ingredients in beer (gives it its bitterness) is directly related (in the same genus) as marijuana!!!

Thats all for now, off to Queenstown tmw - the adventure capital of NZ! we will try at Queens to put some pics up, but the net is reputed to be bad all over NZ!! Which is a pain as our memory cards are nearly full!!!

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