okay so it's 3am, I may or may not have been out this evening indulging in some music and mayhem so forgive the typos. I shall rely on Evan to edit this sensibly - ahem! So what we forgot to tell you last time was that on the Monday that Cecil surprised us with his arrival - we were burgled - yes burgled - but all the nasty thieves took was food, including evan's sandwiches for work, and more to the point my absolut kurrant vodka!!!! I was gutted... until...

So the week of my birthday dawned, and thankfully I was not required to go into work on Monday. This stroke of good luck ( bad luck for our finances) carried on until Tuesday  -my birthday - so I enjoyed a very lazy day. I treated myself to phone calls with Ella, Rebecca and my parents and my sister called from France where it was Midnight the night before and sounded fun. I had a little birthday money and spent some of this ( becuase the dollar goes far) on...

Evan left you with a real cliffhanger with us and Rik standing in the rain by the side of the road out of Kaikoura, with our bags getting slowly wetter and a cardboard sign saying "Christchurch." Well it started slow I have to say... but then we were blessed as Evan was poo-ed on by a seagull! Not only was this incredibly amusing for me and Rik, BUT it also brought us good luck, and fast, for within 5 minutes a guy pulled up in a massive landcruiser wit...

So we arrived in blenheim late one evening after a nice ferry crossing. Still travelling with Iain we were dropped at a hostel for the night and bid him a fond fairwell as he headed on down for the ski season further south. Our hostel was fine, quite modern and warm but only had 6 people in it seemingly, a german couple and lots of chinese, there was not much atmosphere and language was a fair barrier so we decided to spend the night and move on. next day we move...

So... we uploaded an entry that seems to have got lost so to get you up to speed really quickly - we arrived in Auckland a couple of weeks ago, and spent a few days enjoying ourselves looking round. Visited Devonport which is a nice village across the harbour, then decided rather than working in Auckland we would head south and see what happened. We got a lift with a guy called Iain who is a student from Edinburgh over here for the snow and with him we travelled ...