Hello. I must start this blog by sending many, many congratulations to Sarah and Lyndn on the birth of Ellis Ethan Gauntlett-Boak, born at home with no pain relief and only 14 days late! Thank you so much for sending the pictures - he looks absolutely gorgeous and I can't wait to see you all when I return.

As you may have noticed I've been a little quiet with the blog recently, but I'm gradually catching up - I'm sorting the last 3 photo albums and have added the full story of our travels to Abel Tasman, Golden Bay and along the West Coast. We spent the following week on a WWOOF in Hokitika, that was perhaps a little more challenging than previous stays, not least because we were staying in a little cabin that had lights running off a car battery, but was not sufficient to do any work on the laptop! Since then we've had another mini-WWOOF with a German couple who really are living a simple, self-sufficient lifestyle, and we've been trying to find work which has proven to be quite tricky. Our original idea was to head to Central Otago over the Christmas and New Year period, but we decided against this because it gets overcrowded and accommodation prices are at a premium. So we looked for work on the West Coast, though we really need another 2 weeks of seasonal work before the end of January for our visa extension and the only work available was hospitality. So then we decided to cross the Southern Alps and head for Christchurch and Canterbury and look for garden centre work or vineyards, but garden centres seem to be closing up for their Christmas holidays and many of the vineyards here lost their crops in the severe frosts at the beginning of November, so we've stalled again.

We've now spent 2 nights in Christchurch and realise that we just don't want to be here, we're not enjoying being in a city again at all, too much traffic and people, and hostels full of noisy kids! (Do we sound old?) Bring back the mountains, and wild coastline. Anyway, we're having a little bit of a dilemma over what to do. It doesn't look as though we'll find paid work that starts before Christmas so we're now looking for a WWOOF to do over Christmas and New Year so that we don't spend all of our savings from Dean's Nursery. It is quite difficult to know what to do for the best - it's very difficult to save money here and move around to see everything we want to see in NZ (which is after all the reason we came!) After a serious amount of phoning around we've found a WWOOF at Oamaru where there are 2 penguin colonies, where we can stay for a week, or longer to do a little housesitting, so we're heading off tomorrow to collect some seaweed from the beach for their compost! Eventually I'll return to this blog to fill you in on our WWOOF in Hokitika, but it may be a few days until I do - hopefully I may have better luck with internet access there. When I've next updated it may be better if you read the blog before looking at pictures as you may get a little surprise!!!

Lots of love, Jo & Su, xxx