We arrived in Kaikoura and stopped briefly in town before heading to our hostel...only to realise that we weren't going anywhere - the car wouldn't start! Aaaarrrggghh! We called out the AA to find that the battery was dead...this caused us to panic momentarily (remember Kim leaving the lights on and the flat battery in an earlier blog?) Could we be blamed for battery death????? Thankfully the AA man got onto the hire company to tell them that it was old and needed replacing and hey-presto we had a new battery and were back on the road in super quick time!

In Kaikoura we got to go whale watching. We have wanted to see whales since day 1 of this trip - we were fortnight too early in South Africa and a fortnight too late in Oz. Given our desperation we were worried that the trip would prove fruitless, especially when the Captain lowered the water microphone (a loudhailer thing on a stick) and declared that he couldn't hear any whales! We needn't have worried, our luck was in and we saw 4 sperm whales...3 really close to the boat. Amazing! We also saw dusky dolphins and some albatross (these birds have the longest wing-span in the world!)

We had also booked to go swimming with seals but sadly bad weather had made the water too murky and it was cancelled. We even hung around an extra day in the hope of going but no joy. However we did drive up to the seal colony and get really close to basking seals (close enough to smell their putrid fish breath).

The other notable event was getting chatting to a Manc couple who were die-hard Man U fans...Mark was in his element though envious that James worked for Man U TV and had met all the players (Ole Gunnar Solskjaer being his favourite) and also slightly embarrassed that he hadn't managed to catch many matches on our travels while James had watched all but one (even finding matches showing in China and Vietnam) Who is truly the greater fan Kim asks????