Well hello everyone,

We've been in New Zealand a week and boy have we been busy. We picked up our 'micro camper' last Monday and micro is properly the right word to describe it. It's a car with a matress in the back. But you can't even just stop and lie down in the back, you've got to move all the seats around and all our luggage and then fold the bed out, then you can lie down. Fun.

We've been up to this place called the Bay of Islands, which was a really nice bay (full of islands). We went on a sailing trip for the day, where we stopped at one of the islands and did a bit of snorkelling and kayaking and eating and sun bathing.

Next highlight was Waitomo caves, which were these caves full of glow worms. You could do trips where you just walked through the caves but oh no, that's not what we wanted. We went for this trip called tumutumu toobing. Basically we spent 2.5 hours, between 5 and 35 metres underground, floating along in the water on tubes, climbing through little gaps in the rocks (me more then Toni, thought i was stuck at one point), and swimming through the water, oh, and looking at the thousands of glow worms that were in the roof of the cave. When we switched off our lights it was like looking up at the stars.

Last couple of days we've been at this place called Kaikoura where we swam with NZ fur seals and dusky dolphins. The dolphins was the best. Hundreds (no exaggeration) of dolphins swimming past and we had to get there attention and keep them entertained so they would stick around. The recommended tactics for this was to make funny noises and to swim in circles, cos apparently they like to circle you. So there we were doing all of this. Dolphins were everywhere, i couldn't count how many were around me at one point and they were coming really close and looking at us. I wore myself out swimming around so much and made myself dizzy swimming in circles. By the end all i could do is just lie there and watch them swim past, and they didn't seem that interested in what appeared to be a dead person. After the swimming we stayed on the boat for a while and just followed them. They're the most acrobatic of all the dolphins and they put on a good show for us. Leaping out of the water and doing somersaults. There were also loads of little calfs swimming along with their mothers, which prompted lots of aaahs from Toni.

We've just arrived in Christchurch. Feel very tired. We had to get up for the dolphin trip for 5.30, which is early enough, but the fire alarm went off in our hostel at 4am this morning, and of course we couldn't get back to sleep before we had to be up again. It's now only 6pm but i'm falling asleep at this computer.

Hope everything and everyone is well back there. Not long now, see you soon.

Krys and Toni