What we've been up to lately:
Last Friday we went from Queenstown to Dunedin. On Saturday night we checked out some of the night life, which was very lively. The main difference is that people go into a club and get straight on the dance floor, no one really hangs round awkwardly near the bar. Also we saw students skateboarding around town bare footed, which was weird. Sunday we met up with my cousins who I hadn't seen in about 8 years, which was really cool. We went to St Clair beach, which was lovely and it was a really sunny day. We also picked up our Nissan Sunny hire car. Simon had to do all the driving because I haven't been driving long enough for the insurance to cover me. It turned out to be a good thing though.

I spent Monday to Wednesday pointing out every field of animals we passed. There were a lot and Simon did very well not to punch me!

As soon as we left Dunedin, we lost radio and mobile reception. We headed down to the Otago peninsula, once I'd convinced Simon that we needed to buy a map or else we'd spend 3 days doing U-turns. We visited the University of Otago aquarium, which was small but had some cool baby sharks and some large touch tanks. We went to the albatross colony but decided it was a rip off, that they charge £15 just to go in for a half hour tour. We went further up the hill to a farm where we were taken in an Argo - an 8 wheeled off road vehicle that just about seated 6 passengers. It was a bumpy muddy ride and the first Argo lurched weirdly at the top of a hill then the driver inspected it and discovered the axle had snapped, so they had to fetch another vehicle. We got a great view while we waited. Then we went down to a rocky area where we saw a lot of New Zealand fur seals. There was a group of seal pups playing in a muddy pool. They were really cute. I got a video which I will upload whenever I can. Their mothers were down a cliff, mostly sleeping in the sun.

We went to another beach further on where yellow-eyed penguins nest. We couldn't go near them as they are shy. They are the rarest penguins in the world and also the third largest, although they looked tiny from a distance. There was one just standing on the beach completely still, because it was moulting. We watched it from up on the side of the cliff, in a hide. Behind the hide, in the cliff, there were some blue penguins living in little holes. We were asked not to take photos. We got quite close to them, they were hiding in their holes but we could see their little white fluffy bellies, very cute.

On Monday night we stayed in a weird place. It is YHA affiliated, in a small town in the Catlins. The Catlins is on the south coast between Dunedin and Invercargill. It's an agricultural area with few people but lots of sheep and also cows, deer and lots of possums. There aren't many proper roads, most are made of gravel, which tested our hire car and Simon's driving skill! That night, it poured old building which had one long corridor inside reminding me of a hospital. I took some photos which illustrate how creepy the place was. We were greeted by a small black dog which was very cute and friendly. The kitchen was quite big and looked like it used to serve meals. There was a cupboard labelled "Meals on wheels trays". Another cupboard contained only a tray of egg cups. There was an old commercial plate washer. The oven was also very old. A small glass-fronted cabinet near the door displayed some china you would expect to see in an old lady's house. The lounge room had shirts and programmes on the wall framed about a 1950s sports player and apart from the TV in the corner, the room looked stuck in that decade. There was an ancient electric piano and next to it, a wooden chair with a chamberpot under the seat. Very bizarre.

In the bedroom we slept in, there was a bunk bed and then two hospital style beds on the floor. They actually had the mechanism underneath to raise the head and foot. I felt like I might go to sleep and wake up transported back to a 1950s convalescent hospital. Also the ceilings were very high.

I was glad when we left there in the morning. It didn't look much less creepy in the daylight.

By this point, the cold I'd felt coming on for several days had properly kicked in and I was sneezing so violently I thought I'd fall over. We went to a beach where we walked through sand dunes in the rain to a small beach where we saw sea lions. They are stranwith rain. We arrived in the dark, in heavy rain, to a big