Hello, sorry for the lack of updates recently, the internet is very pricey here and I get distracted by e-mailing people.... Since Queenstown, we've been back to Christchurch which was much mroe fun the second time around, we got a tram ticket so we went round and round the old tram circuit and stopped off at many cultural sites/places of interest for people who are getting old (us) for example, the museum, the botanic gardens and the art gallery, I enjoyed it much more than I should have really. The art gallery was particularly impressive, the NZ art scene is a lot more exciting than we'd expected. After Christchurch we drove up the coast to Kaikoura where we went whale watching, it was jsut amazing, we saw 8 sperm whales all lying in a row, hiding from the killer whales that were in the area, sadly we didn't see them as well. On the boast on the way back in though we found ourselves in the middle of a pod of dusky dolphins that had at least 600 of them in- they were so nice! They were doing flips and everything, next time I'm here I'm gonna swim with them! From Kaikoura we crossed the cook strait to wellington, the capital city which was much more exciting than we'd been lead to believe, but maybe we jsut like shopping too much.. and cake... The national museum (Te Papa) was fantastic though, probably the best museum i've ever been to, I spent like 3 hours there and only saw a tiny bit of it properly but now I know all about earthquakes and how to quake-safe your house. We've jsut arrived in Taupo today, world trout-fishing capital I believe. More excitingly it has some cool volcanoes about it (we saw Mt Doom!) and some Moon craters (craters with steam coming out of them and bubbling mud!). We wanted to do this big hike called the Tongariro crossing where yuou see loads of volcanic stuff but the weather's too bad so all the trips have been cancelled, looks quite sunny from here though. 10 days till we're home, not sure if that's good or bad really.