We rung home again this morning as it was their Christmas day and went out for another drive. We followed a scenic route in the car from the guide book which took you out of the city, climbing up steep winding roads until you could look down with a great view over Christchurch. When we arrived back at the hostel, Rachael had a sleep and we had a very quiet afternoon with a few beers. In the evening after tea Tom went into town to see the dizzy heights of Chris...

Merry Christmas or just Friday if you're Rachael. We got up around 8.00am this morning and joined the queue for the telephone so we could both ring home. After breakfast, we made some butties, filled the flask and set off out in the car to a penninsular about two hours away. The drive was lovely and we stopped off at a town and sat by the sea watching families pull up and take their boats on onto the water for the morning. When we arrived back at the hostel we...

Christmas eve or just Thursday if you ask Rachael. It doesn't feel like Christmas here at all. When we were in Australia we booked a hostel for three days over Christmas in Christchurch, not knowing how busy places were going to be so thats where we were heading this morning. The site we were on last night was only about a 20 minute drive away from Christchurch and we arrived at the hostel just after lunch. Thankfully the hostel was nice, probably the nicest o...

Christmas Eve, Eve. Rachael woke with many of her sand flies bites now maturing into big blisters, not good. With no option of staying on that site after another night of little sleep we had to move on (and not surprisingly so were our neighbours). We thought we might as well approach Christchurch ready for Christmas and hopefully find a campsite en-route. Rather than do the 35 km round trip to Kaikoura for fuel we thought we'd risk to to the nearest station t...

There were still things to do in Hanmer but wanted to hit the road and explore somewhere else, and again the scenery was stunning on the "Alpine triangle" tourist drive, we were in search of Seals and Whales. En-route into Kaikoura we watched the Seals playing in the water it was really cool. Contrary to what we'd been told previously we found a campsite easily with only a few caravans on it. The pitch was a couple of metres from the shore and we had...