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...

There was plenty to do in Hamner (even more in winter with all the ski slopes surrounding) so we have decided to stay another night. We had lunch and hired bikes for the afternoon.Cyciling into town we picked up some shopping and pottered around on the bikes for a couple of hours. We were pretty much exhausted by the time we gotback to the campsite so we drove down to the library and finally managed to upload our 10 blogs we had saved on the computer! In the e...

After the day of rain yesterday we woke up to find the day looking a lot better. Greymouth seemed pretty average as far as things to do so we knew we had to move on. We thought we'd go in search of the better weather in the east as it was now a few days since sunshine (suppose it's better than the snow at home). We had a really nice drive through the mountains with much better visibility than the previous day, stunning! Unfortunately another similarity to home...

As we'd expected from the scene last night, rain and fallen and the sand flies hadn't moved anywhere. It was a mad dash to take down the tent in the rain and avoid the flies, they didn't even care it was pouring with rain. With a soaking tent (and most of the car) we decided to drive to the coast in search of better weather, none to be seen. The next three hours we were on the road it just rained and rained, visibility was really bad. With little other option ...