Hello everyone! We do hope you're all well and thank you for the emails we've been getting. it's lovely to hear from you!

We are now in Blenheim, well, more towards Renwick, but we have a job! We are now working at Stoneleigh's (owned by Pernod Ricard, who also own Montana) on the vineyards from 7am until about 3.30pm. It's long, boring, hot work but it does pay and thankfully as we haven't been hired through a contractor, we actually get paid! We had heard a lot of stories from other backpackers about them not getting any of their pay etc, so with the help of the Mercer's (Dave's family friends) we managed to get a job after only a day of looking! We stayed with Jim and Anne a day or two after arriving in the South Island. They kindly offered us their spare room for the long weekend while they were away which we were happy to accept. They very generously let us stay for another week until we were settled and happy with the job & we moved out to a backpackers place only 2 minutes from where we work last week. It's nice, we've got a number of Thai's living above us with barely any english, but Dave is teaching them! We haven't been doing much for the past two weeks apart from working really. At the end of each day we did have a plan to go for wine tasting, but we seem to be so tired and hot that all we want to do is go home and crash after a good cold shower or a dip in the local water hole in the Wairau River!

We are planning on working until the middle of March when we will then move on and travel round the south island. Having changed our flights to the 27th April, we will need to sell the car in Christchurch then fly to Auckland before flying to Adelaide. We did decide it would be a good idea for us to book a flight back to the UK before we got to Aussie (as they may be strict on the requirement for an onward ticket) so we have a flight booked from Perth to London arriving back on the 1st November. We're glad we've booked it as it's one less thing to get done!

Anyway, we probably won't have much exciting travel news for a while but we will keep blogging to let you know we're still alive! haha.

Love to you all,

David and Rachel xxx