Sadly, we havn't been having the weather we packed for!

Lake Tekapo is one of three glacier lakes that when the sun shines, it's a beautiful duck egg blue colour. We couldn't really see the lake at its best, as the weather wasn't very good. We'd also booked to do star gazing in the night, but by the time we got up to the reserve the clouds had started moving over and covered most of the stars, so we actually only had time to see one star and a Milky Way through the telescope. But we had a full refund which was good!

The next morning we left for Christchurch. This was where they had the earthquake in 2011 that devastated the city. Most of the buildings are either closed, or still due to be knocked down. A lot of the smaller businesses like gift shops, coffee shops, have re-opened in shipping containers!

We visited the cardboard cathedral which opened last August as a replacement for their cathedral that fell to the ground in the earthquake. We also went to Quake City, a museum that has a timeline of all the earthquakes in the area, wreckage from the last one, videos showing testimonials from people who experienced it, it was very emotional.

In the evening, we headed out to a bar called Pegasus, where we spoilt ourselves with a bottle of wine, cheeseboard and a dessert and listened to a band of about 8-9 people playing folk music!

In the morning we moved on to Kaikoura, stopping at a seal colony on the way, where they were all lying around near the car park and you could get quite close to them (but not too close or they'd growl!)

We were very excited for Kaikoura to do some whale watching and fishing, but the weather was so horrendous that we weren't able to do either (non-stop rain and gale force winds)!! Good job we booked to stay two days there!

We did however, go to a fisherman's house the first night. His name was Jerry and has been a friend of Kiwi Experience for a while. He cooked us crayfish, mussels and Paua on the BBQ and had a never ending supply of wine made with his own grapes. It was a great evening.

The day we left Kaikoura, the sun was back out (figures!!)

We had a long day yesterday, travelling up to the North island again. The ferrys had been delayed a bit due to the bad weather, so we were late getting to Wellington (though we still managed to pop out to the first welsh bar we've seen for a bit!) Luckily we have two days in NZ's capital, so we're off out to do some sight seeing today!