As soon as we'd seen Alan off we were straight onto organising our next leg. First stop was Akaroa - the penninsular just east of Christchurch - where we plan to swim with the dolphins!

The hostel is more of a farm with guests but its great. Our room is in a barn house conversion and we're up the rickety wooden steps in the loft! We share our kitchen with just two others which is excellent! We book straight onto the morning dolphin tour and get up at 7:00am.

Its a cold morning but fortunately we're kitted out with super thick wetsuits that certainly work when we're out of the water - hopefully within too! The dolphins we're searching for this morning are Hector's dolphins and they're the same sort we saw in Seacliff where i surfed with them. We jump aboard the speedboat and it's soon apparent that its a choppy day! it doesn't make us ill but it certainly makes the ride uncomfortable. Before long we spot dolphins but they don't seem to hang around long enough to swim with. We find this with a few pods we come across and it begins to look disappointing until right near the end of our trip when we're heading home, we come across about 7 dolphins and we soon jump in. I'm the lucky one as i seem to have them all around me at one stage and everyone else just gets flashes of them but it's brilliant. Seeing them is one thing but actually sharing the water is something else!

Leaving Akaroa we drive back through Christchurch, inland a little and northerly to a town called Hanmer Springs. Its a good stop off location on the way to the further north regions as there are natural thermal springs to bathe the days away in! We spend the best part of a whole day making the most of the natural baths! Just what we needed!

Leaving Hanmer towards Nelson Lakes national park we do something we've never done before and i guess its quite suprising we haven't! In all the places we've stayed you would've thought we'd leave something behind somewhere but not us. Not until today! We got about 25 mins from Hanmer so we were able to turn around and go back to collect all our food from the fridge!!!

At Nelson Lakes are some good walks and we climb for almost 2 hours up to the top of Mt. Robert which stands at 1400m alt. Some climb! Actually, we only climb 500m because the car park is at 900m alt!! It was still tough though but the weather was superb and we were blessed with exceptional views of the surrounding mountains and landscapes. The walk was actually Sams idea as i was more than happy to merely chill by the lakes for a day or two!! Haha.

Next stop was the town of Nelson and another very highly rated backpackers hostel. It's called "the Bug" run by an english guy with a fixation for VW Beetles. It's an excellent place and Anthony is very very helpful. We deliberated for hours about how to see Abel Tasman national park and, with Anthony's help, decided upon just doing a one day walk involving a drive to the park, a boat trip to the starting point then walking back to the car. This was chosen over a 3 day hike because the weather was turning bad the day after!

It was a fairly cloudy day when we did the walk but we could see why this park has so much appeal. It's a coastal track that takes you through many beautiful secluded bays and the whole walk lasted around 5hrs at a leisurely pace.

The next day, the rains really did come and we stayed in the hostel thinking how much we didn't want to be out walking by playing Monopoly with other guests. Whilst we were here, we also met a couple from the black country and we agreed to meet up at our next hostel in a few days as they were heading elsewhere while we were staying in Nelson.

The next hostel we visited is the most highly rated hostel in the whole of New Zealand so we had high expectations! Those expectations became even higher after the drive there because it was a good 3-4hrs, most of which was on a very very twisty coastal road around Marlbrough Sounds right at the North Eastern point of the south island. Some of this road was also on unsealed roads which really didn't help!

So, arriving at Hopewell, we were welcomed with a cuppa and cake - a good start. The hostel has excellent facilities and very cheap to use kayaks and fishing gear - among other things. This was a good first impression! Within 2 hours of arriving, Jason and Becky had arrived (the black country couple!) and we were called down onto the front garden - which goes into the sea - as a pod of around 50 dolphins were swimming past!! This was fantastic and Mike (the owner) took us out in his boat to travel with them for a while. What a first day!

Our time at Hopewell was spent spotting gloworms, kayaking during the day, kayaking at night just to see the bio luminescence in the water (they are tiny creatures that give of light when disturbed in the water and the sight when kayaking is amazing!), bathing in the spa on numerous occasions under the stars, taking out a rowing boat to find oysters only to find out that they were mainly on the beach right by the hostel(!!) and indulging in a mussel feast laid on by the hostel! It truly was a superb place and we give it top marks! They even made up a pancake mix for us to cook the oysters in - a delicacy!

This concludes the south island in what has been an absolutely amazing 5 weeks. The north island has a lot to live up to!