It's grey and damp outside today. What happened to the beautiful spring weather of yesterday! After breakfast we armed ourself with a 'Walk the City' map and set off on a bit of a walking tour of the city. There are some interesting old buildings, statues etc and it was interesting to see the plaque marking the spot where the original settlers landed. We had a look at the beautiful Flemish Renaissance style railway station and went upstairs to view an exhibition...

We were up and out in good time this morning. After a hearty hotel breakfast we were, once again heading out along the beautiful Otaga peninsula. This time we were on our way to Larnach castle. The sun was shining, but as we reached the castle the mist started to swirl in and it seemed even more like Scotland than Scotland itself! We spent a leisurely couple of hours exploring the castle, built by William Larnach in the late 1800s. It is an impressive building ...

We enjoyed a delicious breakfast prepared by James and then made good use of the free wireless internet for a couple of hours before getting on our way. We drove back down to the harbour where we had seen the blue penguins and then had a look round the Victorian area of Oamoru and saw many historic limestone buildings and lots of British flags which was quite a surprise. We parked up to have a better look at the Steam Punk train near the old harbour railway stat...

It was another beautiful sunny day in paradise and hard to believe that this was the day we had to say goodbye to wonderful Otahuna Lodge. Jimmy gave us an excellent breakfast to set us up for the day ahead (enough for several days ahead if the truth be told!) and then there was time for Steve to give us a tour of the garden before it was time for us to be on our way. Oh how we hate to say good bye to all you lovely people, but you can be sure that we WILL be bac...

We were awake bright and early and picked up by Lyndal at 7 am for our long trip to Kaikoura. It takes nearly 3 hours to get there but it was a beautiful sunny day and wonderful scenery along the way. At first it was very flat along the Canterbury Plain with plenty of those fantastic New Zealand sheep to admire along the way. It's hard to believe that there are actually a great deal fewer of them than there used to be! The nearer we got to Kaikoura the more we we...