Hello again.

I didn't really finish off our Queenstown adventure and wanted to bring that to a finale with our trip up the cable car to indulge ourselves on the luge! It's one of the highlights of the town, shooting down steep concrete slopes on a tiny bit of plastic with brakes that work in the opposite way to any norm! We love it and had 3 runs each. I'll try to upload a video later.....in fact I might try to upload a couple of videos. Never tried but, heh, let's just throw caution to the wind.

The next morning we said a last farewell to Queenstown as we flew off over the mountains en route to Nelson. As we left out airbnb the lovely host asked where we were off to. When we said Nelson his face fell. 'Big bush fires,' he said. Can't be that bad, we thought! How wrong we were, as you already know.

Still, here we are now with no sense of the fires. They're still going but things are very much better and some residents have been allowed to return home. The farmers have now been forbidden to undertake any work involving machines and, frankly, thier lives have been turned upside down with the loss of stock, land and livlihoods. Who knows what difficult conversations will be had when things are returned to safety. This is unprecedented and is another warning of the way we are using our planet. The drought here is shocking. We passed a field of scrawny looking cattle (jersey types) yesterday and they could hardly be picked out from the totally yellow landscape they stood in. Everywhere trees are dead or dying, fruit trees are shrivelled and rivers are completely dry.

The sandflies, however, are alive and well!!!! By Sunday we were so covered in bites that our little tube of Germoline could no longer cope and so we headed off to the chemist. In hushed tones and whispered behind her hand, the saleslady explained that haemorrhoid cream was what we really needed (with or without the applicator, I wondered). That and antihistamines....no they won't make you drowsy. So we paid £25 for small amounts of both and sat down in the queue of people waiting for prescriptions, ripped our shoes off and smeared haemorroid cream all over our feet and legs. Few strange looks, it's fair to say. IT WORKED!!! I lost a day to dozing after the tablet but small matter. Now, between the deet and the cream we're itch free.

So, life in Nelson is as we remember with extra coffee shops! We headed up to Cable Bay to ride the huge flying fox Skywire. We managed to get up to 75 kph going backwards. Genius. We paid extra to ride up the hill in a wonderful 4WD beast. Just the best afternoon. Here's their summary:

Strapped securely into the ride with 5-point harnesses, the Skywire seats up to four "flyers" at a time, with around 800m of gravity assisted free-wheeling, reaching speeds of up to 100 kph, followed by 800m at a more leisurely pace - ideal for taking in the incredible scenery. Then you do it all again - BACKWARDS

We went to the market, strolled around the galleries and have been swimming a lot. Yesterday we drove over Takaka Hill to Golden Bay. There were enormous landslips on the road last February as a result of Cyclone Gita and it is still single track at one point with a 12 minute wait if you miss the traffic lights! Still, worth the truly scary drive to visit hippy Takaka and the most beautiful Te Waikoropupu springs, some of the purest water ever measured.

So, we're having a ball and living alongside 9 crazy chickens and a badly behaved weka. What more could you want?

J and P x