Hi guys,

Sorry we've been rubbish with the blog but NZ has been a bit hectic. Got everything written down now so there will be a few blog entries coming!

After Alex waved us goodbye in Santiago (with a very worried look on his face) we arrived at the airport ready for our flight to NX. We thought we had arrived nice & early with 2 and a half hours to spare but were a bit confused when we found our check in desk completely empty. We decided to go for a little walk only to find a massive queue of people checking in for a LAN flight to Auckland. Turns out we can't read computer screems well and were patiently waiting in completely the wrong place. Good start! Eventually we boarded our plane at 11 at night (after ysing up our last precious pesos on some chocolate...counting out the coins to the last 10 peso's-no money wasted with us!)
LAN airlines are immense, much better than Iberia. Instead of falling asleep, the air hostesses actually served us a very nice dinner (and very nice wine), and instead of being entertained by water dripping in the plane, we had our own tvs to watch. Much better.
After racing through Auckland customs at 4 in the morning (they weren't loving our very chirpy manner at that time...it felt like the middle of the day to us) we caught an internal flight to Christchurch. Slight error made when we greeted our taxi driver with a friendly O-laaaar!, but we soon learnt we were in a westernised country when the driver didn't tear through the streets, actually stopped at traffic lights and we had seatbelts for once.
We treated ourselves to a twin room at the hostel as we guessed jet lag would hit us pretty hard. We arrived to find neighbours on the tv (wahoo!), and tried to catch up with what's happening 3 months in advance (it's all going off here...) and managed to stay awake till about 8pm.Unfortunately this meant we woke up at about 3am, had a nice chat and got up at 6. We read somewhere that jet lag may slightly increase your appetitie so we took this as good excuse to have breakfast out (not that we really need one anyway) and treated ourselves to bagels at an amazing bagel spaceship place. By the end of the 3 days we were regulars.

By 8.30 we were queuing up at the shops . After telling the shop assistant our life story (explaining why we were up at such a stupid hour, we had been in south america blah blah blah) we ran around the shop getting excited by the sight of normal clothes and generally looking like loons (standard behaviour then). Christchurch is a pretty small cuty and hasn't got much to see so our 'sight-seeing' generally consisted of shopping... But we now know the layout of Christchurch pretty well and have made the exciting discovery of Glassons. It's also a very anglican city (called the 'garden city'), with a river avon, oxford street, worcester street and hereford (woop woop) street.

By wednesday we were ready to start the kiwi experience and boarded our big green bus for a little town called Kaikoura, a few hours north of Christchurch. The drive up was really gorgeous, with a stunning blue coast on one side and rolling hills on the other. The adverts for NZ are complerely true and we both fell in love with NZ within about half an hour. Kaikoura (meaning to eat Crayfish. Kai-to eat, Koura-crayfish...fun fact of the day), is a 'town' about a street long that is pretty but doesn't have a lot to offer apar from a hell of a lot of seals. We had a chilled evening eating fish and chips and sitting on the pebbled beach. We seem to have a habit of staying at hostels with hippies/ absolute weirdos. This one was no exception...we had the company of 3 american 'praise the lord' hillbillys singing church songs at the top of the voice while clapping along and reaching to the sky. We maned to keep straight faces for around 30 seconds but had to run outside pretty soon after.
SJ x