Doug Fotheringham, owner of the Cheviot Motel, switches on the 'Welcome' sign in his office every day at 9am and off at 9pm. You know that when that light is on, Doug and his wife Megan are available and can be found never far away from the office, 7 days a week. They can't do enough to help you, always ready to have a blether with their guests. When Doug moves, with just a hint of a gammy leg, he is unhurried as if nothing would faze him. It is the gait of a man who either has too much time on his hands or has the solution to your problem or question as he's been in the business for too long and seen it all. I wonder whether the watering of the plants or the sawing of wood happens in a particular prearranged order every day but suspect that jobs around the campsite are done as and when needed.

Megan, by contrast, moves with purpose across the lawn, between the office, laundry, washing line, motel units and toilets. I am particularly intrigued by her assistant, a bespectacled girl wearing Amish clothes and blue crocs and make a mental note to ask about how she came to be here. It seems that Megan does the work and Doug is on hand to fix things and give a hand when needed. As a wash has become necessary after travelling from Queenstown all last week, in the laundry I ask Megan (not Megan, Meegan, she corrects) if they ever get a break from running the motel and cabins. 'Seven days a week at the moment, it's the New Zealand holiday season. We're not holiday people really, I like to spend my off time at the piano or doing a bit of painting. It's good here, I have my animals as well, ducks, quail, a cat and a dog'. I ask if they have always run the motel. 'A few years ago we had hotels first in Palmerston then Blenheim. After that we farmed for 11 years, then bought this place, came with 5 acres, we knew about hospitality from the hotels so it was an easy move'.

It is a real holiday atmosphere here, with the temperatures hitting 30 degrees over the past couple of days and children in the small swimming pool. Just thinking about that pool a bit more, there are no signs telling you 'OPEN 10am CLOSED 9pm' or 'NO DIVING, RUNNING OR HORSEPLAY'. No depth markers either. Nothing like 'POOL USERS PLEASE SHOWER FIRST'. There is at least a fence around the pool, but it is very much do as you please. We are glad to see that New Zealand establishments place great faith in common sense. Actually, it's all down to their Accident Compensation scheme, where an accident is an accident and the lawyers' blame finger is rarely raised. Essentially, the Government scheme pays for your medical bills.

A bit further over from our unit (number 5, there are 6 altogether) there are small cabins that you can rent and a campsite. The nightly prices get cheaper the further you are from the main building. The motel units are small but not cramped, and could sleep three but better with just two. Each unit has a cooking area, with various pots and pans, cutlery, crockery, a fridge, a microwave and a two ringed electric cooker with a grill underneath......would test any aspiring cook hence my poor excuse to Lesley about not being able to produce meals on par with Gisborne. The sitting area has a settee, a table with two chairs, and a TV with 5 channels. The bathroom has a shower, a toilet and a wash hand basin. The double and single beds take up nearly all of the bedroom and there's no hanging space. Compared to the Gisborne palace, this is Hobbit accommodation but that's not to complain about it. It's clean, quiet at night and we don't pay for it as the cost is covered by the locum agency.

If you are here on a budget, you can take a cabin which is really just a tiny but and ben. One room is the bedroom the other is the sitting area. You have to use the campground toilets and showers. The furthest away sleeping arrangements are in tents, frequented by the string vest Kiwi brigade who clearly are on a budget. Less cost for accommodation = more beer and quad bikes. Yes, quad bikes. You take them with you on holiday and your children (in crash helmets) ride them around a smallish corner of the campsite. Between this, the pool and games of badminton, Kiwi children are no trouble at all during the school holidays.

I suppose that now we have passed the halfway point of our New Zealand stay, and settled for three weeks in Cheviot after moving around South Island for the past week, it's time to reflect a bit. There is no doubt about it, Gisborne was good. We wanted for nothing with a lovely house and decent sized town. Half the folk in the streets were Maori so gave us an insight into a cultural existence that you just don't see in Auckland, Wellington or much of South Island. It gave Lesley eight weeks to get used to NZ medicine and procedures before she was let loose on the single handed practice of Mangakino. That was only for two weeks in December, but was very different to Gisborne. Smaller house, no big shops in the town, a rural practice and full on responsibility as the only GP. Now that we've arrived in Cheviot, it's a larger town than Mangakino, straddling the main road Picton to Christchurch and has a bit more to it……a hotel (the menu is in our motel room, offering a break from in-room cooking), a couple of coffee bars, a hairdresser, a hardware store and a library. Unlike Mangakino the internet is not just available during opening hours, it is 24 hours access. Always easy to identify the town hotspot by the folk sitting on benches outside.

Don't speak too loudly about holidays and traffic unless you want to tempt fate. Our eyes were opened by an article on last night's TV news that 17 people have been killed on NZ roads this festive season. Add to that 7 drownings. The report did not mention the number of serious injuries on the roads. For an NZ population of 4,400,000 we think that's quite sizeable and frankly intolerable. It would have to have been a very bad two weeks in the UK, population 60 million, for those sort of statistics. As I write I touch wood that we won't have any of that sort of thing here in Cheviot……..we are on the main north south road. Cheviot is a PRIME practice, which means that Lesley as the only GP is liable to be called out to road traffic accidents, farm accidents and other life threatening situations. The St John's ambulance service in town are the first responders when this happens and serious cases are helicoptered to the nearest hospital. On our way from Queenstown to Christchurch we had an hour's wait while a bad smash was dealt with, Lesley offered her help but they were covered. Fortunately there were no deaths but a couple of serious injuries were flown to Dunedin Hospital as we read in the paper the next day. It was a miracle that anyone survived the head on collision having seen the wreckage. The cars were driven by New Zealanders, which bucks the trend here of foreigners being involved in accidents. Fortunately for us driving is on the left here……..many rental cars have stickers on the instrument facia reminding drivers of that fact. Newspaper columns regularly report oriental drivers arrested for weaving over the centreline and fully onto the wrong side of the road. Apparently flights from the Far East to New Zealand have passenger briefings on how to drive safely here.

This blog should perhaps have been written in two halfs, but to do it all now will bring events up to date :-) From time to time my 'virtual editor' (no, it's not Lesley) who sits on my shoulder and tells me what to or what not to write makes contact, usually in the shower. He's advised that the folk out there really need to know where Lesley and I have been, but don't make it too long winded otherwise the readers will just switch off. And any amusing stories along the way will go down well, the best ones are the true ones.

Since we left Queenstown on 28th December we've driven 1,250 miles/2,000 kilometres. Here's where we've been :

Oamaru on the east coast to see penguins coming out of the sea at dusk returning to their colony. The wailing and screeching coming from the nests goes on all night as there are possums prowling, we get a really close look at one as it sits in the tree above us. Katherine receives her furry penguin, a gift from us, which she has named Molly, cuddles it like she is Katherine our wee daughter again. Too late for dinner after the penguins…..NZ chefs down tools at 9pm. A scratch dinner of yoghurt and crisps is on the cards, thank goodness we find a corner shop selling chicken and chips at 10pm. Not chips, cheeps. Cheeken and cheeps, a 2 for $ 10 special. The woman says if you want you can have 'weedgies' instead of cheeps, she's just putting them on. Glaswegians served in yesterdays newspaper? Non Scots readers, just e-mail me privately and I'll explain……..

Christchurch : right enough the city centre is in a pretty bad way. 70% of city centre buildings have been demolished. Retailers who choose still to be here have set up shop in a 'container city', about 100 x 100 metres of brightly coloured shipping containers arranged ingeniously into shops and cafes. Katherine and Jenna depart for Sydney.

Dunedin: freed of responsibility to the younger generation we are travellers again. Lesley takes a call from Don McKirdy the GP we met in Gisborne in October. Would we like to join them for Hogmanay dinner in town? Indeed this is New Zealand hospitality again, and we obviously hit it off with them the last time we met. And so it is, with a couple of their friends we eat out in the Lone Star restaurant……'the portion size is part of the franchise as well'. I get caught out by the accent (or deafness more likely) again, as I offer a drink to Dennis and Dale as they walk into the bar. 'Guinness', I'm sure he said, extending his hand. 'Guinness?', I ask to confirm. 'Dennis', he answers. Ah well, I did ask him what he wanted to drink and he told me his name. I then proceed to the bar and order what our Kiwi friends have asked for and twice the barman says we don't have that. We eventually got drinks into their hands and had a rare banter. We end up in The Octagon in the centre of Dunedin for New Year fireworks. As Scots we are quite used to shaking strangers' hands at this time, but here there are one or two handshakes between friends and everybody heads either to late night bars or home to bed. It is not as big an event as the Scottish New Year.

Wanaka, en route to Haast : the last time we had been to a rodeo was in Darwin 30 years ago and we were not prepared to let this chance pass us by. And so we pay our $ 20, and sit on the grass with another few hundred Kiwis and non Kiwis. The prize for the furthest afield visitor goes to a fellow from Czech Republic, 'there are too many Scots, English and Irish here', the MC on his horse told the crowd. It's the real McCoy, this rodeo, bucking broncos and bulls in the dusty ring, cowboys landing on their heads, not just for the show of it. Seems that there is a professional rodeo circuit with qualifiers and prize money. The ladies get a chance as well, with a timed circuit around three barrels in the ring that they have to ride, the winner being the rider and horse that do it in the shortest time without knocking over a barrel.

Fox and Franz Josef Glaciers : visited these West Coast natural wonders on our trip 30 years ago and a longer walk from the car park now. It's quite astonishing how far they have retreated, perhaps a couple of hundred metres since 1984. Hoards of visitors make the pilgrimage up the mile or so approach track to the viewing platforms. No longer are you allowed to climb up the terminal ice.….they are just too unstable and dangerous with lives lost of folk who cross the safety barriers and get too close then crushed to death under tons of collapsing ice. No sign of the keas in the car parks either…..these colourful birds will pull the rubber out of your windscreen. There are estimated to be only between 1,000 and 5,000 still in existence……..feeding them in car parks attracts them to roads where they are run over.

From Lake Mathieson you can get the calendar view of Aoraki/Mount Cook if conditions are right. We think that photographers spend a lot of time in pursuit of this killer view as the West Coast is rarely free of cloud. We're content with a couple of photos where if you look closely you can just see the snow-capped summit of New Zealand's highest mountain. The attraction of this grand view, along with the ever receding glaciers, have fairly expanded the villages of Fox Glacier and Franz Josef Glacier since we last visited. With learn to fly opportunities, glacier and mountain helicopter trips, restaurants and bars, a visitor could easily hang out in this touristy spot for a couple of days….and that's what the locals want you to do.

Hokitika : definitely worth a return for us as we really just stay the night then move on. It's a pleasant enough place in the summer, with an interesting museum and an artistic community, but in winter you have to be pretty pioneering and hardy to live in this coastal town…….it's blasted full on by the roaring forties from the Tasman Sea. Hokktika has an interesting history as it became established as a port in 1864 for the incoming supplies to the nearby goldfields. The road over Arthur's Pass to Christchurch included a notoriously dangerous set of Z bends and the road was subject to frequent rockfalls and avalanches until bypassed as recently as 1999 with a modern high level road built above the mountainside. Hokitika museum has some revealing old photographs of what it was like for bygone travellers crossing the pass and the back breaking work of the roadmen who lived in small huts in the hills to keep the road open with nothing more than a pick, shovel and horse and cart.

And that was our rather indirect journey Queenstown to Cheviot. Here we are, established until the 23rd January and Lesley can get hunkered down to 3 weeks work. She has Wednesdays and weekends off, so we'll be doing day trips from Cheviot, not least of all to visit the hairdresser and get a dent knocked out of the car. I hasten to add that this was nothing more serious than my inability to avoid a concrete pillar that inexplicably moved into my path as I reversed the car in a Dunedin underground car park :-(.