30th July 2007

Up at 4.45am, got a shuttle bus to the airport for our 8.05am flight into Christchurch, New Zealand, which was delayed an hour. Took around 2.5/3 hours. NZ is 11 hours ahead of UK time. Got a shuttle bus from the airport to the 'Wicked Campers' depot and picked up our 'home' for the week. It's a black Toyota Lucida with the 'Harley Davidson' designs on the side - hardly the girly van we were hoping for! Written on the back it says:- "Early to rise and early to bed, makes a man healthy but socially DEAD!" Funny thing is we actually will be early to bed and to rise! Well anyway off we set after signing our lives away, and headed straight for the supermarket to get an ample food stash. Then to get some petrol which came to $80 which is prob around 30-35 pounds, NZ dollars work out better to the pound than Aussie dollars. Then straight away we started driving til we came to the 'Rakaia River Holiday Park' where we parked up for the night. We'd been driving for a good few hours so it had grown dark by the time we had arrived. We made full use of the kitchen facilities cooking corn on the cob and tomato soup for tea (although we needed to cook the corn for longer because it was cold in the middle!)

31st July 2007

Last night wasn't as cold as i thought it was gonna be. I slept in a t-shirt and my sexy fluorescent legging efforts! Then we had our sleeping bags, a fleecey blanket each and a duvet on top between us, so we were all good! But it was cold getting up this morning, although a delicious bowl of 'budget' coco pops (they're in a bag) and 'budget' chocolate milk TOTALLY brought me to life as i've not had cereal in 3 months!! LUSH! So we set off around 9am and drove to Mount Somers, a very scenic route past mountains with snow on the top, then on to Lake Tekapo (pictured above) and Lake Pukaki - where Mount Cook lies. A very tranquil picturesque view so as you can imagine, i got very snap happy! After that we swapped, and I got into the driving seat, iv never driven an automatic before! Then we stopped off at Oamaru where we stopped off to look at the 'yellow eyed' penguins on the beach. But you could hardly see them, they were quite a way away. On again and next stop was Moeraki where the 'Boulders' are on the beach, but the tide was high so couldn't see much so we'll probably head back up there in the morning. Parked at Hampden Beach Motor Camp for the night, both of us weren't hungry so had a brew and in to bed for 7pm - get us dirty stop outs! Ready for an early start tomorrow!