Under the sun we explored the coast line that was first discovered by the explorer Able Tasman. We kayaked with the Orcas, even if we didn’t see them. Crossed through rivers, walked on sun kissed beaches and under a heavy down pour. At the end of the week we returned to Christchurch to sell our car.

5^th December 2011 Able Tasman Day 1

Kayaking that is how we are going to start our adventure into the national park! We are given a briefing about what to do in case of an emergency or if we see a killer whale and then are set loose. The weather is over cast with winds, making the bay a little bumping. We paddle out to our first beach, have a break, write in the sand and then move on. We paddled over to an island, home to many seals and native birds where we have lunch, in the mean time the wind has picked up and the crossing back to the main land is hard, we even go backwards at some points! We make it back to the sheltered waters of the bay and continue until our stop, it’s been great fun and now more then ever I want a kayak. We walk from Watering Cove until Anchorage hut under the sunshine for an hour. Set ourselves up in the hut for the night and enjoy the beach and the sunset before going to sleep like babies.

6^th December 2011 Able Tasman Day 2

Day 2 under the rain, it’s raining its poring, but we cant stay in bed snoring. We need to walk until the next hut 4 hours away under heavy rain. We walk and cross rivers under the rain. Needless to say we are totally wet when we get to our hut at Bark Bay. We hide inside for the rest of the day, as the rain didn’t go away. We drink tea, eat Nuttela and wonder why New Zealand has a weather prediction service as it is always wrong.

7^th December 2011 Able Tasman Day 3

The sun is back! At 8am its already hot and burning down. Protected as best we can from the sun and the sandflies, we head off on our longest day of waking. We walked along golden sand beaches, through tropical bush and across rivers. Today’s walk is planned according to when low tide is, as we have to cross to rivers that are fed by the sea. The first crossing is short and even though the river was cold and the stones hurt our feet, it was simple and over with in less than 10 minutes. The second crossing took 20 minutes and the water was a lot higher. A couple of people crossed it an hour before we did and had to put there packs on there heads and almost swim across. Tramping in New Zealand is never boring! Happily on the other side we continue the track to the end and to where our water taxi was waiting. If you come to New Zealand and choose to do only 1 track, I suggest this one; it is varied, easy, and stunning. Once on our water taxi, as it was the last one of the day, it stopped of to pick up Kayaks we rode home with 8 Kayaks on the boat with us and saw blue penguins.

After a well deserved hot shower we drove to Takaka, the home of everything organic in New Zealand.

8^th December 2011 Golden Bay

Waking up in the home of Organic New Zealand, we spent the day visiting its wonderful natural attractions. We went walking on the sand dunes and got lost on the long Farewell spit, which is the Northern tip on the south Island.

We laughed at ‘eco tours’ that were simply not eco at all, large 4x4 buses with diesel engines. In the afternoon we stopped at a really cool micro brewery had a selection of local organic beers and enjoyed the sunshine.

In the evening we drove to Nelson, where we stayed in our tent in a backpackers and just relaxed, we had done quite a lot over the last few days.

9^th December 2011 Nelson

Not a fun day at all. We started the day by hunting for our parcel that we sent 5 weeks ago to France. We found out today that it was on the way back here! The problem with that is we wont be here when it gets back! After making a formal complaint we went to the IRD, tax office, to ask when we would be getting our tax back and were quite rudely told that we should not expect anything and if there is anything we would get it once we left New Zealand.

Off to the doctor we go as my lip and foot our swollen. It seems to many sandfly bites and sunshine even though I covered myself are back for me. So now I am on antibiotics until we leave. I am not a happy person.

We drive to Christchurch, nothing special happens, we find a campsite and stay the night.

10^th December 2011 Christchurch

The fallen city, welcome to Christchurch. Today we drove around ‘town’ putting up flyers saying that our car was for sale. We tried to get information from the tourist office, I site, about which Backpackers are open, but they were unable to tell us. So we just used the old list and drove to all of them and figured out for ourselves which ones where open and which ones were not. It is kind of scary and sad at the sand time wondering around this broken city.

In the evening we hang out at a campsite, chill out and watch the Lion King.

11^th December 2011 Car for sale

Today we took our lovely car to a car fair to try and sell her. We stayed there from 9am to 12, but no one was interested so we left with our baby car. We then met up with one of our friends in from Wellington that is in Christchurch for the weekend. This country is small and we keep seeing the same people all around the country. We had coffee together, before dropping him off at the airport.

We showed the car to an Israeli couple that fired questions at us, we did our best to answer all of them.

We headed back to the campsite where we stayed last night only to discover that the food we left in the fridge had been taken by someone. That and the reaction of the camp group owner annoyed me enough to bug them for a refund and move us to another campsite in the suburb of Belfast, Christchurch.