Week 1

We finally made it to NZ and the first week has flown, or should I say motored, by.

The flight left us pretty zonked out for the first few days. We flew out Friday evening and didn't get to bed until what was the equivalent of Sunday morning. I didn't feel travel sick until after landing. Wandering around Christchurch I kept getting air motion when you feel as if you're still moving up and down in the air - a bit like getting off a boat and everything is still bobbing up and down. Very weird.

Christchurch was very relaxing and chilled out so we had a nice day or so pottering about there.

Then we picked up the campervan and have been up graded to a 4 berth! Either way its a fairly huge vehicle but Mat is doing well with the driving - and Yvette's excited us with 80 hair-raising kilometres of her own piloting. We're also learning how all the onboard facilities work. We realised we needed to empty the dirty water tank when it backed up into the shower tray - lovely.

This is our home:

For the first day with the van we took it easy and went to the nearby Harbour town of Akaroa for the night which was very pretty, then we high tailed it inland to the mountains. It was fairly spectacular: glaciers, snow capped peaks and turquoise blue glacial lakes.

This was the view from our campsite:

That's Aoraki, NZ's highest hill in the far distance.

We're now down on the SE coast in the city [more like a town really] of Dunedin. We had a fab drive to here and stopped off to see real live wild penguins and seals on the beach which were very cute. Today has been a bit more cultural in the city visiting the museum and historic buildings. It's a bit odd doing history stuff when nothing is older than 150 years or so. Even the Maoris have only been here for 1,000 years. Anyway, it's more penguin watching for us tomorrow.

For the next few weeks we shall continue enjoying our Skippy cornflakes and lamenting that marmite doesn't taste as good over here. Mat will also continue Almera watching - it appears that the Nissan Almera was rather popular over here. Check this out, some kind of Almera Offroader ! Fantastic ....

Bye for now.