Marlborough Wine Region and the East Coast of South Island

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Starting out from Picton we camped the night at Curious Cove, well I wasnt that curious as it definitely was a cove! This formed part of the Marlborough East Coast scenic drive which certainly offered some of the most challengin driving terrain to date, needless to say the Spaceship is definitely rear wheel drive!

We stopped off at Monkey Bay where Lisa seemed in her element frolicking around the rock caves and had a sudden urge for bananas, she certainly did not want to leave. The views from here were magnificent and the bay almost empty, a great intro to the South Island scenery! From here we travelled to Blenheim & Renwick vineyards of which there are over 30 in a very small proximity but unfortuanetly we only had time for 3. Whats funny is turning up at these vineyards talking crap about the fruitiness of the vintage having been freedom camping for the last 2 nights! We ate some peaches before visiting cloudy bay winery and everything tasted like peaches, I dont think we are quite the connoisseur that Dad was, actually come to think of it some of his wine was quite interesting!!! Lisa did quite a bit of the driving during the tour which is strange (no it isnt...grr) and I decided that most New World wines are overpriced...however we did find some nice Reisling and Mount Riley sparkling Sauvignon Blanc.

From Blenheim we headed South through the gargantuan Molesworth Station, which is over 182k Hectares of farmland, the largest in NZ. I am suprised they can find any of the sheep..... We stopped off to admire the seals at Half Moon Bay and arrived at Kaikoura and camped in anticipation of seeing whales the following morning. Kaikoura was a bit of a tourist trap so we ended up camping on South Beach near a racecourse whose toilets you had to use, unfortuanetly you had to do about 3 furlongs to get to them and I had a drunk a bottle of Mount Riley sparkling...! Put it this way I was 5-1 on for getting there or not, Kevin you know what I mean!!

The following day we headed to get the boat after having booked a week in advance confident of a full days whale watching as the seas where docile and tranquil. Cancelled! Apparently the seas around the pacific shelf were very rough and unsuiatable for sailing, with a cancellation policy of waiting another week to maybe go out, we threw in the towel. Needless to say the attached photo is the only whale we got to see.

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Photos

James hadn't shaved for a while and had frankly let himself go
Half Moon Bay Seals