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Published: November 17th 2012
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The next part of our trip involved driving down to Bluff, which although not technically the furthest southern point is considered so by many, a bit like Cape Reinga in the north. The drive itself was not as spectacular as those that have come before, but was made much nicer by another lovely sunny crisp day. We drove straight to Bluff and parked at the top of the Bluff hill view point. We did a short walk of about 2 hours down the hill and round the coast a small way ending with climbing back up the hill. After the last few days activities it was proving more difficult an we expected. We did enjoy our lunch sat outside the van on the hill looking out over bluff and the Catlins though.
We had decided to go to Invercargill to stay for the night, which is a town about 40mins drive north of Buff. We had planned to go and visit the Invercargill brewery, listed in the lonely planet as a brilliant microbrewery with free tastings. So after sorting out a campsite, we headed there. The streets of Invercargill were really quiet, it's quite a big town, it there just
seemed to be no cars or people around at all. When we walked into the brewery shop, a guy walked in and asked us what we wanted, and it appeared was only keen to let us try small samples of the 4 beers he had on tap, nice hint lonely planet! We asked him for some bar recommendations and headed into town to waste away the afternoon. Then we spent a standard evening in the van with tea and dvd's. The next day we were driving to Dunedin, which Sarah described to us as Edinburgh in NZ. The drive was scenic and coastal and helped along by the continued beautiful weather. We stopped for some lunch in amongst the rolling fields and sheep. After arriving in Dunedin we went for a drive round the Otago peninsular. This was a beautiful drive along the coastline, and the river mouth area. After this we had a potter around to do some shopping, and take in the feel of the city. Following this we went to the Speights brewery. Speights Is a really popular New Zealand beer (think Stella in the UK) and the brewery tour was great fun. It was a really
historic building currently using old English equipment to brew all their beer, but in the middle of massive redevelopment after losing their Christchurch factory in the earthquakes. It also gifted us 40mins with a free self serve bar of tasters. After this we went to the campsite and parked up for our last campervan night, we had planned to make this one last BBQ, but unfortunately this was the first campsite to charge for using the gas BBQ, and we had no cash on us, so grill it was! The next day we had to drive back to Christchurch to return the van. This was by far the longest driving day at about 5 hours. The drive itself was pretty straightforward. More rolling hills and farmland helped along by a mega hot sunny day. We got back to Christchurch in plenty of time to check into the hotel and unload our stuff and then went to take the camper van back. We had a good hour to get it back and the sat nav told us it would take about 15 minutes. No problem we thought, all we've got to do is get petrol and refill the gas canister. It
almost fell apart with the refilling of the gas canister, whereas we went past plenty of petrol stations able to refill on the main drive, the garages of Christchurch couldn't refill the gas canister. We finally found one about 15 minutes before we had to have the van back and it wasn't far from the drop off point. We then had to wait ten minutes only for the guy to say that it didn't need it anyway. Balls! We had yet another close shave with a rental vehicle.
The company offered to drop us off at the bus station, and we said yes, thinking that although we had no cash, bus station sounded like somewhere that would have a cash machine. Unfortunately, she did not mean bus station, she meant bus stop. From there we ended up walking about an hour before we finally came across a shop and a cash machine! Finally we made it back to our hotel to start our Christchurch adventure.
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