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Published: October 19th 2010
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We are now in the South Island and having a ball. We loved it when we first hit the shores and that the sun is shining it's a great change for the last few days. We change into our shorts to take advantage of the drive to Kiakoura. We stopped at a fantastic winery and had to buy a bottle of Tempranillo, stopped at a café on the beach and had lunch and watched a colony of Fur seals. The next day at Kiakoura, I went on a whale watching cruise while Menx has some Personal time to herself to read her book and have coffee and cake. The whale watching has a 98% success rate and if you don't see a whale they give you 80% of the ticket price back. Lets just say, I saw some dolphins and got my money back. It was good Menx didn't go as it was about 3 metre waves.
We drove off to Hanmer Springs and spent the rest of the afternoon soaking in the hot springs. We went back after dinner and watched the sun set in the hot springs - this was great as it was 39 degrees in the water
and getting cold outside.
It was a very cold night and in the morning there was extra snow on the mountains. We were a little worried as we were crossing them to get to Hokitika today. We didn't make if far as we were stopped saying the road ahead was closed, there is no other way around, they were clearing it and we only had to wait for 40 minutes. We drove through the snow covered trees and Menx was happily taking photos through the car window. We thought we had passed the snow and heading to the town when we turned a corner and the road was covered in snow. Menx got a little worried now but a truck had gone through ahead of us and left us some tracks we could drive down. We made it safely to Reefton where we had a great lunch and coffee before reaching Hokitika for the night. We thought Melbourne had 4 seasons in 1 day - we had sun, snow, rain, snow, sun, rain and every other combination you could think of that day.
Hokitika is right on the ocean and a nice little town. We checked out the Hokitika gorge
and some water falls and did a beach walk.
Today we left Holitika for to the glaciers. It seams the west coast is getting some of the bad weather that Melbourne had, and not far down the road it started raining. We reach Franz Josef glacier but the tours have been cancelled for tomorrow. We walked to the look out as far as we could go and then headed to Fox glacier. We are booked on a 830am 1/2 day hike in the morning and the weather is starting to clear so fingers crossed.
We are fine and not near Christchurch at the moment, thanks to those that sent us text messages - we didn't even now about it here. Apparently they have had about 2000 aftershocks since the big quake a month ago.
Happy Engagement Prue and Ben. Hope you had a great night, sorry we couldn't be there but we were thinking of you and I had a single malt in your honour.
Happy Birthday Craig - 40 now - ha ha (I can say that for another 2 months anyway)…
The next few days we are heading down to Queenstown and our Milford Sound overnight
cruise.
Take care and on Thursday we are half way through our holiday - not a happy day at all as we're having too good a time.
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