Coastal Lodge Kekerengu

For the past month, most of our time has been spent with the fantastic Judge family in Seddon. For whatever reason we have neglected to inform all of you of our recent adventures. Here is our tale ... From the sounds we headed south a worked for the most non-organic Wwoof host in NZ for a week, and then down to Seddon, half an hour south of wine country to the Judges. The plan being to spend a week or two working off a rafting trip which Ben ...

Fire. Believe me ladies, if you want your fella out of the way for a while give him some matches and an endless supply of stuff to burn. The primeival side of any many will come out when faced with this scenario. He'll spend hours stood next to an oil drum or a pile of burning leaves giving it a 'knowing' poke and on the occasions when you do go out just to check he's not burnt himself to death he will serenade your ears with stories of camping as a kid and how he has ...

I can't exactly remember what I wrote in my last blog and because I'm on 56k Dial-Up I'm not about to wait for 15 minutes for it to load up to find out, so I will start with Monday. I've basically been given the option by Colleen on my hours of work. I can work 4 hours and then have the rest of the day to myself or work a full day and take a day off. I figured I wanted to spend a day walking around Kaikoura so on Monday I decided on a full days work. It was a national holiday here ...

Kaikoura - My Dad flew over from China for a short trip. Rather then spend all the time in Wellington we took the ferry over to the south island to spend a few days exploring. It was typical weather (windy) leaving Wellington, which meant the swells across the Cook Straight were 3 to 4 metres which made for a rough trip. Once we got into Marlborough Sounds ...

when we got to the whale watching office the next day our trip was on. it lasted about 3 hours and we saw 2 sperm whales and 2 different surfacing times. i got an awesome video on one diving down to feed which ill put up here tomorrow. i was so happy that we did the whale watching. despite being a bit over-priced, it was amazing to get near to the creatures as i find them so fascinating!

... 7am the next morning our time. we came across a really nice (and cheap) campsite which had sky so james was a very happy bunny. in the evening we decided to test that our brains still worked and attempted to local pub quiz. the end result was that we didn't win, but we didn't come last so we were ecstatic!

... landed on the water and became the North Island. The South Island was Maui's canoe, and Kaikoura's peninsula was the seat of the canoe, which Maui used to brace his foot. Fertile and accessible, it's easy to see why this peninsula would be so important to a culture surviving in such grand but sometimes difficult surrounds. The seals were mostly basking on offshore rocks, safe from rubes with ...

... it was a beautiful summers day. A freaky coincidence happen again today where I bumped into a girl that I had had a chat with in a bar in Xian in China for about 10 minutes last October. She was in my dorm and I hadn't seen her since that night. Again very small world.

... other varieties and gives Alasdair terrible indigestion, so we were keen to avoid them. We managed to drink our way around five wineries. We were particularly keen to visit George Michel`s winery but were disappointed to discover that the owner was never in Wham! and almost certainly has never been caught asleep in his car at a roundabout. While there we met the worst kind of wine taster. When going for a tasting there are bound to be other people having a free ...

... plane that looked like it was about to crash into the road. It made a hard banking turn just in time to touch down in a open field and taxi down the other end like it probably does every day, but it sure gave us a hell of a fright. We veered off the main road towards Gore Bay where we had read that there was some great regional surfing. As we came down the hills we stopped to marvel at Cathedrals which is where the exposed limestone cliffs had been beautifully eroded ...