Chez la Mer Akaroa

Friday March 19th It turns out that if I had left yesterday and gone like a bat out of hell up the coast I would have been able to see Meat Loaf's final concert of his world tour in Christchurch. Instead I decided to stay in Dunedin to see the penguins and albatrosses, but not the world's steepest street. I wasn't sad, as two out of three ain't bad. Woke up to a stunning sunrise to take the early bus up to Christchurch. The woman who drove looked like wild drug-addled songstress Courtney Love...

Yay! I have my first tramping blisters! It's like a badge y'know. After my walk up to Mount Cook and subsequent battle with the elements on Wednesday, I awoke to a cloudless sky yesterday after another cosy deep sleep. The view of the mountains in the distance as I opened the curtains was crystal clear and Mount Cook was showing the results of yesterdays freak weather - a heavy coat of snow covering it's upper third. My plan today was to visit Lake Tekapo, about 60km down the road. I made bre...

Went swimming with Hector dolplhins in Akaroa. After an hour of so of zooming around in the speed boat trying to find a group of dolphins that seemed curious enough to let us swim with them, we finally got to slip into the cold water and give it a go. Basically they had us try to form a rough circle in the water and make lots of noise by turning out snorkels into kazoos and having someone in the middle clack rocks together. Well, it worked! About 6 dolphins came through the circle off and on...

Wow, its been a while since I updated this, I hope both of our avid readers are still checking regularly! From Wanaka we headed to nearby Queenstown, but we ended up in a ****** central hostel with no sound proofing and surrounded by pubs full of adventure seeking adrenaline junkies who were drinking and singing until the small hours of the morning. Don't they know that us oldies need our sleep? Anyway we decamped to the more scenic Glenorchy at the other end of Lake Wakatipu, a charming slig...

DEUTSCH WEITER UNTEN 20th to 21st August - Swimming with Dolphins in Akaroa We leave Christchurch and have a very scenic drive to the Bank Penisular to our destination, Akaroa. On the way not only do we get some great views but we also get some free Mulled Wine and Cheese as a local restaurant, its hard life being a backpacker. Akaroa itself is a small town set on the Peninsular and was home to French settlers, back sometime ago so there is still has a lot of French influence on the town. Aka...

I'd been wanting to head down to the Banks Peninsula for a while, as it was Brenda's favourite part of New Zealand, and she said it was very beautiful. Frenchfest provided me with the perfect excuse to go for the weekend. Akaroa is NZ's only French settlement - whilst the French were sheltering from high winds, the Treaty of Waitangi was signed and made NZ a British colony. How different things could have been! It would definitely be interesting today if NZ was two countries - a former French...

This morning we left Christchurch and took the "scenic" route to Akaroa, also known as the ooooo what's down this road route. We went through Lyttelton and around the cauldera to Diamond Harbour where there is nothing except a "wharf" which is more like a dock. From there we went to "Port" Levy, which is a couple of fallen over broken pier pilings at the end of a grassy dirt road with a falling apart corregated shack. Here we had lunch as the view was spectacular. (Sorry no pix, we are on a s...

Went swimming with Hector dolphins yesterday (Monday) it was fantastic they are the smallest dolphins in the world and local to this area of New Zealand. It was a pod of about 20 and they swam around and in between our group. Staying in a great hostel Chez le Mer Backpackers which is well worth staying in, am going to walk up to the hills to get a great view of the harbour today.

2nd Week It was cold on the day i start the tour, on a scenic bus, costly but worth of it. Tour Guide @ bus driver is funny & nice & willing to let ur down anytime we wanna take a photo, or he introduced something he proud of to us, so the trip actually took about 2 hours, rather than the 1 1/2 hrs. And it start raining & snowing on the hill tops on the day i left. Amazingly view, for someone that never see snow before like me...and i believe it would be getting cold for the next ...

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