This morning our aim was to get to Oamaru,which is only an hour and a half's drive. Instead of taking the 'motorway' out of town, we decided to instead take the scenic route along North Road. It went over the hill instead of around it, and was very pretty. We stopped at a small town by the beach, Mateaka - or something. It seemed quite ramshackl...

We arrived in Omaru after a short drive from Dunedin and checked into the Top 10 campsite which was lovely. It worked out cheaper to have a 2 bedroom chalet so we got to sleep in a big bed again! We went to the information centre to find out the best place to see the penguins. The Yellow Eyed Penguins are the rarest in the world. They go out to ...

My last day in christchurch the 23rd of May it took me forever to pack up and finally hit the road with my car full of **** in the late afternoon.. It was on to route 1 and heading south for Oamaru. took about 3 hours ish to get there and it was dark at this stage. Oamaru seems to be a nice town but it was completley dead.. i seemed to be the on...

Hi everyone, hope you are all well, Right i have been in New Zealand for one full week now. Done several things since being here although still trying to get used to it. When we landed i kind of thought that it was similar to what i had expected. Especially since our first stop was Christchurch. However now i have been here a week i can see that...

Next day we drove to Oamaru back on the east coast but some way further south. To break up the drive we stopped off at a couple of landmarks on the way. One was a massive dam (deserted) that you could drive across (which was pleasant) and admire the views (by NZ standards, below average). The other was a site called Elephant Rocks. They were a s...

Third time is the charm. We looked for yellow eyed penguins twice around Dunedin but only managed to sit in cold windy weather for a long time. Okay, we are not good naturelist so a long time for us was 30 minutes! Then we drove north a little bit, checked into a "holiday park", the lady said go to the end of this road . . . we did and there was...

We reluctantly left Mt. Cook for Oamaru on the coast. I had received an email from dad, intrigued by our visit to the glacier and asking me to bottle a sample of the glacier water and sending it to him by UPS so he could have it tested for purity. For those of you who don't know my father, he is, well...eclectic to say the least. Bit of a mad sc...