West Coast Post

Since we last posted we have since moved to the south island. After seeing the pretty capital city of Wellington, where we spent half a day at the impressive Te Papa Museum and checked out the harbour front. We then boarded the ferry for the 3 hour ride to the south island. Upon arriving we headed west to view a seal colony and ended up getting some excitement watching a coast guard rescue of a swimmer that got swept out in high tide (turned out to be a valuable lesson for our land locked children of the dangers of the ocean). From their we headed south and did an underground caving tour (www.caverafting.com) on float tubes where we learnt lots on caves and floated underneath the largest colony of glow worms in the world. It was very cool and it felt like we were sitting under a million stars on the clearest night. We have since moved further south and viewed both the Fox and Franz Josef glaciers. It has been a bit of a whirlwind over the past few days as there is not a lot of activity or towns but lots of treks and smaller hikes for those with the energy. I am not sure if it is because we are currently "trekked out" after Peru or the fact that E hasn't been feeling great but we have pretty much avoided any hikes and used our windshield time to enjoy the scenery.

The scenery is absolutely stunning and seems to change by the hour. It is also much different than the north island. We were commenting today that we have seen deserts, rain forests, mountains, glaciers, pasture land, timber forests and beaches all within this small country.

With all the driving we have done since the "incident" it has been fairly uneventful with the occasional moment of sheer terror. We have found that when we do not have any reference such as parked cars or traffic it has taken us a bit of time before either one of us notices that we are driving on the wrong side of the road. Driving is definitely not boring here with steep inclines, tight Ianes, no shoulders and the odd one shared lane stretch of highway/bridges. It really challenges my six speed manual transmission abilities, I definitely long for the drive on the QE2 where it is straight, has shoulders and you can use cruise control.

We would like to thank all that leave comments on the blog and send us emails. It is nice to know people are following us. We do read them all but apologize that we do not respond to all of them as we tend to have limited internet most of the time.

Tomorrow we head off to Queenstown then Milford Sound for a few days so we may be off the grid for a few days.

Bye for now!