When the Cormiers met the Dunns…

Sounds like the title of a Winnie the Pooh story… Both sets of parents came, saw and pretty much conquered New Zealand over the Easter weekend… Katie’s parent’s in all their English splendour with sun hats, anoraks, amazing sunglasses, cameras, binoculars and huge mobile phone cases a permanent presence. Seb’s parents holding up the side for Germany with their amazing campervan trundling thousands of kilometers across the land, acting mainly as a traveling wine cellar, as they stopped only for the occasional cigarette break and to re-stock the grape juice and chocolate almond supplies! It was so much fun to have them all here and very sad to see them go again L. Oh well I guess that’s what happens when you live on the other side of the world!

So after they had all departed, we took to the road again for another week’s traveling and exploring, this time in South Island. Our first stop was to re-visit some of my old haunts (I did a 6-week stint, 10 years ago, picking apples in a tiny little town called Richmond, near Nelson). It was very nostalgic, we even managed to find the exact cabin that Georgie and I lived in for that time… surrounded by weird NZ seasonal workers with far too much hair and too few social skills…

From there, we quickly moved on to Abel Tasman to explore the beautiful unspoilt coastline of the national park. Apart from being eaten alive by sandflies, and having only seriously soggy sandwiches and pasta to consume on our 2-day trek, the scene was absolutely idyllic… kayaking to deserted coves and being followed by playful seals, then a casual trek further up the coast line to camp for the night. In our usual, highly organized way we didn’t think to check the tides, so some of the low tide routes that we took, turned out to be rather wet!!

The next day we put on our soggy clothes from the previous day, ate a soggy sandwich and continued for another days trekking up the coast. We were really lucky with the weather and had stunning sunshine the whole day. A water taxi took us back to the start at the end of the day, with a quick stop at the seal colony on one of the islands on the way back, this rounded off our trip nicely.

So, where to next… south, to the Nelson Lakes National Park. The weather took a turn for the worse here and as we arrived in total pitch blackness to the tiny town of St Arnaud (100 people live here!) it was chucking it down, so camping didn’t seem very appealing and we took a back packers for the night. The next day we did a bracing 3 hour trek up and down Mount Robert… slightly unnerved to hear a kid screaming “HELLO MISS DUNN” at the top of her voice, as we wondered past one of the rest huts up there! Bonkers… one of the children I teach in Wellington was climbing the same mountain as us (may I remind you we’re on South Island, in a National Park, up a bloody mountain) at the same moment as us… NZ is sooooo small!

Then we headed across to the west coast to an extremely exciting little town called Westport… not brilliant, used to be a mining town and has since rather become a nothingy kind of town. So after a couple of beers in a local tavern, surrounded by far to many people who looked like they could have come from Royston Vasey … “Are you local?” and a very wet night in the tent, we moved on down the west coast to Greymouth, driving along some of the most stunning coastal roads where the sea was really kicking up a stink and has created some amazing coastal formations for all you geology geeks out there!

Our next stop we decided would be Kaikoura, right over on the east coast, so we crossed the entire island that day in order to get there by night-fall. The drive was again absolutely stunning as we drove through the Kaikoura mountain ranges as the sun was setting… ahhh so romantic in our brown Honda accord, which is by this time absolutely knee deep in long car journey rubbish and smells like wet dog…

Anyway, we treated ourselves for the last 2 nights of our holiday by renting an ensuite cabin at a holiday park… it had a toaster and kettle and everything! Kaikoura is a town famous in historic terms for whaling, but since you’re not really allowed to kill them anymore, they’ve changed their tourist focus to just looking at the whales. Very nice if you’ve got the money, but both Seb and I have done a whale watching trip before and didn’t fancy it again! Instead we took a lovely stroll along the beach to look at the seals, which we could actually get really close to. In a rather David Attenborough moment, I crouched behind a rock to have a pee at one point and turned around to find a large seal rearing up on the rock just above my head… he didn’t seem too bothered, so we both just carried on our business!

Now we’re back home again and Seb’s back to work, while I have a few more days of the Easter hols left to write a blog and do other exciting things like washing, cleaning, cooking and food shopping… life is the same everywhere you go!

Lots of love to you all, keep those comments and e-mails coming… we love hearing from you.

Katie and Seb