Kia Ora from New Zealand

Apologies for another update – we’ve got a few hours of fast internet so we’re taking advantage! Cold and snow was not an exaggeration about New Zealand; the pilot announced it was 2 degrees C when we landed about 11am, and it’s not ventured much above 8 for the last week! We knew we had to worry when the lady who sorted our campervan gave us snow chains for the wheels, and said ‘you’d better have a second duvet’! Luckily our campervan has a heater and everywhere is selling hats and gloves. Our campervan is surprisingly nice; definition of nice for this purpose being we have managed to find a cupboard for everything, and we haven’t killed each other yet! Our sofa/bed in the kitchen/living/dining room is also surprisingly comfortable, and our cupboard that they call a toilet and shower/wetroom has hot water (too a limited extent!). All in all, a week in we still like our campervan!

We are currently on the south island, and have so far visited Fox Glacier, Franz Josef Glacier (where we went on a guided ice climb), Lake Matheson and Milford Sound (which was freezing, but amazing!). We’ve also been to Queenstown, Oamaru and Geraldine. Highlights so far have included walking along the beach with sleeping sea lions, the wild penguins we’ve seen; a couple swimming at Milford Sound and the world rarest and most endangered penguin at a reserve near Dunedin. We also watched England (just) beat Argentina in the Rugby World Cup in Dunedin on Saturday night, which was great to see, even if England weren’t exactly at their best! Also in Dunedin, we visited Cadbury World (Carrie’s choice) , which although not quite as big or as interesting as the Bournville version was still amazing, especially as they gave us lots of free chocolate! And witnessed a chocolate waterfall of 1 tonne of daily milk falling 5 metres, Cadbury’s chocolate doesn’t quite taste the same here though (not that it’s stopped us eating it!), and they have quite a few different varieties to us – ‘pebbles’, which are Cadbury’s version of smarties, a ‘moro’, the most popular chocolate bar in NZ; apparently someone is eating one every 3 seconds! They also have ‘perky nana’, a banana flavoured chew bar covered in chocolate, as well as little round orange chocolates called ‘jaffas’, which they roll down the world’s steepest street (which we stupidly climbed!) in their thousands in July each year!

It’s not just Cadbury’s and the weather that make it feel like England here (or Scotland down around Dunedin and further south), but all the food brands they have – Twinning’s, Sunmaid raisins, Kellogg’s, Yoplait, El del Paso, Uncle Ben’s, Dolmio, Ribena, and Flora. They also have all the same toiletries and make-up brands, so going food shopping feels like going to Waitrose! Special note for Adam and Nat: it’s not quite like Waitrose as we heard the theme tune to One Tree Hill being played in the supermarket the other day!  

We are currently in Geraldine to see where they filmed Lord of the Rings (Ryan’s choice) and walk in Peel Forest – the largest indigenous podocarp forest in New Zealand, before leaving for Christchurch tomorrow. The weather forecast is a bit better for further north, so hopefully we will be able to loose the hats and gloves in a couple of days time!

Hope you are all well and enjoying the start of term J