Wednesday 10th
We both had a pretty awful nights sleep last night, mainly due to the type of rain and how it was falling on the van. We were both awake from around 6am and by 7am we were in line for the ferry across to the South Island. By 7.30 we were ordering breakfast and by 8 we were walking about the ferry. We found the observation deck but my goodness it was freezing cold and extremely windy and raining so didn't stay there long! There was a movie area where we sat and watched Kung fu panda and The Help over the time we were on the ferry. I had to keep going outside though because I felt very sea sick, I could hardly open the door to get out it was stormy outside. In the end I was actually sick, managed to get to the toilet in time though thankfully. After that we bought some travel sickness tablets and both Liam and I needed them because it was so rocky. So much for it being a beautiful journey, could hardly see anything and could hardly even stand upright! Because of the bad weather we were late getting to picton by about an hour and a half, once we were on land we drove down the high street just for the sake of seeing what was there. Not much as it turns out. So we began our drive to Nelson. Right from the beginning the shift in scenery from north to south was very dramatic. There were mountains surrounding us from all sides in the distance covered with snow but unfortunately it was difficult to get decent shots of it all inside the van. We drove along the coast towards Nelson, stopped for a short while to walk around the high streets, nice town but that's it, a town and not really much we were bothered about staying for. Its supposed to be a great place in the summer but its cold now so we spent 20 minutes looking at our skydive photos for the first time and upload some onto Facebook using some computers.
Drove through stoke which is much nicer than our one, nice houses and shops. Then it was onwards through motueka. By this time was around 5pm and the sun was just beginning to lower, the shapes and formations of the clouds made for some beautiful views with the sun behind. I must have taken about 50 photos of clouds on the way across. We both felt a little bit sick in the van, the roads are very windy but I think some of it was left over from the ship if that's even possible. We stayed at..... By the beach and treated ourselves to baked potatoes done in the microwave and watched mr poppers penguins, as well as getting some washing done before settling down to sleep for around 9.30pm.
Thursday 11th
Was sort of awake from 5 this morning partly due to needing the toilet and it being too cold to get out. At 6am Liam put the heating on but over an hour later it was still freezing, when I looked he had put the cold air on so we had been having old air bursting out for an hour. What a clutz! It took a while to heat up from there which meant we were a bit later getting away, then we had to go to 3 separate water stations to try and fill the water because the hoses were all frozen solid! No wonder we had been freezing, it was ver frosty and cold outside. We left the site at around 9.30 and drove past the beach...it was supposed to be a nice stop over but I think that's more of a summer activity somehow. So we enjoyed the view for a few moments before leaving the area.
If we thought the roads were windy in the north then bloody hell we were wrong, they're a whole new level of bends here. Liam had to take a travel sickness tablet it was so bad today, maybe my driving contributed towards that though. We drove to the AbelTasman coastal track and did a short walk along there, we were gone from the vs no more than an hour and a half just because we know there's so much to see we are happy just doing tasters of things. The track was nice, as you can probably guess it was along the coast line so we got to look out over the sea a lot of the time and see the snow capped mountains on the other side. It was very cold but we walked at a good pace to try and stay warm.
We were initially going to drive up to pupu (haha) springs because its supposedly beautiful up there and the waters are some of the clearest in the world. However after seeing how long it would take and knowing we only have limited time to see as much as possible we opted out of not going up that way. Maybe next time!
Instead we made our way down to Buller gorge and went across the very long swing bridge over the Buller river. It was a great thing to do, there was an option to do a zip wire and other things like that but we were more than happy walking across. We completed a short walk around the area which in itself was interesting because the place we were walking was created by an earthquake in 1921, the whole ground shifted up by 4m in the quake.
After that we had more driving to do to get to Westport. Just the driving is great, the scenery is beautiful with a mixture of tamer farmland and miles and miles of nature reserves and forest. We decided not to go further than that because it was going to be dark soon and we wanted to try and see some seals that were perhaps 20 minutes south of there. We went to a restaurant and bar and had a drink, hoping to get some wifi with it but it was rubbish so that didnt happen. After a lot of driving we were ready just to settle down for the evening so headed down to the beach where we had been told was free camping. We drove down to the edge of what to us seemed like a perfectly fine place to park and look out. Only after we had looked and went to reverse back and round to find a gravelled area we got stuck in the sand...it wasn't that deep but with the weight of the van it was just too much. Luckily there was a group of people not far away from us with 2 vans also looking out from the same sort of spot we had been. They made no move to come see if we needed help despite watching us so I had to approach them and ask. The men were very reluctant to help initially, it took the lady with them to persuade them which I thought strange.
They did help which we are grateful for, luckily they had 2 trucks, although only one was needed, so with the equipment to tow us so we weren't short of help from them. They were just an odd bunch, it felt obvious they were taking the mick out of us the whole time and one in particular was outright rude and distasteful of us. They helped us out though so that was that. We will be taking extra precautions after getting stuck twice now!
We spent the evening liam cooking our tea, watching some special features of lord of the rings and me trying to get up to date with blogs. Liam became paranoid people were going to come and give us hassle through the night due to a car driving past very quickly at about 8pm.
