Kiwi travels by Lemmo

Ok, so it's been a bit of a while since we updated this and we have been to lots of places and done lots of things, therefore to save you from the boredom of reading a really long post, and to prevent my typing fingers bleeding, I will try and keep this short and sweet.

Our last few days in Queenstown were spent out on the rivers in jet boats, playing typical tourist and seeing a few of the Lord of the Rings film sites, visiting a bird santuary, where we got to see some Kiwi's (so much bigger than expected - chicken sized!) - the staff had a sense of humour failure when I asked whether they also tasted like chicked! We visited the Ice Bar and the Boiler Room as well as some other pubs for the odd drink or two, and yes the Ice Bar was cold (funnily enough, it was completely made of ice - including the glasses that we drank from) and the Boiler Room next door was very hot!

After Queenstown, we headed to Te Anau.  We spent a day walking on the Keepler Track, 9hrs of very hard work - lots of it was up hill not surprisingly. However we felt very pleased that we managed to go further than we planned and reached the town before dark! After a bit of a break we then headed down to Milford Sound, which is absolutely stunning.  On the way there we did several more short walks of up to three hours and felt on top of the world at Key Summit, where you can see the beginning of three rivers - one runs to the West coast, the other to the South coast and the third to the East coast.  Our day in Milford began with a boat trip along the Sound (really a Fiord - made from Glaciers, not rivers - wrongly named in the past), where we came across a pod of 50-60 bottlenose dolphins who decided to delight us all by playing around the boat and riding in its wake. Just fantastic!

After a night in the pub with the locals in Milford, who are cut off from the rest of society for most of the year, we decided it was time to head to another out the way place called the Catlins.  This is a drive along the scenic South coast where we spent 2 nights with the best views from our bedroom of the whole trip - an entire wall made of glass that overlooks Porpoise Bay (near Curio Bay). In the bay lived two types of penguins and Hectors dolphins (though unfortunately we did not see any dolphins this time).  After a few days of exploring lakes, waterfalls and beaches with the most gigantic caves - where we ventured inside at lowtide - we finally left this morning to come to Dunedin.  On the way we stopped at a few more beaches where we saw seals and sealions playing in the waves.

The last week has been amazing - the countryside here is stunning/beautiful/(your choice of superlative)!

Tomorrow we will be going in search of Royal Albatrosses on the Otago Peninsula, so fingers crossed we will see some.  We're then off to Wanaka and up the West Coast.

Until then...  Love Elle  x