Friday January 10, 2014

Another late night chatting to Biffy.  She is a really interesting person and has travelled extensively.  She advised us to take a different route than the one we had planned.  Going inland to the lake districts of Tekapo and then down to Queenstown.  I wanted to go to Dunedin and see the penguins in Omaru.  We don’t actually have to decide on the route until tomorrow night when we have to go further inland or back out to the coast.  Other people we have spoken to say we should go inland.  I think we will be going inland.

Today’s ride was a very flat ride out of Christchurch, the wind was behind us most of the way.  Rather an uneventful ride, very quiet back country road (The Old West Coast Road).

At one point all we could see down the road was very tall cedar hedgerows.

We occasionally got a glimpse of the mountains – which are snow-topped.

For all of those Canadians who are emailing us about the amount of snow you have, there is snow here too 🙂

A very noisy and social camp-site tonight.  We spoke to Dana who was making a wonderful pumpkin and kumara, spinach, feta, sun-dried tomato and spinach salad.  How do we know it had all those wonderful ingredients because as we sat down to eat our pasta supper she bought us a bowl of it, yum lovely.

This site had a lot of Kiwis on holiday with lots of kids running around.  When we arrived Ralf said what a great site for kids, they have to use their imagination and play, as there was no games room, no TV and no pay as you go internet.  Of course at 9:00 when we were ready for bed the kids were still “using their imagination” and building forts and dens not far from our tent.  Everything quieted down around 10:15.  Ralf commented he might be featured on the news tomorrow “Missing Kiwi Children at Campsite”.