The ferry crossing went very smoothly and we landed at Picton, picked up a new rental car and set off for Blenheim – a town in the Marlborough wine producing areas.  This time we decided to visit just a couple of vineyards independently – Montana, because it is the most widely known in the UK, and Saint Clair, which was really nice wine.  Unfortunately there was a rather snotty English couple in the last one and the woman was making copious notes about each wine, when Dan said he thought one of the wines had more flavour than the previous one she said, very haughtily, ‘not more, just different!’.

The motel rooms are amazing and put English hotels to shame.  They are like 4 star hotel rooms, spotlessly clean, have microwaves, fridges, tea and coffee and if there is no hob there is always an electric frying pan. In addition there are guest laundry facilities.

We only had one night in Blenheim and headed on to Kaikoura – which means crayfish meal in Maori, so we had to sample the famous crayfish lunch at a roadside kiosk.  Crayfish here is the size of a lobster except they don’t have front pincers, just long legs.  It tasted just like lobster really.  On the journey we stopped several times to see the fur seals which were basking on the rocks, they were really cute.  We decided to self cater for the night and bought a fish called ‘rig’ from the nearby supermarket, apparently it’s also known as lemon fish, it was delicious.

The next leg of the journey was to Akoroa, (which means long harbour in Maori) an idyllic little harbour town  on the Banks peninsular.  It was a steep climb and then descent into the town, but we stopped at the top of the range of mountains before our descent and looked down on the glorious view of emerald green water and huge volcanic mountains rising from the shores.  Akoroa is one of the most beautiful places we have ever been in the world – very reminiscent of Annecy in France – in fact it has a strong French influence as a colony of French immigrants settled here in about 1840.  We went for an after dinner walk on the first night and ended up looking in at the small cinema opposite our motel, where 2 women were trying to drum up 2 more people to watch the film as 4 is the minimum required, so we duly obliged and they bought us a drink!  We saw a very sweet Italian film called Marcello, Marcello – Dan could even follow the plot!

We have been out on another nature spotting harbour cruise and saw hector dolphins (the smallest in the world),  white flippered penguins (also the smallest in the world), and more seals.

Time to move on again to Dunedin …next blog!