The holiday feeling started straight away with a hilarious driver on the Auckland airport bus. He was a very jovial chap who kept stopping to wait for people to visit cash points, not caring that the cars behind him would have preferred him to go when the traffic light was green! He raised a laugh by ticking off a couple saying a fond farewell at the bus stop.
A couple of hours later we were in Christchurch. We spent an hour or two there, catching sight of the Botanic Gardens and the inside of a supermarket before heading off with our camper van. We had a Jucy Crib for 8 days - a converted people-carrier/minivan with a bed in the back. It was rather cosy but served us well, handled like a car and allowed us to overtake lots of larger conventional camper vans.
We reached Kaikoura that night, ate a tasty dinner at the White Morph, and more or less managed to assemble the bed in the dark with a bottle of wine in us.
The next morning we were out early for a guided kayaking trip around Kaikoura's fur seal colony. It was pretty good, but we were a bit hampered by a Japanese couple in the group who spoke no English and couldn't get the hang of making the thing go forwards... Still we enjoyed paddling close to a few swimming seals and admired some more on the rocks.
High spot of the outing was when we brought the kayaks back to the beach. Paddling at the shore we were a few feet away from two huge sting rays in the shallows - one of them must have been 6ft across.
We finished up our Kaikoura visit with barbecued crayfish at a beachside stall, before heading north up the coast - we had a long way to cover in a week.
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