Tea with the fur seals

Back in Womba, we were off on the road again, to drive down the East Coast as far as Christchurch where we'd hook up again with Chris and Heather. The weather was beautiful and our drive back through the wine region was so much prettier than before. We drove down through Nelson (and grabbed a quick cheese toastie to go) and then on through Blenheim. Everyone had raved about Kaikoura so we planned to break up the 300km drive with a night there. Legend had it that there are fur seals practically tethered to the side of the road so it seemed a good place to stop and see if we could spot one!

Nothing prepared us for the breahtaking (literally) view of the Southern Alps as we hit the East Coast. They just take you by surprise and then there suddenly in front of you are the massive snowy peaks. For about 100km we were driving with the South Pacific Ocean on one side and the Southern Alps on the other. It's amazing! On the way to Kaikoura we stopped at a place called The Store that was written up in our Lonely Planet as having the best road side views - which it did. But still no seals...

But wait, what's that? No sooner had we got back on the road then we started spotting some suspiciously 'slug-shaped' formations on the rocks. "It's a seal!" we cried! (Well, actually, I can't take any credit. Despite being on 'seal duty', Guy in fact spotted them whilst driving around hairpin bends - he really has the eyes of a hawk!). We pulled in and spent a brilliant hour watching them and taking hundreds of photos (check out the fighting seal shots on the gallery - Guy was loving the 'muti-shot sports' setting on the camera!). They are such funny and endearing creatures but really fiesty and rough when they want to be. We were able to get really close to them especially with my new super dooper zoom lens!

Moving on to Kaikoura we picked this great little campsite with views up to the Alps and found ourselves a sun terrace for a beer. We then walked around the bay and sampled some fish of the day that was so fresh and tasty. Kaikoura was very pretty and you just spend the whole time mesmerised by the views up to the mountains. At the harbour, we encountered an old fur seal that seemed to have broken away from the colony and was just hanging out on the rocks where the fisherman pulled in. He looked pretty battle-scarred so we call him 'The Old Major'!

That night - our last in Womba - was spent packing up and trying to squeeze all our miscellaneous possessions that we'd acquired into our bags. Not an easy task and the evening was spent doing a tense 'dance' around each other as we tried to manoeuvere two people and two giant rucksacks in the back of a tiny campervan! The next morning we dumped a load of half used tins and unopened packs of rice in the kitchen with a note for people to 'help themselves' before heading on to Christchurch to give back Womba. But we couldn't leave Kaikoura without one last view of the seals, so we drove to the famous colony at Point Kean to have breakfast with them. Dawn isn't a great time to see seals, we found out, but nevertheless a few had turned up and we shared a cup of tea with them while looking back onto the Alps.

We then drove on to Christchurch to give up our lovely Womba. It was a sad moment as she'd been a brilliant van and we'd had such fun bombing around NZ in her - but we vowed that there would be other Wombas and our campaervan-ing days were definitely not over!