Waiting for the boat...
Well, the roads were less windy and we got through the last bit a bit quicker than we expected! We're in Picton!
After Greymouth we drove up north and visited the Pancake Rocks in the Punakaiki Reserve and then went further north and visited a seal colony at Cape Foulwind... which stank! But the seals were very cute! We cut into land through the national parks and camped somewhere inbetween there and the Abel Tasmen in a carpark next to the Owen River.
Yesterday we made it to the Abel Tasman... which was really quiet. We went for a walk up the coast and saw lots of Oyster Catchers and other birds. We went to the weirdest campground as there was a "Spaceship Station" and we wanted to swap over our dvds (Yes... our Spaceship even has a 7" dvd player in it!) It was called "Old Macdonalds Farm and Campsite"... it was dead... there were a few cows.. and one or two ducks but no people. It was slightly scarey as the signs were all hand painted and circus like and were faded and worn out and so it looked deserted. Weird, because the things I thought were creepy were also the things I thought were quite cool! Old Macdonald did eventually turn up and we swapped the dvds and went on our way... would have been nice to have stayed if we'd had longer though - the cows and ducks were very cool! :oP
So on we went to Nelson... It was there that we stumbled across the first Chavs we have seen in NZ... 3 cars of them in the botanical gardens carpack! We decided not to leave the car there and went and found some safer street parking... this country is so like home in so many ways! We did the walk up a very steep hill to the centre of New Zealand. It's funny... we don't know how they worked out where the centre was... but they must have been very happy that it lay right on the top of the hill and not in a bog to the side! A nice man with a huge dog showed us one of NZ less treasured birds... the Native Pigeon... who are fat as. At the top of the hill, at the centre of New Zealand... we bumped into the boys who had been on our Glacier walk - we had also bumped into them at Pancake Rocks so that was very weird! Less weird than when we bumped into the girl on our Kakadu trip in Queenstown, but hey. We chatted to them then went our own way again and started heading to Picton.
Last night we had our 3rd freecamping night so this morning we made it to Picton (going via a few scenic bits) and arrived rather smelly! So we are in a 5* campsite with spa and are now squeaky clean ready for the North Island!