Back to where we started

I am now sitting in a garden cafe in Akaroa, enjoying a banoffee cake and a cup of raspberry tea while Justus is out trying to catch today's third sleeping train with Junia. In an hour and a half we will meet up mum and Håkan in this fantastic little French bistro where we had our first meal in New Zealand almost two months ago. And tomorrow we will hand in our camper van after three weeks, and head for the North island. Exciting! Justus is a bit sad that the camping days are over, but the only thing I feel sorry about are the next happy campers when they open our gas chamber (the cupboard where we kept our shoes. Junia's nappies smells like toffee sauce in comparison). We will now have a normal car again, and hopefully sleep in places with toilets and showers, maybe even in the same building as our bed. I will however miss the possibility to spread out my stuff everywhere and not having to pack every night.

So, what have we done lately? From the west coast we moved on inland towards the tourist mekkas of Wanaka, Queenstown and Arrowtown. Good food, cute places and crowded camp sites. It felt a bit like sleeping on a parking lot. Then we headed south west to Fiordland, some wilderness camping and the famous milford sounds. Beautiful and probably very much like Norway (haven't been). We have however realised that the experienced beauty of a place we somehow find directly negatively proportional with the number of people there. That might have sounded a bit too mathematical (can't even remember the correct term for it), but basically; crowded with japanese, or even worse - cruise ships passengers, means get out of here ASAP. That explains why we did not even have time to try the home made ice cream in cinema paradiso in Wanaka (as someone decided that I'm only allowed to one dessert/day and that day's quota was already filled) which I'm still a bit upset about.

Bueno, old mining town Clyde was rather empty to our big delight, and there we pallade plums, peaches, black berries and walked the old railway track Clyde-Alexandra where I had the best lamb-mint burger in my life. Absolutely beautiful! (Both the 25 km walk, the burger and the fresh fruit). In that area, central otago, famous for all the fruit we also stocked up in a place called Cromwell. The lady in the tourist office seriously could not come up with any ideas about what we could do in the area so we ended up taking a photo of the city sign, which seemed to be the biggest attraction. Places like that are cool.

But now we are again in the former French settlement of Akaroa, where we spent this morning swimming with the world's smallest dolphin, hector's dolphin. It was such a kick you even forgot how freezing cold it was. We also saw some of the world's smallest penguin, little blue penguin. They like to keep it simple these kiwis.

Hope that all is fine with you blog readers, be happy that you live in places without the merci-less sandflies! (Have killed five while writing this and don't want to think about how many I missed.)