Well, as we said in the last blog, we have now left the land of the Aussie’s and have set off to New Zealand, but what we forgot to say was how far we had travelled in this vast country.

We have travelled about 3100 miles on the train (3000 on the Indian Pacific and the rest between Perth & Fremantle), about 1500 by ship (mostly on the cruise ship, but some on the various ferry rides we took in Perth and Sidney) and about 400 miles by car and coach (about 300 miles on the various trips we did).

So that’s about 5000 miles in total around this great country of Australia, but even at that, we have barely scratched the service and there is so much more of it to see.

Once leaving Burnie, on the north coast of Tasmania, we had a couple of days sailing across the Tasman Sea, towards our first sight of New Zealand, on day three, where we sailed up and down Milford Sound and saw its spectacular scenery, with literally hundreds of beautiful and often very big waterfalls and no, we are not joking, there were hundreds of them.

We then sailed through Doubtful Sound and through Dusty Fford, before arriving on day four at our first landfall in New Zealand, called Port Chambers, on the Dunedin Peninsular.

Once we arrived in Port Chambers, we embarked on a great ‘Wildlife Safari’, where half of it was on eight-wheeled vehicles, across some really rough country and the rest on a coach.

But it was well worth all the bumping around over the rough terrain, because we saw fur seals and penguins 👍👍

Although we were not allowed to film the penguins as they were in nest boxes, which we peeped into, they came ashore on this beach.

Our next stop was Akaroa, where we embarked on a trip across to Christchurch, quite a long, about 1 & 1/2 hours (each way), coach trip, where we did a tour of the city, followed by a punting trip down the Avon River followed by a visit to the Melton Winery for some wine tasting Hic Hic!

We also did a ride around the 75 acres of Botanic Gardens in a caterpillar bus, which was pretty neat.

Sadly, Christchurch has been devastated by a number of very strong earthquakes, starting in 2010, with the latest just three years ago, which resulted in huge amounts of the city being destroyed and 185 people killed and many more injured!

This has lead to a total redesign of the building standards, to help to make buildings earthquake proof (hopefully) and a move away from high rise buildings, with the highest allowed now, just seven storey’s – let’s hope the new designs work.

Thats all for now, it’s time for a drink (it’s five o’clock somewhere ) 🍺🍺🍷🍷👫