We visit Kaikoura

 We camped by a beach, look at this sunset.

 We drove past some huge salt pans, where sea water is evaporated and the salt is harvested. These salt hills were huge.

 Even though it is the middle of summer in New Zealand, we can still see snow on some of the mountains.

This is us visiting a waterfall and a pool. In the middle of summer there weren't any seal pups, but in the winter months there are often more than a hundred seal pups swimming here. They leave their mothers for a few days at a time, and climb up a creek to this pond where they play and socialise with other seal pups, then head back to feed with their mothers.

We are on holidays

We found a cafe with a map of the world, it doesn't look like the map we are used to seeing, New Zealand is on top of the world!

 

Visitors are invited to stick a pin into the map to mark where thy come from. We put a pin in Stendal, Germany.

It is the middle of summer here. We will make sure to wear our hats always, the sun is fierce. Sunburned feet, ouch.

We cross the Cook Strait

Our host family is going on holidays to the South Island of New Zealand and we are going too!

Here we are at the ferry terminal in Wellington with our back packs on, ready to board the ship.

This is our ship!

It is a rainy, windy day and the sea is looking a bit rough...

Bye, Wellington. We will see you in a few weeks.

We have a picnic on the beach

  It is the middle if summer in New Zealand, and it was a perfect day to eat an evening meal at the beach.

 This is Oriental Bay on Wellington Harbour. The sand here is golden, but that's a bit misleading because we heard that they import the sand to this beach. Sand on other parts of Wellington Harbour is either pebbles, or dark grey sand.

Cherries and other stone fruits are in season here, and so delicious.

We visit Te Papa

 

Our family took us to Te Papa, New Zealand's national museum.  

There were some enormous troll sculptures from "The Hobbit", they looked so scary!

At Te Papa we also saw a huge gingerbread house. Much too big for us. We preferred the gingerbread house we shared at Christmas time.

The kids in our family told us that their favourite exhibit in the whole museum is this colossal squid. It was found in Antarctic waters, and it is the only colossal squid on display in any museum in the world. It's eyeballs are the size of soccer balls. We are really glad that it is under glass.

We visit the Wellington Airport

Wellington airport is an international airport, but small and very relaxed!

 Weta Workshops created and installed an enormous Gollum at Wellington Airport for the world premiere of The Hobbit. It's huge and a bit creepy and wonderful. We're glad he has a fish to catch, and won't be interested in tiny backpackers like us!

We went for picking berries...

Today we went picking berries from a local orchard.

This is a local tradition in Napier, where there are lots of orchards with gorgeous summer fruits, strawberries, raspberries, apricots, plums, peaches and nectarines.

Here we are in the trays that the pickers use.

"Hans, where are you?"

These berries are so good, we couldn't help ourselves, we had to dive in to the bowl.
Some in the bowl, some in our mouths. Yum!

"Paul, stop eating them all and come and help me!"