I See the Sea........

Greetings, well a lot has happened since my last blog, so I'll have to break my happenings up into 2 blogs. Right now I'm in Franz Josef and will do a glacier walk tomorrow. Hopefully the rain will take a day off.
The only thing going faster than the time has been the money, but hey, this is what I was savin' for when I was returning nachos because they didnt have chicken on them.
Windy Welly was a nice city with a well-defined town centre that had lots of shops and pedestrian walk-ways, with some good craic at night to boot. Unfortunately, my stay there was cut short since unbeknownst to me the Rolling Stones were coming to town so all the hosTELS (as they say down here) were booked up. The Stones hadnt been here since '67, but apparantly the were still putting on a good show. But, I was able to have a cheeky beer in Welly's own Molly Malone's and see the big and free! museum, Te Papa before I had to get the ferry over to Picton in the South Island. Te Papa accepted donations (none given) had a lot of Maori things and a Lord of the Rings Exhibtion going on.
Picton greeted me with an excellent sunny day. I did a walk around the town in the morn, and in the afternoon I got on the Mail Time Taxi, which is a catamaran that sails around the coves in the Queen Charlotte Sound. Some entrepreneur got the idea to make the route of the postman into a tourist activity, so about 20 of us boarded the boat and tagged along while the mailman delivered sacks of mail, food, beer or whatever to people in the distant parts of the Sound. It was a perfect day for the cruise, and we had one stop where there was a monument commemorating where Cptn Cook stopped 5 times on his journeys through the South Pacific. As a bonus, we also came upon a big group of bottle nosed dolphins. They were very playful and they were doing jumps out of the water and racing alongside the boat with us (not too much unlike Niall and Mody racing along Eastern Parkway, but in that case it would have been just 2 dolphins)
The next day I got the bus to Nelson, which is the hub for activiites into Abel Tasman Nat'l Park. I had been wanting to do some kind of water sport and hadn't really done anything yet, so I decided to do a 2 day kayak trip around the coast of Abel Tasman that included a night's stay on the floating backpacker (a boat, which was a bit cramped but served up a good feed for brekky and dinner). While on board, I met this Topper from Minnesota. She could one up anything you brought at her. It turns out she had 5 sisters, went to this really prestigious school, was guarnateed a job after grad, danced for the Vikings etc etc. She had this really hot friend with her, which was really weird because that's hardly happened so far. Kayaking was great, though. The first day, I ended up rowing with, Tilo, a nice enough guy, who was paranoid of the kayak tipping (highly unlikely). The second day I had Gabby, another German, who was more laid back than most i've met. We saw a family of seals, and the cubs were at the playful age where they wanted to jump on the kayak and meet the people. All in all, very nice. next blog coming soon about Punakaiki and Franz Joseph.

Cheers,
James