The ferry crossing wasn't too bad at all. A small amount of sway in the Cook Straight was all we had to endure. The last hour of the crossing was through fjord like channels where the waves could not reach. We wandered around Picton briefly trying to find our hostel for the night and very quickly we were settling down to some sandwiches before bed. The hostel was nicely laid out and it was a shame we weren't there long enough to enjoy it. One bit I didn't like though was the presence of Windows 98 on the internet machines. In my opinion, there is little reason to run 95, 98, NT4 or ME anymore, they are horrible. Anyway, enough complaining.

Our first day in the south island started out as a very sunny and pleasant one and we didn't waste too much time leaving Picton and heading south. Our first stop of the day was Cloudy Bay, the bay after which a rather nice chardonnay was named. The bay itself isn't much different in appearance to many of the other bays around the island of New Zealand but we just wanted to be able to say that we'd been there. From there we carried on to Blenheim, pretty much the centre of the Marlborough wine region. There are numerous vineyards dotted around Blenheim but we were only interested in visiting one of them. Yep, you guessed it, Cloudy Bay vineyard. They have a cellar door where they sell wines from but to be honest, I think the prices there are similar to the ones you can find the wine for in shops in England (based on my brief internet research the night before). That didn't stop us tasting though. We tried their Chardonnay (Claire's favourite), their Te Koko (nice strong white) and their Pinot Noir too. I kept the sips small as I was the designated driver but Claire got to empty the glasses and was very happy afterwards.

We stopped for lunch in a small gold mining town called Havelock. I ordered a lamb fry, onion and bacon toasted sandwich which was nice but I think that had I realised beforehand that the lamb part would be lamb's liver, I might not have ordered it. Don't get me wrong, I don't dislike liver, it's just not that high on my list of favourites.

After lunch, we headed out back towards Picton but we took the scenic route. The scenery was magnificent as was the weather. We spent about an hour driving to somewhere the name of which I can't remember and then we drove back to Havelock and then on towards Nelson, where we stayed the night. For some unknown technical reason, the meter on the internet machine there wasn't working very well so we ended up getting 1500% extra time free!