It's about 360km to Christchurch from Dunedin and so we had planned to leave nice and early so that we would have at least half of the day to explore. Of course it was more difficult to get up than we had imagined, it always is! Still, we were on the road nice and early and Dunedin was soon behind us.

Before long, we saw a sign to Shag Point and thought we ought to investigate. (By the way, a Shag is a type of bird.) Whilst we were there we did see one sealion basking in the sun and I thought we might end up going for a short walk and so I turned the engine off. Well, the walk didn't happen in quite the way I had expected. On closer examination, the area didn't see well suited to wandering so we went back to the car. The car perhaps was not impressed by the shortness of the stop and refused to start. So our walk became a half mile walk back to find some jump leads.

With that debacle behind us, we headed on, but not far. We stopped again (this time somewhere more populated than before) to see the Moeraki boulders. I'm not sure where the name comes from but the boulders themselves are odd. They are dotted along a small stretch of beach and were formed over millions of years.

We didn't stop again (except to eat sandwiches) until we reached Christchurch. Our hostel was quite easy to find and very nicely decorated. It was a shame that we would only be spending one and a half nights there. Having checked in, we headed back to the city centre and explored for a while until it got dark.

We were feeling a little bit lazy at this stage of our tour of New Zealand so instead of cooking, we went out for dinner. The resaurant we chose beat me into submission with their portion sizes. They also had glasses with pentagonal bottoms and round tops!

On our final, full day in New Zealand we had a very lazy morning. We stayed in bed until about 11am and then started packing. Since we picked up the hire car, we had been a bit disorganised. Clothes were everywhere and we had numerous boxes and bags that we did not need and could not take with us. By 1pm we were mostly sorted and we set out for the suburbs to take the hire car back. We had a quick grumble about the fact that we had to jump start the car three times before we were whisked back into the city centre where we spent a small fortune in the post office.

I'd like to say that we did something amazing and outstanding and unusual on our last night in New Zealand. Actually, for us I suppose it was unusual. We went into a sports bar and over ordered some food (the over ordering isn't too unusual I suppose), drank beer and watched Shane Warne get his record equalling 527th test wicket.

Earlier I mentioned that we were only having one and a half nights in Christchurch. The reason for that was because our flight for Sydney left at a most unsociable hour in the morning. The alarm went off at at 3am and we were dressed and standing sleepily out the front of the hostel when the shuttle bus turned up at 3.20. Our plane was delayed for 30 minutes while it we de-iced it was that early. We even took off in the dark! It's just not right. At least Qantas managed to show something I hadn't seen before, Jersey Girl.

So, that concludes our visit to New Zealand. I enjoyed it and I'm sure we'll be going back there again one day.