New Zealand Update

Well, many adventures have happened since our last update. The car has provided many opportunities for ryan and I to practice our motor head knowledge from a flat tire to a new brake pad, a broken jack, and electric windows that just stopped rolling up. At least the engine still works, although lately it's been a bit testy starting up some mornings.

Aside from the car, we have seen some great things and done ALOT of hiking and walking, "tramping" if you will, which is what they call it here in NZ.

After Nelson Lakes nat. park we made our way to the west coast and started south. We saw the pancake rocks in punakaki and the seals at westport. At Greymouth we decided to head inland a bit into Arthur's Pass. We heard there was bouldering here at Castle Hill and ryan was very excited to check things out. :) It was also where some of the Lord of the Rings was filmed.

We drove over the mountain pass in the pouring rain. We had heard that there would be a storm coming in that would drop nearly one half a meter of rain which "Isn't a small amount of rain" according to one ranger. We did some scenic driving and blew out one of our tires. This was the point that both of us wished we had bought a replacment car jack for the one that broke a month previous, rotating the tires. We were fortunate enough to have a nice Kiwi fellow pull over and let us borrow his jack for a few minutes to change the tire. He must have felt bad for us sleeping out in the rain with a flat tire so he offered us a bacheler pad he had on the other side of the mountain.

This is the sign we used to flag him down.

After one day of camping in the rain we were just about ready to check out the climbing area and leave but we came across another issue; a bridge had been washed out on the road we travelled in on. There arent too many other ways around the mountains from that point and we were forced to change our itinerary along with many other angry travelers at the pass. Because of this, we were unable to take our Kiwi friend with the car jack up on his offer to use his pad. So we headed east towards Christchurch then south along the east coast to Dunedin and Invercargill.

This is a picture of a picture of the bridge that had been washed out a day after we drove on it.