sweet as...

The past few days have been action packed. We started with Dave's pre-birthday celebration of white water rafting in a small town called Murchison (where you last heard from me). The river was short, but was spiced up with some cliff jumping and a rapid swim. The water was absolutely freezing, but the sun was shining and it was a very fun morning. We also happened to be in a boat with a couple from Greenwich... Small world.

After leaving Murchison, we spent an afternoon and night in Renwick, in the Marlborough wine district in the north-east of the South Island. We rented bicycles from our hostel and did a biking wine tasting tour of the local vineyards. This area is known for the Sauvignon Blanc and Pinot Noir and we could absolutely taste why. We also played a round of "Badonk" or as we know it, "Bocce Ball". After talking way too much smack, Allison and I ended up losing to Dave... Yes he wanted me to add this into the post.

photo by Dave

Yesterday, on our drive down to Kaikoura, on the East coast, we saw tons of seals, of which (of course) we pulled over to take photographs. We were able to get incredibly close to a number of them sunbathing and who couldn't care less that we  were there.  We also stopped at a seal pup "daycare" creek where 3 tiny seals were playing. This fresh water creek is an area protected from predators, where mother seals take and leave their pups for the day while they go out hunting. It was incredibly cool and the seals were adorable.

We are currently in Kaikoura, and Allison and I got up at the crack of 7 to go out swimming with the resident dusky dolphin. There must have been between 250 and 400 around the area and they were awesome. Once numb from the frigid water, and making bizarre sounds as directed, the dolphins would come around and if try were curious, and if you could, make eye contact, the dolphin would swim around you in circles about a foot away. This happened twice to me, and Allison and I had one dolphin keep coming back to us for a good 2 minutes. It was incredible. The photos were taken with my GoPro camera, so the quality is not the best, but you can get a sense of the animals.

We're all going tomorrow to swim with the seals. Looking forward to it.