att göra en resa...: The last few days with our campervan...and work!

The last few days with our precious campervan was spent in Dunedin and the Otago peninsula. Dunedin is the only Scottish city in New Zealand (the rest were claimed by the English) and we liked it a lot. Fairly small, like every major city in NZ, but with a lot of students and bars (me like!).

But the best part was really the Otago peninsula, which is an hours ride from the city with a car. Can’t really say that my expectation where high, I mean, the “Royal Albatross centre” doesn’t really sound all that sexy. But it was very beautiful and interesting. My eyes opened up for the Albatross bird, damn they are cool! Also saw some cute furry seals laying around everywhere (I think they are my inner animal). Unfortunately, we did not see the world’s smallest penguins that hang around on that peninsula as well.

The day after we went to Lake Tekapo which we heard about but was not overwhelmed. Perhaps because the weather was crappy and the lake was no competition to what we had seen down in the Queenstown region. I think we are getting pretty spoiled!

The day after we got up early to leave our dear Milli Jucy as we called her at the airport in Christchurch. Went very smoothly…we stressed out a little the day before and cleaned her inside out, and they didn’t even come to check her out with us! We just left the keys and could go…

We got to our hostel here in Christchurch, had about an hour nap (aka Me on Instagram/Facebook for an hour while Erik slept) and then went to the common room to start applying for work.

When we were visiting Fox Glacier two weeks ago we already saw an ad to come and work at an animal park farm just outside of Kaikoura (2,5 hours north of Christchurch). It involved a lot of animal care (feeding, cleaning etc) and I died a little bit inside because I would loveeee to work with animals on a farm in New Zealand and get my hands dirty. But they were only looking for one person and we had still had some travels to do.

But yesterday we saw they had just posted a new ad, and this time they were looking for two people. We send them an email at once and literally two hours later, after some phone calls, we got it! So lucky J So we are leaving our hostel one day earlier than planned and tomorrow we are off to Kaikoura with the bus! We get our accommodation and meals paid for and will save so much money now for Australia and South east Asia.

So, we will be farmers until the end of April hopefully, haha. So looking forward to see Erik in his farm uniform mocking poo! Hihi. And I will try to snuggle with the guinea pigs as much as possible:D Here is some online promotion for the farm: www.kaikourafarmpark.co.nz

Today we spent the whole day in Christchurch. It has been very interesting and also very sad. 5 years ago Christchurch has a terrible earthquake (and another one, weaker, just three weeks ago). 185 people died from over 20 nation, and the city was damaged so bad. Still, 5 years later, they are still trying hard to rebuild the city but it is a slow process. The city center is literally now temporarily built out of containers. But they have done a really cool and creative job, with a lot of art and amazing not-so-temporary delicious street food and high fashion stores are located in these containers. It is not fair to give an opinion of the city based on how it looks now after this catastrophe. Would be interesting to come back in 10 years time to check it out.

Cheers to you who actually read this very long text! (In order words, tack mamma!) ;)