Ok, so I have been a little slack with my blogging, sorry about that guys! I can't believe how fast time is flying by. We are now back in Christchurch and we are flying from there to Melbourne early friday morning (7:30! that is even worse than working).

Visiting Christchurch last week and Aikora was good! we did a little tour in the tram, Malo found it pretty exciting and we got told off because he would not stay still on our laps! We went around the botanic gardens for a little while, chasing ducks, playing in the water fountains, smelling the pretty flowers (see picture, this is on of Malo's favorite things to do in gardens these days).

We spent a beautiful sunny day in Aikora, Malo and I shared a pretty huge ice cream all for NZ$3! After that we headed to Queenstown, stayed at the beautiful lake Tekapo. The blue of that lake is just amazing! We did a nice little walk uphill to enjoy a beautiful view, shame Malo was whinging the whole way up, car+backpack was a bit too much sitting for his liking! And then all he wanted to do was to go for a swim in the lake, but the weather was so cold there was absolutly no chance of that happening!!!

We only stayed in Queenstown for the night, the weather was not so good and we could not decide which "extreme activity" to go for, so we thought we'd chose on the way back from the south. Left Queenstown under grey clouds, but no rain and arrived in Invercargill a few hours later under hard pouring rain and full on wind! The holiday park was one of the worst so far in terms of cabins, I mean it was pretty cold down there and there was a bick crack in the wooden door from top to bottom! Seriously cold, that night! Lucky no one got sick :) What did we visit from the Southland that day, hum let me think!? oh yeah, the beach for 10 min (including the walk from and to the car :)) and the indoor playground of Mcdo! best thing ever for rainy days when you don't have a cosy home to stay in :).

Anyway, it was still raining hard in the morning and some people told me it was going to be like this for the next few days all over the south, so here I am sitting in the car with my map, counting how many days left we have and what happens if we do this or that... I really wanted to go for a walk on the glacier so to secure this, we decided to give a miss to Milford sounds. Blame it on Malo, since we can't drive too much each day and he would definitly not have handled a day trip on the bus and a boat cruise on top iof that... we drove back to Queenstown, in the rain and the cold... arrived in Queenstown a couple of hours later and it was beautifull and sunny. Oh well the drive was amasingly beautiful anyway! So we enjoyed a nice afternoon near the lake, went to the information centre to get some info on the whole glacier thing and were terribly unlucky. The woman there was one of the meanest person I talked to in a long time, so we left very angry and with no booking or even information for that matter.

We looked it all up ourselves in the end, without any problems! Sam decided that we could do the 5 hour drive the next day in one go, so we booked for a heli-hike (little helicopter ride to an upper part of the glacier and a little walk around the glacier) for myself the morning after that and for him in the afternoon. The drive was not nice because it was way too long for Malo and I wish we'd done it is 2 days because there were a few walks along the way that sounded good, but we did not know that before heading out... so that was it! got to the glacier later in the afternoon, all excited about the next day.

I went to the glacier that next day and Sam the day after in the end. It was amazing, the ice, the blue inside for of the ice caves, the helicopter ride...

Then we drove back to the north stopping at Hokitika and Greymouth. Malo went for a swim in the lake near Hokitika. It all started with us having a picnic for lunch in the grass near that lake with no one around... nice and peacefull and then Malo starts to sign "swimming", so Sam takes him closer to the lake to dip his feet with his nice new sandals on, so I told him to take them off... So here is Malo jumping in the water getting his shorts all wet... so Sam takes them off, one thing leading to another, Malo was half naked (kept the wet tshirt on because I was worried he would get sunburnt!) in the lake. He had a great time!

We went and check out the pancake rocks yesterday, very pretty! and now we are just enjoying a couple of days without driving too much around Christchurch.

Sorry for this very long blog, hope you made it to the end... if you did then here are a lot of big kisses from all of us for all of you.

Next blog from somewhere in Australia