Losing Ourselves on the South Island

We have been remiss in updating you all on our adventures! We have spent the last couple weeks driving all over the South Island of New Zealand, hopping from campsite to campsite in another hilarious vehicle. (See our crazy campervan below!) 

It has been stunning, breathtaking and positively exhilarating.  After picking up our awesome van, we booked it from Auckland to the South Island, but once there, we managed to take time to enjoy at least a bit of New Zealand wine country at Saint Clair.

​From there, there were far too many amazing views and fascinating finds to share, but we'll share some of our favorite moments and shots. We did a lot of driving, so many of our days looked like this:

While most of our nights looked like this:

(Side note: Stereotypical gender roles pictured but not intended; we alternated driving and cooking every day!)

For the first part of our trip, we focused heavily on seeing some of New Zealand's amazing wildlife, including at Ohau Waterfall near Kaikoura. This is a waterfall and pond where seal pups hang out between trips back down to the beach to feed from their moms. It's like a baby seal playground!

If that wasn't enough, we wandered to a lighthouse and wildlife preserve where we saw a colony of yellow-eyed penguins! These little guys are native to New Zealand, and they wander in from the sea every evening around dusk to rest in their burrows. Look at their little footprints!

And to top it all off, we had the most amazing wildlife experience of our lives. Typically, when we see anything that says "swim with dolphins" or "dolphin encounter," we are incredibly wary. Most "swim with dolphins" experiences use captive dolphins, often captured from the wild and kept in inhumane conditions at worst and unnatural conditions at best.

But when we read about Encounter Kaikoura's dolphin, we were thrilled and amazed. They take snorkelers out looking for one of the pods of wild dolphins that resides around the coast. Once they find the pod, the snorkelers hop in and essentially try to entertain the dolphins enough that they'll stay and play. They would swim within a few feet of us, eye-to-eye, and they really seemed to like it when anyone would dive down or noises through their snorkel. We spent a full hour freezing in the waters while absolutely enchanted by the dolphins as they stayed and played with us - without any incentive (e.g., food) other than fun. This short video gives a great sense of the trip though and our time with "the world's friendliest" dolphin. The GoPro died while we were swimming, so this is the best shot we have of one of members of the 400-strong pod of dolphins! ​

These were some of our favorite moments, but there have been a million more in the two weeks we've spent on the South Island. Below are just a few more!

And finally, a picture of one of Greg's happiest moments of the trip so far. :)

We're excited to share more in our update about our week on the North Island. We can hardly believe that our travels our coming to an end soon, but we are squeezing every last moment of joy out of the time we have left!

- JC & GK