Wine Country and a Great Walk

No I'm not back in Hamilton yet. As I write this post, I'm sitting at a hostel (there you go Grandpa) in Christchurch. Tomorrow I will fly to Wellington to watch the All Blacks play Argentina, and Sunday night I will begin my trek back to Hamilton. So we're almost home. And it has been one hell of a wild ride. But first lets rewind a bit....

Two Wednesday's ago, I took my Maori test and hopped on a bus to the Auckland airport to fly down to Wellington. I stayed at Walker's place for the night, and caught the ferry the next day to head across the Cook Strait. It was something I wanted to do, as I had heard that the views are pretty amazing. The weather was perfect, and I crossed over to the south island as the sun set. It was a pretty spectacular ride.

On Friday, I had scheduled to take a wine tour through the world famous Marlborough wine region. I got to hit some of the most famous vineyards (Villa Maria, St. Clair to name a couple), and learned a lot. Although famous for their Sauv Blancs, I found myself enjoying the great Rieslings of the region a lot more. It was a great day, but by the 6th or 7th (of 10) vineyard of the day I was (in all honesty) pretty drunk and could not really do the wines justice anymore. It was a lot of fun though. I had set aside an extra day to hit any vineyards that I missed, but didn't end up needing it.

On Sunday I was off to Nelson, the sunniest area of New Zealand. Thats not saying much. It still rained the whole time that I was there. On Monday I headed to the Abel Tasman National Park to hike for the day and meet up with Walker. Abel Tasman is what is known as a "Great Walk," and a great walk it was. Although the day began looking pretty gloomy and dreary, the weather had really turned by the end of the day. We had a lot of fun hiking through the bush and spending a lot of time on the beach.

Then it was time to hop on the Magic Bus.

To be continued....

PS-I will post a lot of pictures in a separate post at the end, as well as on Facebook. They'll probably be up by the end of the weekend.