Hello everybody,

The weather has turned cold, presumably in sympathy with everyone in Europe. We're still trekking on, though.

As it turned out, I couldn't persuade Kari and Georg to head west from National Park, so we headed south as originally planned to Wanganui. This turned out to be not bad anyway. After the first 30 km, we got to Raetihi, a run-down town looking like something out of a cowboy western, and there we turned off onto a side road to Pipiriki and the so-called Whanganui River Road.

This turned out to have long stretches of badly maintained gravel, which were very trying and slow. At least it kept the traffic at bay. The only accommodation on the 100 km or so route in a convent at Jerusalem (sic!) was fully booked, so we spent our first night of the trip in the tents on an idyllic, deserted, campsite in Ranana (also called London!). We bought eggs and milk off the camp guardian and cooked up some freeze-dried concoction for supper. It turned out well. There was a tough 200m hill to get over to get out of the valley and back into civilisation, but we're getting quite used to those. Big hills seem to be the order of the day in NZ, as expected. From Wanganui we took the bus to Wellington via Palmerston North, stayed 2 nights there, and then caught the ferry across to Picton on S. Island on Tuesday. Now we're heading west to the coast.

The weather turned bitterly cold on Tuesday, so the ferry crossing was not very special. The ferry was also over an hour late, so we had to stay in Picton for the night rather than setting off on the way to Nelson. The cycling from there to here, apart from being very beautiful, was wet and cold yesterday, and just cold and damp this morning, but it has improved now. Hopefully it will continue nice down the west coast, but the region doesn't have much of a reputation for good weather. We'll see.

Best wishes to you all,

David