Hi everyone. I’m Dan and earlier this year I went on a mean as road-trip with my mate DJ around the top of the South Island! We also had the pleasure of taking a camera crew with us and documenting our experiences and shenanigans for you!
Our adventure kicked off in the most “happening” city of the South Island of New Zealand – Christchurch! With a ridiculously huge Bunning’s Warehouse, two dollar fried rice and original Greek souvlakis, it definitely is the excitement of the South. First of all we picked up the campervan from Jucy's rentals depot - a handy 2 minutes drive from the airport. Very convenient if you are flying in from somewhere, but seeing as we weren’t flying in from anywhere, it meant a bit of a drive out to the airport ha ha.
Being underprepared boys we had only a very rough plan of what direction we would take and absolutely no idea of what would end up in our video diaries or whether we even had anything interesting to say at all. But never the less after a refreshing meal at the Colombo St KFC we headed north along the east-coast.
After about two and a half hours of conversation about ex-girlfriends and why they will remain our ex-girlfriends, we arrived out of the Hundalee hills and onto the beautiful coastline of the Kaikoura area. It takes about thirty or so minutes of driving along this picturesque coastline until you actually hit the township of Kaikoura and all along the way there are lots of little bays, each with their own unique “tearooms” and an assortment of New Zealand family bachs.
Seeing as we had decided on the “eat-in” option at KFC and then took our time leaving Christchurch, we arrived on the east coast quite late. Instead of falling asleep at the wheel with more we decided to then pull into one of the first bays before Kaikoura named “Goose bay”. We found a pretty nice campground there, nestled into the base of the hills with full power available and several strange mountain cows that came and went. The campground is pretty clearly sign posted and you’d be silly if you missed it (as it is about 50% of all that exists in Goose bay).
View Larger Map.I’m not sure of where the whole “Goose” thing comes from, because we certainly didn’t see any Geese, or many birds for that matter. Just the scabby beach seagulls that stare at you for ages with their "giz a chup, giz a chup" look.
After spending the next morning hassling DJ to get out of bed, we finally found ourselves moving again and proceeded to make our way out of the camping grounds. However we didn’t make it much further than the entrance to Goose bay because as we turned back on the main road we all noticed something happening in the ocean - Hundreds of Dolphins going nuts in the water.
Mesmerised by this strange yet awesome sight, we quickly pulled the campervan over and ran out on the nearby rocks to get a better view. After about half an hour of gawking at flipper we dwindled back to the shoreline and ended up chatting with some of the locals who were obviously not nearly as mesmerised as we were. Apparently it happens pretty regularly around there, and the dolphins are out eating breakfast in their hundreds most early summer mornings. However for us city folk it was something magical and even more impressive at the handy price of $0.
A couple of hours later and we were back on the road again but not before we could stop and make friends with a paua diver and ask him a few silly questions that would have made even the slowest of us cringe. Oh well it probably helped to solidify the stereotype in his mind that city folk are are all silly.