On the road again

We managed to get to Invercargill in one piece, and booked into a nice quiet hostel. Our tent decided to break again (only about a week after we got it replaced) so we headed to Kathmandu once more. After trying to fix the zipper for a while the guy behind the counter gave up and announced that he would just replace the whole tent for us (last time they only replaced the outer tent). However we'd have to come back the next day because we didn't bring our tent poles. Because we had nothing to do we decided to go to the cinema to try and watch a 3D movie, but just like the other 3 times we tried to watch a 3D movie here they weren't playing one, Doh! So we just watched Greenzone instead, which wasn't too bad. The next morning we picked up our brand new tent, which was actually a newer version than the one we had (and was about 500 dollars more expensive!). We wasted some time on the internet and headed back to our Hostel.
The following day we walked for an hour before arriving at the edge of town so we could start hitching a ride, but before we got our bags off our backs a car stopped. The guy obviously saw that we were planning to hitch-hike and offered to take us to Gore, which was about an hour further up the road. He dropped us off at the edge of town where it took us just over two and a half hours (!) to get our next ride. We finally ended up in Dunedin where we checked into another hostel (no campsites in town here), which was actually really nice and cozy. We spent a day exploring town and decided to go to Oamaru the next day to check out the penguins. After a long hour of walking we reached the start of the motorway and started to hitch-hike. After about 20 minutes a guy stopped and took us a short while up the road to the next town. From here another guy took us halfway to Oamaru. Rain then proceeded to piss down and after 5 seconds we were drenched, luckily we managed to get a ride after about 15 minutes, all the way to Oamaru this time. Oamaru actually looked very nice, it had a Victorian theme to it and the buildings all looked very clean. The campsite wasn't too flash, but it gave us a chance to test out our brand new tent. Turns out it was the exact same tent as the one we had, only with different colours, totally worth $500! That night we checked out the penguins, it was an hour walking to the first colony. Here Yellow-eyed penguins (one of the rarest penguins in the world) came ashore just before sundown. When we arrived there there was already a penguin ashore, he was standing in the bushes in plain view. After about half an hour of staring at the same penguin we decided to head to the other colony. This one was occupied by blue penguins, also called little penguins. We sat down on the huge podium they made on the edge of the sea to watch them come ashore. After about half an hour, just as it was starting to turn dark we saw the first wave of penguins swim towards shore. You first saw them as a swarm of little black spots, usually about 7 at a time. They were hard to spot at first because it was so dark, but once you saw them they were quite easy to follow. Even though it seemed like they got a brutal pounding as the waves crashed them onto the shore they were quite alright. We were told we couldn't take any pictures because they didn't want any flashes to accidentally go off, but when we were walking back to the campsite we found a few penguins that were coming ashore at a different spot so we took a few pictures of them here (making very sure that we'd turned off our flash). The next day we explored town, especially the old part of town was nice, it had a cool dutch bakery and a very nice 2nd hand book store. Of course I couldn't control myself and bought 3 more books, my bag is getting heavier and heavier. . .
When we started to hitch-hike to Christchurch I wasn't really feeling it as much as usual and because of the long distance (3 and a half hours) between Oamaru and Christchurch we were fairly pessimistic.
When at 2:30 pm we still didn't find a ride we decided to change our goal a bit so we wouldn't arrive at the hostels too late to find a bed. But just as I was writing our new destination on our sign a car stopped and the lady that got out offered to take us all the way to Christchurch.

http://s713.photobucket.com/albums/ww138/lingonlas/NZ%20Maart%2020/