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We drove through the centre of Blenheim on our way out today as we thought we hadn’t seen it properly and called at The Village again briefly before heading to Nelson, in the centre of New Zealand.
It’s a bit confusing because it’s nowhere near the centre of the South Island but if you put the two islands that make up New Zealand together, Nelson is where the centre would be. It was a reasonably sized town when Miss Robb’s Mummy was here about sixteen years ago; it’s now a city!
After we’d checked into our motel, we walked to the actual geographical centre. You know what I said about New Zealand hills being steep? This one was almost perpendicular! We even tried walking up it backwards to see if that was any easier. It wasn’t but when we got to the top the 360 degree view was amazing.
Barnaby
As we were in one of New Zealand’s prime wine producing areas, we had to go on a wine tasting tour didn’t we? But our first stop was Makana Confections, just outside Blenheim, which is a boutique chocolate factory. I got to see chocolates being made after all and the free samples were delicious :-).
From there we went to the beautiful vineyard of Domaine Georges Michel and then to Cloudy Bay, where we were taught how to taste wine properly (except they didn’t tell us spit it out afterwards, although Morris would have if he’d tried it because he doesn’t like wine).
We had lunch at The Village, where there was also olive tasting and a quilting barn before relaxing back in Blenheim.
Another fun day!
Barnaby
Our time on the South Island is coming to an end. Today we drove up to Marlborough, which some of your parents might have heard of as it’s one of New Zealand’s biggest wine producing areas.
Our route took us through Kaikoura and we didn’t even need to take a cruise to see the whales it’s famous for as we spotted a group of them from the road :-). The colours in New Zealand are amazing – the sea at Kaikoura was actually turquoise.
We had lunch (chowder again – yum) at a restaurant our friends had recommended and then drove on to Blenheim where we were spending the night. At this motel we had a bedroom each (often we shared a room) and there was a swimming pool: more sunbathing in January!
Barnaby
