Apologies for the radio silence for a few days. We were out of reliable internet coverage until now.

Friday morning in Dunedin we both went for a little run before checking out and heading to a cafe in town called The Perc for some deliciously strong black coffee. Reading the local newspapers we discovered that a skydiver had ended up in lake Wakitipu and failed to come out. I'm sure our skydive next week will be fine..

It was late morning by the time we left Dunedin and we had a big day of driving ahead of us. The weather was beautiful, mid- to high-twenties and barely a cloud in the sky, so we stopped for an ice-cream before too long. Our first planned stop at Purakanui Falls gave is a taste of the NZ forest on short walk to a very impressive waterfall, albeit with a bit less water cascading than it might usually display due to the dry summer NZ had had so far. Back on the road and the next stop was Curio Bay where a 170 million year old petrified forest is exposed at the surface on the coast. How lucky are we! Another few thousand years and it will probably have eroded beyond recognition. A mud slide out something similar flowed through and toppled yes leaving only stumps and logs lying alongside them. The mud was built on by more sedimentation and the mud, stumps and logs all slowly turned to rock. Now that the overburdern had been eroded just the right amount, the present day ground surface is virtually where the forest floor was. The preservation of the woods is so good that you can see the grain in the wood and count rings in the truncated stumps. It still looks just like wood!

From curio Bay we drove around the sloth coast with magnificent views over golden sandy beaches that were completely empty. The density of people in NZ, the south island particularly is such that there can be these huge, empty expanses of beach on a glorious sunny day. Anywhere in Europe they'd be mobbed.

Manapouri was our stop for the night. We found a quiet beach on Lake just to the north of the town, pitched our tent, cooked some dinner and watched while the sun went down and the stars came out. There's virtually no light pollution down here and we couldn't help lying on the beach looking up at millions of twinkling specks billions of miles away until well past dark.