We headed from here to look at some other campgrounds the next morning.  These campgrounds that we are using are the cheapest in the country at $6pp (about £2.10pp) and are run by the Department of Conservation and as long as you don’t mind simple camping (this is a great deal more complex than our usual dig a hole and squat routine) with only toilets, running water and stunning campsites then you are onto a bargain.  Lucky for us this is a little bit more than we had in mind.  We headed into Reefton, which is a mining town and looks like somebody has tarmac’ed an old Wild West town and slapped a petrol station in for good measure.  A short while later we headed off to check out a couple of nice camping spots for the night.  The first one we stopped at we met a nice English couple who we talked to for ages about their travels around New Zealand.  Whilst we were talking we had our first Weka experience.  A Weka is a flightless bird that lives in New Zealand.  They are beyond brave.  They will walk right up to you and check everything out.  This nosey little one at one point was nearly in the car where I had left the driver’s door open.  We have seen these birds feeding out of the radiator grill at the front of the car where they have worked out that loads of dead insects can be found.

That weekend we kept up on a promise and visited our friend Nerida (rather embarrassing as when we asked for her at the local Cop shop (she is a PC) we mis-pronounced her name as “Nereeda” rather than “Neridder”) who we met in Oaxaca, Mexico, but soon we were ensconced in great Kiwi hospitality.  We did our best to pay her back by cooking dinner and we all chilled out to watch “World’s Fastest Indian” with Anthony Hopkins (he was in the film, rather than her lounge).  The following day we waved goodbye and headed off.  One day Nerida, we will have a home again and you are always welcome, thank you for the place to crash, wash our clothes and cook a decent meal.

We headed off to Hokitika Gorge on Nerida’s recommendation.  Basically, check the pictures out, they are stunning.  Later that day we found a campsite nearby that would allow us to visit the Glow Worm Dell in Hokitika.  As you stand in the dell and the night closes in a mini-galaxy of tiny lights comes alive around you as lots of baby flies eat other insects and produce luminescence.  We headed North the next day to find a suitable site for our 1 year anniversary.

At the moment that we had been on the road for 1 year, exactly 1 year to the moment that we had waved goodbye to our families on Strawberry Hill station we were sitting on a beach watching the sun go down (handy that we were celebrating at GMT+12 as we left at 09:10 in the morning that day) we sat reflecting on our year as we downed our first decent ale since leaving England.  Finally a country with decent beer, lovely!!!  The beach was as deserted as our bargain basement campsite and we sat there and finished off another 2 decent ales from the same brewery before calling it a night.

We moved up to the North coast over the next few days, stopping at amazing campsites, all with nice pictures so it really isn’t worth saying much.  The East Coast was a little plain at places, but we kept meeting friendly Kiwis in the all the campsites that we chose.  Stick to the cheap campsites and you meet all the nicest people as they are doing their level best to avoid the crowds and you end up having lovely evenings swapping excellent travel tips, far better than the Lonely Planet that we haven’t bothered with for New Zealand.