We went to the supermarket and bought prossecco and cheese to toast the "champagne birthday" which is the Australian notion that when you turn 26 on the 26th (for example), it must be celebrated with champagne.
Our first stop off was to see the fur seal colony at the beautifully named Cape Foulwind. From up on the viewing platform we really did see some seals, there appeared to be only half a dozen at first, but as you watched, more and more could be spotted, playing in the waves and on rocks out to sea.
As we watched, I felt something tickling the back of my arm and brushed away what I thought was a hair, only to feel a large insect, which immediately caused me a lot of pain.
I didn't know whether I'd ben bit or stung, and luckily the boys had seen enough of the seals, and I'd already decided to splash out and have icecream in honour of the special occasion, so I asked the lady at the kiosk (luckily a native) what was wrong with my slightly swollen arm. She assured me it was nothing to worry about, that I had been stung by a paper wasp (Max had seen the perpetrator and given her a description) and she gave me a block of ice to soothe it. I was very grateful, and we enjoyed our icecreams before returning to the road.
Next stop down the west coast was Punukake pancake rocks. These were a pretty impressive bit of geography where the cliffs looked like this:
And in typical NZ style formed just a part of a stunningly scenic panorama
As a birthday treat I bought Blake and I lunch in the pancake rocks cafe, which felt really special after several days of supermarket bread. Excitingly for me, the cafe offered pancakes, so I celebrated shrove Tuesday early and in style!
From Punukake we continued south down Route 6 towards Franz Josef, experiencing a terrifying rail bridge with a single track shared by trains AND cars, in both directions... I nearly had a meltdown when Blake joked that a train was coming
This should not be a thing.
Unfortunately we weren't allowed to take photos of the kiwi birds (and we did see two of these very strange creatures!) But we could photograph the aquarium, which was a fun bonus
These eels are all 80-100 year old females. The sign on their tank said that this was so that they didn't breed. I had to delicately explain to Floriane what the word 'breed' meant.
Blake got a birthday kiss from a very friendly fish
It was a long hot drive, but eventually we arrived on the outskirts of Franz Josef, where we stopped to take in some more epic scenery, in particular a spectacularly blue River,
before dropping Floriane in town and checking in at our hostel.
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