Holiday. Chapter 7. Elite campers goes wine tasting in amazing Wanaka

After almost a week living in a camper van we are truly getting the hang of this lifestyle. It's cramped, always hard to find what you are looking for, hard to sleep and, extremely fun. We've learned to cook good food in a tiny kitchen which almost only have room for 1/2 person. Here me and Guy are in action, cooking falafel wraps with brown rice and carrot tzatsiki made with coconut yoghurt (which taste divine and that you'll find in New World. One thing I realised on this trip so far is that New World takes the price for best and most vegan products out of all the big supermarket chains here in NZ)

Another great thing about a road trip around New Zealand South Island is of course the beautiful scenery you get along the way. A journey always takes longer than expected as you just HAVE to stop to breath it all in sometimes!

Our last stop before we check into a house in Queenstown was beautiful Wanaka. This place is so amazing, it is right by a gorgeous lake and you can see the glaciers in the distance no matter where in the town you are.

We went up to Rippon wine yard on the first day to do a wine tasting. This is the most beautiful wine yard you can find in New Zealand (and maybe even the world?) where the whole wine making process is organic as well. I've never had wine in a better place than this, I dare to say that it's the best wine I've had! Even if you don't drink wine - the view from up here is stunning and something you cannot miss out on.

Holiday. Chapter 6. Freedom camping & pouring rain

When we headed inland towards Frans Josef Glaciers we decided to stop by this beautiful lake and freedom camp for the night. Sounds pretty nice, right?

Only thing was that we left the sun and summer on the east coast and drove into a New Zealand winter with pouring rain. 

Despite being wet and cold though we had a funny night in the camper van playing cards and drinking wine, but the night was pretty scary when crazy wind made me think that the whole camper van was going to tilt over any time. We even heard other camper vans on the site leave in the middle of the night due to this storm, but we made it through! 

The next day was even more windy and rainy so we decided to give the glaciers a miss for this time, but make the best out of the situation and at least go to Arthurs Pass, where there are all these waterfalls and a huge river below, which was pretty incredible to experience in the heavy rain (even though I couldn't see much because all of the rain splashing I my eyes haha!)

We stopped by this little restaurant and to my big surprise it was one of the most vegan friendly restaurants I've been to in New Zealand! I left my phone in the car so I couldn't take a photo of all the delicious things in there, but I had both the kumara & mushroom pie and a vegan burger. It was one of those moments when you as a vegan actually have things to choose between, so it took a while to decide! They also had a vegan sandwich which looked amaze and loads of smoothies and soy milk for my flat white. If someone out there reads this and want to visit this epic place, make sure to go the big restaurant with a store next to it and NOT to the smaller one across the street. We went in there first and then people working there were absolute bitches and they didn't even have soy milk. Shame on them! 

With a lovely meal in our bellies we went on to chase the sun back closer to the east coast and stopped by Castle Hill, which looks like where a few sences from Lord of the Rings takes place (but I think it was another place that was actually in the film)

I felt like a kid again when me and my love ran around on these rocks, climbing, almost slippering and even practise balancing yoga poses!

We drove for a few more hours until we reached a less cold place and parked up at a camp site in Rakaia close to Christchurch and I think we were all happy to wake up to sunshine the next day.

Holiday. Chapter 5. Happy campers!

If you haven't already got it, I'll say it again: Kaikoura is awesome. If you get a chance to go there, do it! We had a couple of nice nights at a camp site a bit outside of the town and one night we had the most amazing vegan barbecue right on the beach.

Whilst preparing all of the food (veggie gourmet burgers and vegan sausages from Countdown, salad and garlic mushrooms etc) with a glass of red, it felt as if we were in a cool cooking show with this scenery around us.

I doubt there is anything better in the world that beats that moment when you watch the sunset right on the beach with friends and amazing food. New Zealand is truly growing on me after that Auckland-haze.

Holiday. Chapter 4. Kaikoura - the marine animal paradise

Our happy camper life started right after we landed in Christchurch on Tuesday, which also means I haven't been able to do any blogging (sorry all fans ;)

Anyway, after a flight down to Christchurch we picked up the camper van which is going to be our home for the next 7 nights and headed up a bit north to amazing Kaikoura. This is probably the coolest town I've been to so far in New Zealand. It's right by the coast and it has incredible marine life which we started to explore as soon as we got there when we found this little hidden gem where fur seals hang out.

Seals is for some reason one of my favourite animals so this was one of the best experiences I've ever had! I've never seen a seal in my life before and here all of a sudden, in the woods there was a beautiful waterfall where a huge amount of cute fur seals were playing around in the water.

Sometimes it seems like they acknowledge us visitors by coming up close to see who we were, but the majority of time it only seemed like they were too busy playing with each other.

But we didn't have to enter the forest to be able to see seals - they are everywhere along the coastline, although they are pretty camouflaged when they are sunbathing on the rocks.

After our first night in the camper van we got up early to go to Kaikoura whale watching center where we had a safety briefing and a coffee before going on to the whale watching boat.

 

On this whale watching tour you can be unlucky and you may come back to the shore without have seen any marine life (but if that happens you get some of your money back I think!) or you can be incredibly lucky like us and see not only one, but two spermwhales! Nature is nature and the great thing about this whale watching is that humans doesn't take animals into a prison but let them live as they want to themselves.

Apart from the whales we saw 200 dolphins playing and swimming around together at one spot. I think I've seen one or two wild dolphins before in my life so this was pretty overwhelming and I could've watched them all for ages!

After a tour like that a lot of people go for a sushi with fish meat or fish & chips or something like that, which is something that I will never understand. How can people not realise how contradicting it is to go and admire marine animals and then go and eat animals and talk about how cool it was to see the animals of the sea. It really disgust me. Instead, why not go and have a vegan sushi? That's what we did anyway as we found this awesome sushi place in down town Kaikoura, where they had plenty of vegan sushi options for a good price and the staff was so friendly as well!

Holiday. Chapter 3. A foodies perfect day

I woke up today and still feel so full from all the food I had yesterday. We had a lot of food to go through as we are leaving the batch in Mount Maunganui today to take a flight down south to Christchurch. So since we all hate to let food go to waste we started the day with a vegan brunch feast: scrambled chickpeas, ciabatta, Frys sausages, tomato & spinach salad, a broccoli-cabbage-onion- cashew nut warm salad and some strawberries. 

Then we took a long bike ride along the beach and through the whole area of Mount Maunganui in the beautiful sunny weather with no cloud in sight for the first time in ages! 

We stopped by a Tank, which is a New Zealand juice bar chain that I've never tried before. We had a avocado-banana-kale-kiwi-coconut cream- smoothie which was so good that I could easily have had 3 of them in a row. Yum!

After that we had some drinks out in the town before we headed back home for the second food feast of this day: pizza overloaded with different veggies (broccoli, zucchini, tomato, sundries tomatoes, olives, cabbage, onion, kumara, leek, capsicum), samosas, onion bajees and fried asparagus in olive oil.

Yeah. Like I said. I'm still soooo full and I feel like my stomach is about to, like, die or something but jeez I'm so keen to go down to the South Island of new Ealand for the first time. See you on the other side people! 

Holiday. Chapter 2. Cathedral Cove

It's been one of those really long but also really amazing days today. A Sunday with no Sunday blues. A real Sundayfunday. Anyway. We started of with a short walk down Mount Manganui downtown and had some coffee, went to the farmers market to buy some cheap avocados and the most amazing ciabatta loaf and then ended up at the cupcake cafe Sugartown. A cute little hidden gem with two vegan options; Raw muesli slice and a Citrus cupcake. Of course I just had to try both and they were divine! A more chocolaty vegan version would be even better though!

After that sugar-kick we were ready to take off on our 2 hour road trip to Coromandel and Cathedral Cove (which is supposed to be one of the best beaches in the world and I could definitely see why!)

You have to go on a 45ish minute walk in beautiful nature to get to this lovely Cove, which made me feel so ready to just jump into the sea as soon as we reached the beach. 

It was so nice swimming in the sea again! And I feel like I can say that summer is back for real now that I've finally had my first dip in ages!

We arrived back in our batch in the mount pretty late and we're all pretty tired and very hungry and decided to order some Indian food. It's always a bit scary to order food from a restaurant which isn't fully vegetarian as I always feel suspicious that it won't actually be vegan. I think you get that eating-out-paranoia because you know how easy it is for everyone to make mistakes, not to mention in the restaurant business (I've been there myself and I know I've made x amount of mistakes over my time as a waitress, barista etc at various places!) Being a cautious eater is kind of a part of being vegan so luckily enough I could see that there were chicken in my curry instead of the tofu I had ordered.. I'm just really happy that I didn't just start eating straight away. That has happened before and it's the worst feeling eating something dead without realising until you've had a bite! Anyway, the evening did end well when we finally got the right order when the owner from the restaurant came back with the tofu curries just before midnight. 

Do I have to mention that I had the best sleep after this day?