Stoat - Where?

In Manchester, you have the curry mile, a semi-misnomered kilometer stretch of curry houses and jewelery shops. In the same vein, Hokatika could be the Jade Square Mile. From the quaint little clocktower in the town centre, all you can see down each road are jade workshops interspersed with craftstores, glassblowing centres and, yes, jewelery stores. I awoke, still alive, still free and still not frozen, albeit with a healthy dose of condensation and a coldness in my bones that I anticipate will be a daily occurrence in later years. Sleeping in cars: frugal - yes, comfortable - not exactly, and something I want to do a lot of in the future - definitely not.
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I only decided to come on this trip relatively recently, so all my flights are different to Amy’s the friend I’m travelling with. Somehow, the cheapest flight to Christchurch I could find was with Emirates, whose service and entertainment was so good that for the first time ever, I wished my flight was longer. And as it happened, my wish was granted as we sat waiting around for an hour in Sydney due to ‘technical difficulties’. This meant that I arrived in New Zealand after Amy, instead of before, which would have been fine except that neither of our phones work over here. When we eventually did meet up later on and piece together our day, we found that we’d probably been missing each other by a perfectly timed 2 minutes in each place, and had been leaving messages for each other at different organisations and information desks throughout the airport. Even after all that, we were still on the road by 5:30pm, in our newly rented car. Our rough plan takes us to Greymouth, Franz Josef Glacier, Queenstown, Milford Sound, Dunedin and back to Christchurch, with stops at as many places along the way as interest us.
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