Cycle: 92km

Boo, it was time to leave the de Gruchy's. Sam woke us up early with a cup of tea and we said goodbye to her. Bye Sam. After breakfast and packing our stuff and spending 15 minutes putting on our new cycling gear (we'll get quicker at this, I'm sure) it was time to say goodbye to Tim too. Bye Tim. It took a alot of will power to turn down his kind offer of a ride out of town.

We called in to Invers to get some cash out and to pull up our leg warmers (not a good start) before riding on past Tisbury Hall (the scene of the biker encounter in The World's Fastest Indian) and our first planned stop, Mokotua. The flaw in this plan was that there was nowhere at all to stop at Mokotua (Nigel was shockingly wrong on this one!) so we pushed on to a funny little converted lignite pit to use the toilet and buy a cup of tea. Very odd. We passed more farmland before reaching the coast again and having lunch at the Stirling Tides cafe in Fortrose, where the food was really good.

I must mention here our new game, Horseeeeee. It's a brainchild of Tim's brother. To begin the game you say "Scanning the paddock for horses..." and then whoever spots a paddock with horses in first gets a point, but to get the point you must point, wobble your finger and call "Horseeeee" in your best Jilly Cooper accent. If the paddock contains a white horse you get two points. The game last forever if you want it to. At the end of this day I was winning 13-11. Genius.

After Fortrose we turned off the highway onto a smaller coastal road, as the Catlins begin east of Fortrose. Again, the weather was poor, I'd never seen such changeable skies as I was about to see in the Catlins. One minute it would be clear blue skies and the next it would be angry grey and raining. With this weather our coastal route was mainly cold and wet plus we embarked on 12km of unsealed road which covered the bikes in muck to which the chains protested. We cycled along the edge of Porpoise Bay where sea lions and yellow-eyed penguins dwell and then arived, wet and cold at Penguin Paradise, our digs for the night.

We were in the shed with the bed (but our own heater) and in the main building were the couple from Auckland, Liz and Don, who'd passed us five times that day in their car! We had a nice evening chatting to them, they were very interesting and well travelled like most Kiwi's (including hitch-hiking round the Middle-East when they were newly married). The duty manager also stayed and chatted with us for a while, she was from Cornwall but had a fish stall in Kent! We spent most of the night talking about shell fish - yum!