32 degrees, sunny
Today we went on a wine tour around the Wineries of the Wairau Valley in Marlborough. Our first stop was at Allan Scott Winery for lunch and some wine tasting. Lunch was excellent but the wines on offer weren’t really to our taste, being too oaky for us. There were 11 passengers in all on our tour, from Arkansas, Perth, Brisbane and two sets of young couples from Germany, Denmark, Bulgaria and Holland, a real mixture ages and races, but all spoke excellent English and were very good company.
Our next stop was Framingham Wines which were much nicer for us so we
splashed out and bought a couple of bottles of Sauvignon Blanc – that’ll keep ‘em going for the rest of the year! Then followed Whitehaven, Giessen and St Clair but we didn’t give them any of our business. We tasted about 5 wines in each cellar so plenty of wine was consumed overall, though we did actually chuck a couple away that we really disliked!
Back at the campsite and the stream looked really inviting, to Clare at least! At the top end of the site there was access to the river where the water was about 6 or 7 feet deep and so clear, so in she went. Naturally the water was very cold (and sobering) and with a strong current to swim against, she didn’t make too much progress upstream. John elected to be the photographer and the helper out as that hadn’t been taken into consideration in the eagerness to dive in!
In the early evening our Kiwi neighbours told us they were going to feed the pet (pit) eels in the river downstream of our pitch so we went along to watch them. They’d cooked extra sausages on the BBQ especially for the eels and fed them from a BBQ fork. About 7 or so big black eels arrived and some of them more or less came up out of the water to get to the sausage.
After that we spent the evening with them and were given a lot of advice as to where to go next, stacks of information, most of which we remembered.
Previously, we had seen a large Coot like bird take a baby sparrow off the grass and run off with it across the river. They identified it as a Pukeko bird which is apparently quite rare and it is extremely unusual to see it take other creatures. (We’ve subsequently seen loads of these birds all over, so Googled them and it turns out they are quite abundant, but it is rare to see them take other creatures as they are mostly vegetarian, never trust the locals!).