Have been having a pretty chilled couple of days in Dunedin. Today i went to the museum which was really good and yesterday i went on a wildlife tour where i saw a royal spoonbill, some pukekos, albatross, little blue penguins, yellow-eyed penguins, nz fur seals and sealions, shags, black swans, black-backed seagulls, pied stilts, variable oystercatchers and a heron.

I have been having some nice chats with people in the hostel as well. I love hostels as it's so much fun talking to random people. On the tour i sat next to a lady from Japan who was practising her English - she asked me to help her with her grammar which was fun but i'm not sure how much help i was. She came up with the sentence 'we have seen penguins' which i said was correct but later she came up with 'we saw penguins' which i said was better but i'm not sure why. Some grammar-y expert help me out here.

Also friendly in the hostel are a boy (uni age) and his dad from England, two boys form S Korea who told me (again) how tough life is there. Min Wook had told me before and i knew he didn't want to go back there but i didn't really realise how difficult it is. Forget weekends, there is so much competition for jobs that you probably wouldn't get a weekend until you'd been working for a company for a good few years. They said ten. The S Korea peoples are over here to learn English so they can get better jobs.

Also really cool was y'day i met an old guy who was in town to see his grandson graduate who knew Christine and Colin McKenzie -Fi's friends who i'm going to stay with tomorrow :) He'd even been over to their place for a walking group lunch last week. It got me all happy 'cos i thought 'ooooh everyone knows each other like on ki'. He said they have a lovely garden so i've got high expectations...

Other interesting-types: In the Christchurch hostel, i met a guy from Tynemouth. Never has the west-country accent been so appealing to me. I started talking to him and felt an immediate west-country bond -not sure what one of those is but he told me all the places i needed to go in nz so that was pretty handy.

In Melbourne, I went to a theosophical society meeting about how the body stores pain. It was quite interesting but for a society that was meant to have a Buddhist core there were an awful lot of egos flying around the room. Anyway this one guy called Michael mentioned how he'd had a bike crash and smashed up his arm but had managed to self-heal it which had totally changed his philosophy on life. I know i've probably lost you here but he sounded interesting and at the end i went up to him and asked him if i could talk to him about his experience. He said here? And i said, do you want to go for a coffee? After i'd said this i thought that maybe i'd gone a bit mad because i didn't know him at all but then i thought well what else have i got to do tonight? So we went for a drink over the road and had the best conversation ever.

I told him about me and he told me about himself (he complemented me on my name as he had a daughter called lucy) and we had a couple of drinks and chatted as if we'd known each other for ages. There was no physical attraction, no ulterior motive, just two people in the same place at the same time interested in each other and, for that time, totally connected. And at the end of the evening, he kissed me on the cheek and we both said we'd had a really lovely evening. And that was it: a perfect travelling moment.