I'd booked myself on a whale watching excursion in Kaikoura as a back up in case the dolphins didn't turn up, but it seemed like the whales didn't want to play ball either so the trip was cancelled. I spent the afternoon in the sunny hostel garden with an British guy who had also made the mistake of buying Bill Clinton's autobiography. I didn't feel quite so stupid! Or at least, quite so alone in my stupidity. He'd been lugging it around for three months and was only a few chapters into it, but I had to give him credit that it was the paperback version. I wished him luck.

I took the K-Bus back up to Picton since the Intercity bus had left already that day. We were packed into a shabby old minibus and trundled up the coast. There was a wino on board who seemed to sense a kindred spirit in me and kept offering me swigs of his bottle of wine. I told him no thanks, but he persisted and kept trying to chat, despite my best efforts staring out of the window and ignoring him. The guy next to me - maybe in an attempt to rescue me - started up a conversation with me, but this was mainly about the surgical appliance engineering business that he was in, so I'm not sure as there was much improvement. There are only so many hip replacements you can hear about. By the time we reached Blenheim, the wino was so far gone that he - and his bottle - rolled out of the van when the door was opened. The bus driver went crazy and yelled at him and then us for not having told him that the guy was drinking. The bloke had been waving his bottle around, talking loudly and drunkenly and the van stank of wine (and fags from when he'd tried to light up)... so I'm not sure how the driver had missed this. We stopped - bizarrely - for a car wash, then finally got to Picton.