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On our first full day in Wellington we had a looong lie in (heaven!) before going for a general meander around town. It's a good place to meander: everything is nice and close together. We decided to be cultural and went on the free one-hour guided tour of the 'Beehive', aka the Kiwi Houses of Parliament (or Parliament House seeing as they no longer have a House of Lords). It was really interesting to get an insight into how New Zealand is governed and its history, but it was kind of strange to hear about their colonial past as everyone seemed to assume that we would know all the details already, being English. I tried to nod knowingly at the major points but in reality a lot of it was news to us. We need to brush up on the history of Britain when we get back - every other nation knows more about it than we do and it's getting rather embarrassing now...
After our cultural moment we caught the cable car up the hill and walked back down through the sprawling botanical gardens, which were very pretty. We found a kids' playground on the way and had quite a bit of fun on the zipwire and seesaw.
The next day we headed to Te Papa Museum, which is completely free and very good. A lot of the exhibitions are interactive so you really get involved. They even have a whole giant squid on display in a tank; its eyes are the size of footballs and it's taller than me! It was quite gross but Jak was impressed. We ended up spending several hours in there, only leaving when our minds were so saturated with interesting facts and useless titbits of information about New Zealand's history and geography that we literally couldn't take in anything else. That night we avoided any further exercise of our minds and just vegged out in the hostel's movie room with some wine, watching two films one after another: 'Jumper', and 'Enemy of the State'. Both were good.
We spent Wednesday mainly doing errands: washing, shopping, internet banking etc. I won't bore you with the details. We also made good use of the free pool table at hostel - Jak beat me four games to two but I'm definitely getting better :-)
On Thursday we had to get up early in order to catch the 8.25am Interislander ferry to Picton. It took 3 hours to make the crossing from the North Island to the South Island, then a new bus met us at the ferry terminal and drove us to Nelson via the beautiful Rai Valley. We've been told that the South Island is much more picturesque than the North; it's also much more quiet as just 1 million people live here compared to around 3 million in the North. Perhaps that's why everything in Nelson seems to shut at 5pm; the town was pretty dead when we got here.
Yesterday we went to Abel Tasman National Park - miles and miles of forest, golden sandy beaches and clear blue sea. We arrived into the park by boat and hiked the 13.4km trail from Anchorage Bay to Marahou, stopping at various beaches and lookout points on the way. We were incredibly lucky with the weather; we were actually hot enough (for the first time in New Zealand!) to walk around in just a tshirt - a definite plus when you find yourself on some of the most beautiful beaches you've ever seen. Plus, because we visited as the season is only just beginning, we barely saw anyone else whilst we were there and quite often found ourselves on completely undisturbed and isolated stretches of sand. Of course, the sand didn't remain undisturbed for long as we couldn't resist the urge to claim the beaches as our own by writing our names on them in 10 foot high letters. Oops. The birds and seals we spotted didn't seem to mind though.
That night we went out for pizza and a drink before crashing out at an embarrassingly early hour, exhausted. We're not used to walking that far in one day!
- comments
Christian Scott hey nic, i experienced the same shame when my lack of history was exposed. I bought this book when i was in OZ, im sure they will sell it in a Borders shop in NZ. it was a fairly decent read and i quite enjoyed the windin up the locals with the title! http://www.penguin.com.au/products/9780141037318/empire-how-britain-made-modern-world-popular-penguins.
Nic Thanks Christian! That looks like a good book, I will look for it when I'm next in a bookshop :-)