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Wilson's World Tour
In Porangahau whilst I did the first stint of docking, we met an old guy named Ray who was Paul, the farmers step dad. He is a really nice chap who lived in Wellington. He kindly offered that when we got to Wellington to stay with him. As it happened, he was away when we arrived so we rather luckily had the exclusive use of his house !.
We only had two days in Wellington before we caught the ferry to the South Island. The first day we went to Te Papa museum, which was excellent, lots of touchy feeley exhibits and free !! You could probably spend a whole day there, we managed a good few hours (must be growing up !) We then walked along the keyside and happened upon a tall ship which just by chance was about to go for a sail to see the Wellington, ex Naval frigate, being sunk. We jumed aboard and were soon roped in to hauling up the sails, it was great, I was in my element. They normally use it to take groups of teenagers away for ten day sails, to help them grow as people I guess. It was a beautiful ship with about 12 sails when fully rigged.
We got to the Wellington just in time to see it being sunk, there was a huge explosion and massive ball of smoke, by the time the smoke had cleared it had sunk, a very clever magic trick perhaps ! The idea of sinking it is to create a reef for divers and something interesting to explore I guess.
The next day we walked around the city, went up the cable and just took it in. It is quite a nice place although because of the topogaraphy, houses are built on all the hills making it feel a little claustraphobic and reminded us of Rio without the slums !.
Our ferry was at 0200 as this was the cheapest time to travel ! We tried to get a few hours sleep before then made our way to the ferry terminal, Dover it aint ! The boat was quite nice and we settled down to try and get some sleep. Sam was sick, a mixture of chocolate cake and motion sickness we think ! We got to Picton at about 0500 totally exausted but excited about being in the South Island and new adventures !
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