Wellington - Capital City with Capital Letters

My first usage of a Doofer!

In Wellington I was staying with another friend I had made at camp, Petrina. A name that seems to be more popular in NZ than in England! For the first time since Christchurch I had a bed and a room. It was really odd to have walls and when I woke up in the morning I couldn’t just be outside by rolling over and opening the door. I hugely appreciated being able to shut the curtains and then be able to sleep after the sun had risen but it was a sudden change and we know how much I love change! My first night in Welly Petrina gave me my first experience of Burger Fuel, it was like seeing the light. It also has the easiest to order online service. And the milkshakes are top notch, we had a lime one and it was delicious. For those that think GBK is the bomb, this is a lot better!

My first day in Wellington I decided to get Sinbad fixed. I called around a few places and found a guy who could get him fixed that day and quickly. I dropped him off and wandered around

My manly beverage

Wellington. It was the first time that I had voluntarily given away the keys to Sinbad, it was scary and liberating at the same time. I walked down to the harbour and they have a special diving board set up over the water so you can come and jump in safely. Genius. I then spent a few hours in a museum called Te Papa, learning about the history of New Zealand. It was very interesting and I got to see a Giant Squid. It was time for a game of American Football so grabbed some afternoon luncheon and watched the game in a bar that had a sofa in front of the TV. I then received the call from Wayne (the mechanic) saying that Sinbad was fixed and ready to roll. We were whole again, wooo. Petrina called inviting me for a drink at a cool bar called Hangar, based on a plane hanger, strange coincidence.

Petrina was away for the weekend so I had a few options of what to do, so I organised a house party with all of my friends. It was off the chain! I’m hoping Petrina reads this and has a fit before she realises that I don’t have any friends and it was just me on my own. The next day it was a bit overcast and rainy so I sat around for a few hours writing my blog for the other places, ha. Now work out where this blog is written. But once the clouds parted a little I decided on a trip to the zoo.

This is a Sun Bear, cute
but scary!

I love a good zoo and even though Wellington Zoo isn’t the biggest zoo in the world it packs a punch with a few different styles and animals. The first part is they have an onsite vet surgery with glass windows so they can show the patrons what they are doing and all the work that they need to do. Something like 80% of all their animals get treated in that facility. They seemed to have misplaced their penguins. I always wonder when an enclosure is empty, where do the animals go? Do they have send them back to the wild for a holiday? That would be nice wouldn’t it. Then you don’t feel like you have been conned into believing the animals would be there. So yeah, zoo. I did some awesome timing of visiting, I got to see the Sun Bears get fed, I hadn’t experienced a Sun Bear before but they are really cool. They have a flabby neck so that if they get attacked from behind they can turn around 180 degrees in their skin and fight back. They also have a yellow sun on their chest! After a fun look at the traditional Tigers, Cheetahs, Baboons, Giraffes and Deer I entered the Neighbours zone (this is more of a TV show joke than proximity BTW), dedicated to animals from Australia. There was a Tasmanian Devil, Wallabies, Kangaroos and of course, there was a Dingo! The best part is that you literally walk through them, just hanging around by the side of the path. It was the closest I’ve felt to the animals out of any zoo I’ve been to.

Good job I don't have any babies! PS, this is a Dingo, now laugh!

Well this is just cute

All that exciting stuff didn’t even prepare me for the chimps, I watched them for about an hour. They are such interesting creatures, so humanlike in their actions and their interaction. There was a baby baby that just stuck on the mumma chimp, a baby that just played around, a couple of older ones that just hung out and my fave, the chimp that just sat there and picked its arse. I have a disgusting photo that I won’t share with you but will let you picture it, of a chimp with pooey fingers licking them clean. It was disgusting but funny at the same time. No wonder they get ill a lot. A bird was flying around the inside enclosure and flew into a window and fell to the ground, an older chimp picked up said bird and carried it up to the fenced window out to the world. A couple of the younger chimps went along to observe and help. Unfortunately in the process of trying to poke it through the gaps in fence the bird was killed but I think the intention was positive. On a simple symbolic level it was really nice to see the compassion of animals even if the result wasn’t the best.

Family photo

Red Panda doing Red Panda things

After that experience I watched as a Red Panda admired the keeper as he took in more food and cleaned up a bit. So chilled out and then followed the keeper around a bit like a dog. I then went to find a Kiwi, they are notoriously hard to find even in a zoo. They live in a blacked out room with one Kiwi on either side and a footpath down the middle. With very limited red lighting you could hear them but couldn’t spot them. Then I spotted one, that it would appear was the easy part. Trying to take a photo of a Kiwi was even harder, for those that don’t know how hard it is to focus in the dark, it is very hard! But I think I kind of succeeded. I had spent so long at the zoo that I was actually ushered out by one of the keepers, you know you’ve had a good day when they are kicking you out, ha. 

Ok fine, this is an actual Kiwi

Told you I saw one!

For the Sunday I was recommended to go to the Farmer’s Market by a beautiful young lady so thought I

A Farmer's Market

would give it a go. I thoroughly enjoyed myself, even buying some fruit and veg as instructed, it was good. I even went off script and bought a delicious breakfast for myself. Then I wanted to go up the Cable Car and set off to find the bottom station. This was made very difficult by some roads being closed by guess what? Oh yeah, it was a Christmas Parade. I couldn’t have planned my trip better if I had been wanting to see all of the Christmas Parades in New Zealand. For the record, that wasn’t actually my plan. The road closures led to me trying to do a U-turn on a one way street as I needed to go the other way only to realise that once I was facing into the traffic. After gently nudging a lamppost and going round one loop 3 times I decided to call it a day and have a picnic in the garden. 

After American Football Day I joined Petrina and a couple of her friends in a park overlooking the harbour for a picnic. The best part was a slacklining club was practicing in the same park. They had one that must have been 30 metres long, it was impressive seeing someone walk all the way.

Quick visit home

Prior to departing Wellington the next morning I wanted to succeed in riding the Cable Car but the only way to do this whilst parking was driving to the top and taking the car down. This didn’t make logic to me but hey ho. Having got up there I realised that this still meant I paid for parking but didn’t have to walk to the station, very complicated! But I did it anyway, a beautiful view from the top and a fun experience. After taking the car down and then up again I found out that I could have had a nice walk down through the gardens and then get the Cable Car up. This made what the same beautiful young lady had said make sense. So if you go to Wellington, walk down through the pretty gardens and then get the cable car up. 

My plan was to drive up the west coast to Auckland for Christmas. Hmmmm…

Woodie’s Wisdom: If you are having a bad day, don’t try and force it. Things will only get worse!

I wuv wooo

Nelson - Being at One with Nature Hurts

A rock made of rock pancakes of rock

Part of my day long drive to Nelson involved looking at lots of trees, as those avid readers will know, I seem to have fallen in love with looking at trees. New Zealand has a plethora of trees (this is why you've waited so long for a blog, I was using a thesaurus and got confused). Big ones, small ones, tropical ones, evergreen ones. It’s amazing and the forests look they are having trouble holding them all in one place, no wonder they’ve had to install walkways to the monuments. One of these well placed walkways was to the pancake rocks and blowholes. It was very humid but well planned, the roundtrip walk was only 20 mins so I

Selfie on a wobbly bridge

got cracking. I got to see lots of pancake type rocks but the water didn’t want to Free Willy through the holes. I was looking forward to it but alas. Further along the road I found a bridge, not just any old bridge, but a wobbly one. It is like the millennium bridge just not as big but with the same wobble factor (prior to fixing obvs). It also involved a small walk, making me complete my 30 mins of exercise for the day meaning that everything that happened later was bonus and therefore making me healthier, there you go mum! It was even and educational walk with information boards around the route and awesome rusty vehicles that they used when the place was a gold mine.

One of the rusty mining vehicles

When I finally arrived into Nelson I got to my campsite and received a text from Jimi (friend from camp, lives in Nelson, also short for Jimi-Zara, friend girl) saying that she was going to be free sooner than expected so I only needed to fill an hour. I had a chat to my campsite neighbours who just so happened to be from England and in dire need of medicinal smoking grass, unfortunately even with my contacts I wasn’t able to provide. We did have a nice chat about traveling South Island, they really went big and actually slept in the back of their car with no mattress either. Jimi picked me up around 8 and we went for drinks and dinner at a pub, enjoyable experience. I then realized that my

A drunken guy wearing a
Champions t-shirt (Modin reference)

night wasn’t going to be that chilled. We headed into the “city” for continued beverage consumption. My 2nd big night in a week, my aging body nearly conked out. But we did go to a few interesting bars and nightclub things. It was my first real appreciation of the kiwi way. I was wearing trousers but only had the jandal (flip flop in kiwi) on. I was allowed in everywhere and didn’t lose them to a sticky dance floor. There was a lot of dancing until we got to the club that had the football on and I might have got distracted.

Larry the llama

The next morning I was collected once again (I enjoyed the chauffeuring) and we went on a tour of the city. Much like my experience in Invercargill I encountered the Santa Parade, this time it made a meal of Jimi showing me around. We then met up with some friends for a delicious brunch. Jimi and I have a very similar approach to organisation and rushing. Eventually we went to the beach, which was cleverly placed right next to my campsite. Before that we went to a little zoo farm like thing that had monkeys and we definitely didn’t feed them, did we Jimi? #rebel. At the beach we did beach things like a bit of splashing around and getting my tan on.

Jimi, Edd & Tim selfie

We also tried a bit of slacklining as we brought one with us. Tim was by far the best, I realised yet again that I don’t have anything that resembles a core muscle group. It’s like they went out for milk 5 years ago and haven’t been seen since. This could explain all of the injuries that I have had since. After that I think we all needed an early night so I crashed at the campsite with instructions to be at Jimi’s house bright and early for our next adventure…. Abel Tasman!!

When I arrived at Jimi’s house and was immediately confused as to why there was no one at the house until she fetched me and showed me to the shed which when you walked round it was magically another abode (thesaurus time again). The views were amazing, looking over fields for miles and only being about 300m from a river thing. We hung out for a bit and then slowly headed over to Abel Tasman (massive national park, lots of trees, by the sea). We arrived a little late, again the planning was a little poor, so there was only one walk that we could do. This is based around the fact that they need to know how many people are staying in the park overnight and if you are supposed to be coming out that day then they have to send a search party. And if you are extra special, you get a boat and helicopter to remove you from it. That wasn’t us by the way. The nice girl in the tourist office thing mentioned that she did the 4 hour walk that we were going to attempt in 2 hours 30 mins and she was barefoot, do I hear a challenge being laid out? Yes you do. As Jimdog and

Abel Tasman view

I were only wearing our flipity flopities anyway we thought we would give it a shot. For the record, 12 kms is not a distance that the modern human foot is comfortable walking. There were some pretty views and lots of trees, some sea and some incredibly sharp little stones underfoot. We had exactly 3 hours 45 mins to complete the 4 hour walk before the last ferry home left and we did it in 3 hours 15 mins. Success!! And we even had time to run into the sea and cool off before the boat ride back. A fun day out. Oh, the chaffage was terrible. Nearly forgot that. It was bloody hot and I was in agony by the time we got to the end, I won’t go into too much detail but it wasn’t pretty. The one thing that I needed and didn’t have, Aloe Vera! I did have something that was nearly as good though. Jimi has an outside shower, not the summer house kind but an actual shower with warm water. It was amazing, perfect pressure and if I stood on my tippy toes I got the view of the countryside. A new and interesting experience, I want one in the UK!

On the way back from Abel Tasman we stopped and picked up the freshest fish and chips I’ve ever had, it was so soft and tender and was battered to perfection. That evening the whole clan were there

Sinbad sleeping in a field

and we watched TV, the first proper TV I had watched in NZ other than American Football. There was something called the Block, home design show from Australia, then some Criminal Minds. It’s the small things that remind you of home. When it was bed time I went out to Sinbad and was lost in a field, everything was quiet and still. It was an amazing experience, like nothing I’ve ever felt. Looking up to the sky I saw more stars than I thought existed, it felt like a dream there were so many.

The next morning Jimi was tasked with babysitting her nephew whilst everyone else in the family was off doing stuff so we took him to the beach. Lewis is 2 ish I think and incredibly cute and very photogenic so I had a lot of fun taking photos of him, some that might even make it to my website, who knows… As well as having an outdoor shower, Jimi’s family are incredibly creative. From calling their son Fox to wanting to build a chic backpacker hostel made out of shipping containers, they do it all. Another example of Kiwis using shipping containers for use everywhere. At the end of the drive they were building a container pop-up coffee shop for the summer. 

After lunch I left for another adventure after a sunny and thoroughly wonderful time in Nelson, a place that I would love to go back to. I headed off to Picton to catch the ferry to North Island. Jimi’s mum told me that I probably didn’t want to go the windy windy way so obviously that’s the way I went, more by accident than intent. It was an incredible journey, driving up a sound was amazing. And turning the corner onto Picton Harbour was amazing. I found my campsite and realized that the weather the next day was supposed to be shitty so not the day you want to go up Queen Charlotte Sound. So I booked my ferry for the day after when the weather was going to be much nicer and had a really chilled out day, wandered round Picton and watched a couple of movies. It was my first day that I hadn’t done anything, it was a nice change, like being back in England all over again…

My day of travel I woke up to sunshine and few clouds, just what I’d ordered. The ferry was a little delayed so took a walk into town to grab some breakfast, a warm bacon and egg bread thing. The crossing itself was pretty uneventful, beautiful views and a nice comfy seat inside. Made it to Wellington unscathed!

Sinbad and I on the ferry

Thank you South Island, it has been a pleasure. I will be seeing you again. One of the best days of my life and some memories that will last a lifetime. 

Woodie’s Wisdom: Walking barefoot may seem like a way to feel at one with nature but nature will win and your feet will hurt!