Wellington

Wellington - the capital city of New Zealand - is situated in a harbour and surrounded by lush green hills populated with apartments and posh houses. With around 460 thousand people living here, it contains under half the population of Auckland, but seemingly many more bars, places to eat and a better layout.

01 The Lord of the Ring Exhibition was ace

I had a good time here. I arrived on a Thursday and spent a couple of nights partying with some of the crew from the Stray bus, then when they all moved on I bumped into Nick (the guy from Leeds) in the bar. Over the course of a few days we found that it was possible to spend $200 in just over one hour on drinks, discussed the strange disappearance of bidets, discovered our mutual hatred for brushing teeth and ate a lot of food.

There's not really a lot to say about Wellington that hasn't been already said, other than that it seems to posess an inordinate number of bookshops of various sizes and specialisations. Arty Bees was a favourite of mine; a second-hand bookshop with an enormous fantasy section where smelly bearded men and greasy haired teenagers alike shuffled in to check out the Star Trek collection and gaze in awe at pictures of dragons, and scantily-clad women in metal-armoured corsets. Every available space was filled with volumes from Discworld, Conan the Barbarian, Star Trek, The Lord of the Rings, The Wheel of Time and of course, L. Ron Hubbard's back catalogue before he wrote the fantasy novel that everyone thought should be in the 'religion' section because it had an ology in it (sorry Tom).