The North Island

We checked into a campsite near the ferry port and had a night in the van... thanking the rain that had followed us from Nelson. The next morning we decided that we would use our journey to the North Island as another new beginning, and would live a bit like backpackers again, by camping the cheap way (hopefully no mice on the North Island), so we jumped in the showers and made the most of the hot water & clean toilets. Of course the rain had picked up even heavier, so we weren't looking forward to the crossing. After checking out of our campsite we checked out Rumba (for yet another carrot cake) - the nicest one still being the one I had in Wanaka! Paul ordered a cheesecake so we were very interesting diners to have at 10am!

Ciara in Cable Car Museum in Wellington

We had a pretty rough crossing to the north island (the worse being the Cook Straight with 30 knot cross winds & really rough seas), surprisingly our breakfasts stayed in our tummies. Of course, we also weren't able to enjoy the cruise through the sounds because the weather was so bad. We arrived in Wellington on Saturday evening and parked up in the car park of Oriental Bay, where we were able to camp for 2 nights for free (thanks for the tip Jo & Kerry)!

Ciara in Te Papa Museum

We were lucky enough that the weather broke on Sunday and we took a walk to Te Papa (the museum). It was quite interesting to learn a bit about Maori culture and even got to go into a marae (meeting house). New Zealand's mountainous landscape is mainly due to seismic activity so we also went into a wee house for a simulated earthquake (although it wasn't anything like the real thing - possibly helped by the fact that we were expecting it) it did give an idea. We left the museum and rode the cable cars up to Botanic Gardens and visited the Cable Car Museum to see the history of cable cars in Wellington, and were very interested to learnt that because a lot of the houses in Wellington are up in the hills, people actually have private cable cars to their houses.

Going back down in Cable Car

All in all Wellington was nice enough, but certainly not our favourite place visited.

Paul in front of Old Cable Car

View from top of Cable Car track