We’ve finally left Wellington so I’ll have no excuse for being so slack in posting to this thing. It was a strange feeling waving goodbye to the place - we’d made friends, had cool jobs and it was very tempting to stay but it was time to move on. It was beautiful day for the ferry trip across Cook Strait: the sea was flat and the sun was shining. The highlight of the trip was a young German boy breaking his glasses and then running to his mother crying (what we could hear) “my glasses are kaputt!!”. A new word-of-the-trip has thus been coined.

We’re now staying in seaside town Picton which is strangely devoid of tourists. We stumbled on a small pub last night with some colourful local characters. We thankfully managed to hold on to our beers, though, when a big bloke decided to exact revenge on the floor next to us on a lad in the pub who had squirted his urchin son with a water pistol. We left shortly afterwards. This afternoon we’re going on a walk round the 'Sounds before we set off down the West coast on the Kiwi Experience bus tomorrow morning.