We arrived in Wellington on Monday in the pouring rain! The mist was so thinck we could not actually see the city across the harbour! This has been the theme unfortunately for the last few days - rain!

On sunday we had planned to do a walk in the Tongariro National Park. We knew that we could not do the famous Tongariro Crossing because the weather is still too bad here and we would have had to hire boots, crampons, ice axes, etc, which was well out of our budget. Andrew was particualrly gutted with his ice axe sat at home, pretty much unused! So we decided to just do a short walk to see the volcanoes Mt Ruapehu, Mt Tongariro and Mt Ngauruhoe, which are all active volcanoes! However when we arrived it was raining, the cloud level was really low and the mist meant visability was rubbish! We could not even see the volcanoes that we knew were surronding us! Disappointed we gave up, brought a postcard!! and headed for Wellington!

You may well have heard that on Tuesday night Mt Ruapehu actually errupted with no warning, injuring a 22 year old whose legs were crushed by falling bolders, maybe it was a good job we did not stay to do a walk after all!

Wellington seemed like a nice city, with lots of very arty walkways and displays, although the weather was pretty rubbish! It is actually tiny considering it is the capital of NZ and you can walk from one side of the city to the other in half an hour! Due to the bad weather there was not much for us to do apart from go to the Te Papa Museum, which was a really good musuem. Lots of different exhibitions to see and it was free! You could easily spend days in there. The maori culture section was particualrly good with information about the treaty from both the maori and european perspectives.

We also managed to catch up with another old school friend of Andrew's Chris, who has been living in Wellington for 3 years working for Peter Jackson's film company in visual effects! Very cool job!

Today we caught the ferry from Wellington to Picton at 8am, so an early start! The weather was once again rubbish, so the crossing was pretty rough, you could really see and feel the ferry going up and down over the waves! The crew go round offering everyone ice for in case they feel queesy, better than the cross channel where they just let you be sick! The crossing took about 3 hours and then we were over to the South Island!

Lots of Love

Sarah and Andrew xxx