Rained heavily during the night and the front of the van leaked; lovely large big puddle between the front seats. That, coupled with the grey water problem we'd encountered for several days, where the water from the sink was pouring straight out of the bottom of the van, rather than going into the water tank, meant we'd decided to call the campervan company and try and get something done about it. We were on our way to the phonebox when Andrea noticed a campervan office on our camp site which had the Backpacker logo on it. There was a queue, but the guy confirmed that he could help us sort the problems out. We had to wait a couple of hours before we got to the front of the queue, but he said he'd get us another campervan. And we wouldn't have to bother filling up the diesel. Result! New van and free fuel and gas fill ups! He said he'd sort out the paperwork and have the new van waiting for us for as we were heading into Wellington.

Caught the bus into Wellington. Nice looking city, but not too sure about the outskirts as our camp site was on an industrial estate in Lower Hutt so not the best or most convenient location and may have tainted our view of the capital (maybe it's nicer on the other side of the mountain). Had lunch in an excellent burger bar called BurgerFuel. Picked up a map from the Visitors Centre then wandered along the waterfront towards the Te Papa museum, the national museum of New Zealand. The walk to the museum was lovely, and we saw a cool bridge and some great wooden sculptures, and some of the quotation boards that Billy Connelly had talked about in his World Tour of New Zealand (seeing them was a highlight for us!).

The Te Papa museum is huge with lots of different exhibitions. We went to the Maori floor as we hadn't really had any exposure to Maori culture thus far in our visit. Highlights were the war canoe and marae (meeting house), both beautifully carved and very impressive. Also there was a corrugated iron Holden estate car!

Spent a couple of hours in the museum before catching the bus back to the camp site. Picked up our new campervan; which was exactly the same as the old one (i.e. a two berth Mercedes Sprinter) except this one had the Backpacker stickers on it. Other notable differences were the curtains being a different colour (and not to Andrea's taste), a less battered interior, two duvets instead of one (very nice as we'd been cold in the night a few times), a heater that worked, and a big clip on the dashboard to hold pieces of paper. We backed the two vans up together and transferred everything across, swapping the things we liked best from the old van! And it had been raining during the day so we knew the new one didn't leak!