Pretty much a travel day after leaving Rangitata. The group we had toured the South Island with was splitting today in Christchurch on the way through – the end of an era!! Jan, Bram and Victoria were all off to the airport to catch their flights and the rest of us were off to Kaikoura for the second time in a month! Not really much to tell you about our time there apart from Laura the barber shaving Eric’s head and coming third in the Adelphi Lodge Pub Quiz – it appears the brains haven’t totally shut down yet from being on holiday!!

From Kaikoura it was off to Picton to catch the ferry across to the North Island – first stop Wellington. The ferry ride across was really comfortable made a bit more painful by Herbie Fully Loaded playing on the big screens – another Lindsay Lohan Classic!! We had booked 5 nights in Wellington – 3 more than the maximum stops with Stray so we would be leaving the bus in a couple of days to join our new group! Turns out we picked the most expensive weekend to try and spend extra days here as South Africa were in town to play the All Blacks in the Tri Nations Rugby and every hostel in town and hiked up their prices!! Thankfully with us being Stray customers we got a bit of a discount so it wasn’t too bad in the end.

We headed out that night for some food in a cheap Asian Restaurant that Mambo knew of – the food was great to be fair. We grabbed a few drinks in the Hostel Bar and headed off to bed – we were wrecked after a full day on the move! Luckily we were able to get an 8 bed dorm with a few of the others from our bus but everyone had started getting sick so it was only a matter of time before one of us got it………who do you think it’ll be???

Spent the first full day in Wellington exploring a bit – the city isn’t very big so it is pretty easy to get around. We took the cable car up to Botanic Gardens which gives you really good views over the city before heading down towards the Beehive Parliament Building – super ugly!! Had some farewell drinks with the guys from the room before they headed North tomorrow morning. We had planned to go to a jazz bar down at the water front but when we arrived there was hardly a person in the place not wearing a suit or fancy dress and the drinks were a pure fortune – “think we’ll just keep walking guys”!!

Woke up feeling dodgy – I got the chest bug that had been going around – brilliant!! The next few days were fairly chilled out in Wellington. We checked out Te Papa Museum which is brilliant, huge and most importantly free! We visited JJ Murphy’s Irish Pub on a few occasions to make the most of their cheap breakfasts and Laura and Katie spent one of the mornings dandering round the waterfront market checking out the local crafts, clothes and most importantly banana and nutella crepes!! On our last night we decided to treat ourselves to a proper dinner out – well proper compared to what we had been eating! Me, Laura and Katie spent the day talking about tasty food and BBQ’s so we decided to head off to Hog’s Breath Café – an American Style Diner with good burgers, steaks and ribs – we could have been rolled home, we were stuffed! A couple of beers in front of the big screen in the hostel bar watching the All Blacks stuff South Africa rounded off the night well!

Off to Auckland tomorrow to start our second Stray trip – our lap of the North Island, looking forward to meeting a new bunch of people and seeing more of this awesome country!

Craig and Laura = )