WHAT A BLOODY DAY!!! Today has been THE hardest day in New Zealand by far - possibly even one of the most demanding of the trip (with the exception of Sydney nightmare!)!!

The day all started well as we got up nice and early to leave Nelson and drop off the car. We left at about 8.45 (45 mins later than planned) and made our way West. The trip was all good and we even spotted a short cut on the map, which would cut the kilometres by a load, albeit going on what seemed like a smaller road instead of the highway - first mistake of the day!! This road was the windiest road we have ever been on in our lives - it puts Wales' twisty roads to shame, add to this crazy cliffs on one side of the car and an abundance of bloody cyclists around every other corner (there are so many crazy ppl who cycle all of the way around NZ instead of driving [idiots!!]) who we were nearly killing every 2 mins! This would not have been all too bad if both of us had grown out of our travel sickness now that we are 23 - but poor lil' Sarah was feeling as sick as a dog and turning green - fast.

Now i dont think Sarah's condition was helped by the next event. Now, perhaps the most common sight on all of our drives has not been mountains, or even sheep, but dead possums!! Now there are millions of them on the road every few kms!! I dont think ppl mind as they are a pest (introduced from Oz for some reason, but now they are destroying all of NZ's forests and stuff), so they prob run them over on purpose (i even ate a possum in a pie at some random weird little shop on the side of a road a few days ago - just another animal to my long list that i have eaten, dog in Thailand next!!). Back to the spoint ... we were looking for a nice fresh one, that was relatively entact to show all of you at home ... Sarah was armed and ready with the camera, and we were keeping a keen eye open! A few passed, but did not pass the stringent quality control of Sarah, until, lo and behold we see something dead on the side, in a layby so we would not get run over whilst taking a picture, so i pulled over and Sarah jumped out to investigate. I am quite surprised she did not a) scream or b) throw up right there (i think her torrid time at the vets must have done some good after all) as it was a nice pretty little cat!! Awww! But we had to press on, and fortunately we found a more suitable subject - pics to follow shortly.

Anyway, that was the drive, next was time to return the car. We walk in the door, and the guy asks us to sit down - hmmm. He did not have a very friendly look, and proceeded to tell us that the car was due back yesterday (it wasnt!!) and so we were a day late. Now we were not happy so we told him that we had booked it until today, and a new car tomorrow at Wellington. He pondered a while and asked for our contract, luckily the guy in christchurch had made another error on the contract - the contract said return on the 23rd, his computer said the 24th, and we we booked it until the 25th!! Now this gave us the leverage as the guy in Christchurch was obviously useless! Next problem, he tells us that there are now 2 days outstanding, as we only paid until the 23rd - fair enough, we sorted that out. Was it over there - i think not!! He now asks us our age - 23 - and tells us that there should be an <25 fee of $10 a day which we have not paid! I told the guy that this was the 1st question i asked when getting quotes for the car, and i was ensured that there was no fees to pay (again by that idiot in Christchurch). The guy then agreed not to charge us (like we would have paid anyway) but has warned us that when we get our car tmw in Welly, they may try to charge us, even though we have already paid for the car in full - so basically we may have a fight on our hands tmw, as we are not paying an extra $100!!! We would not have bothered taking the car if we knew about that.

Well after all that the guy was pretty cool, and gave us a lift to the ferry terminal. Just a nice check in for our 13:00 ferry and we are away. WRONG, there is no 13:00 ferry. Somehow i have managed to book the 13:00 Wellington - Picton ferry, pretty useless when you are in Picton!! I do not know how i did this as i clicked on Picton - Welly for definite! I will still hold to that!!!! But the guy said he can get us on the 14:00 going the right way, just come back at 1 to check in, so we went out to the bench outside the terminal (very lovely) and had our lunch whilst we waited (for about an hour and a half). We popped back in to check in, but were served by some stroppy woman who told us that we were only on a standby list and may not even get on, but just to sit and wait on case they call us (we had even checked our luggage in already) ... despite being told we were booked on it already!! AHHHH!!

Eventually after about 45 mins we had the call and we boarded for our 4 hr crossing which was full of stupid screaming kids!!!! But we did arrive and are now in Wellington - just looks like another scummy city to be honest! We have definitely decided we do not like cities!! We got a taxi to our hostel (about the 5th on the list that we tried for) and surprise surprise it is not very nice - the forst bad hostel in NZ. Oh and lets not forget the fact that when we went to check in they had no recollection of Sarah's booking!!! Of course this all despite taking credit card details to hold the booking (good job we are now wise to this and just change a few numbers around so they cannot stitch is up hehe).

Oh well, we will just prepare ourselves for tmw, and find something to do here before shooting off to Napier. hope i have not bored you all, but we felt like we should share today with you all!!!

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