Most of Thursday was spent travelling down to the capital city of NZ,
Wellington. We made a lunch stop at a strange little place (which to
be honest, a lot of the stopoffs are!) called Bulls. Here they seemed
to pride themselves on their word plays and so everything in the town
ended in -bulls.... Eg the toilets were called 'relieva-bulls' and the
baby shop 'non-returna-bulls'. How very witty.

Later we also stopped off at a strange place where they hold the
annual Wellington boot throwing championship! Our bus had our own
little competition throwing the boots down the fenced alley and, much
to my own surprise based on how crap I usually am at anything
involving throwing (I'm good with my feet, not my hands remember!), I
won!! With the final throw of the day though, as I tried to beat
Hoff, I got a little carried away and with a badly misjudged arm
through it out of and over the cage, actually hitting the roof of our
bus and then skidding off! At that point we figured it was time to go
home!! Still managed to win myself a Jager Bomb for that night though
for my efforts!

We hit 'Windy Welly around 3pm, and the nickname is well earned, as
when we were walking to the Beehive and government buildings we had to
lean right into it to not get blown over!!

We only had a few hours to ourselves in Wellington but walking around
it seemed to have a pretty cool vibe to it, with quite a businessy
feel and loads of cafes and bars.

We visited the really good Te Papa, the National Museum, which had
some really interesting stuff in it - one if the best things being the
preserved colossal squid! As far as museums go, and to say it was
free, this one was quality - with the added bonus of free wifi (a real
rarity!).

In the evening we had a few drinks downstairs in the base hostel bar,
where even Chris (the slightly older guy on our bus) came along, went
and got showered and in bed, and then came back down again!

We tried not to get to bed too late because we had a 6am start on
Friday morning to catch the ferry over to Picton in the South Island.
The scenery across Marlborough Sound as we crossed the Cook Straight
was amazing (even if we did sleep through a lot of it), and almost as
soon as we started driving it felt noticeable how quite different the
South Island is from the volcanic North, and it's more mountainous and
covered in dense bush - we are definately excited about everything
coming up over the next couple of weeks!!