The ferry ride across to Wellington was alot more bearable than the ferry ride from mainland Thailand to Koh Tao haha. We chilled out, watched a couple of movies and by the time we knew it we were in Wellington, the capital city of New Zealand. As it was about 11pm we headed up to Mt victoria Lookout, which apparently offers amazing views of the city. we thought we would camp up here so that we could see the city and harbour in the morning, it was a lovely view to wake up to at that.We were only planning on checking out Wellington for a couple of hours that morning before heading onto Napier as there wasn't that much we wanted to do here. we were planniing on checking out the popular museum here but parking in the city was expensive and it didn't open for another couple of hours so we took a look around the city centre for a while. Wellington has a thriving cafe scene and is much the same as any other city, with a nice harbour and surrounding hills. However without splashing out there wasn't much to do here so we quickly moved onto Napier a 3-4 hour drive up on the east coast.

On the way to napier we stopped for some lunch at a nice picnic area and then carried on. While we were listening to the radio there was high alerts about entering the city of Napier due to a hostage situation on bluff hill. A local drug bust had gone wrong and one policeman had been shot and another being held hostage. There had been a number of shots and the locals were scared to come out there houses and were stopped from going home and all the roads around the area and local schools were closed down, it was pretty crazy, especially in an area like this. Napier was a gorgeous little town, it felt like what i imagined entering miami would be like with palm trees on either side of the main highway with perfect blue skys haha. Anyway there is meant to be an awesome view point of Hawkes Bay and the city from up on this hill so we weren't best pleased about this numpty causing all these problems however it didnt stop us from checking out the city centre, which is Napiers main highlight. The main reason for coming here was to check out the Art Deco architecture of the town centre. In 1931 Napier was virtually destroyed by an earthquke measuring 7.9 on the richter scale, finding itself alot larger after the earthquake. In some areas the land level rose by over 2m. Anyway it was the rebuilding of thhis city that produced this Art Deco style. Art deco is actually a deorative style of zig zags, lightning flashes, geometric shapes and rising suns. These all characterise this distinctive type of style. We checked out all the great examples around the city given in our lonely planet book, the town was so colourful and had a feel good vibe about it because of it. The buildings were old school and looked really attractive. Many new shops have changed alot of this art deco style at ground level but if you look above the shop floors you can see some great examples. We also checked out the coast that the town is set on and had a quick look at the sunken gardens and the statue of Paania of the reef, a targic romantic figure from local Maori folklore. Anyway we really enjoyed exploring this town but we decided to move on and drive up to Lake Taupo, via a detour due to all the hostage action. We stopped the night just outside Taupo at a nice picnic area all to ourselves.