We started our early mornng off by getting picked up byt the worst morning person we have ever had the joy of coming across, his job was to order us abot and make us lift our own bags into the van while he looked at our bums! We were only going to the ferry terminal a stones throw away so we should have just walked, we got to the termal and hopped on our ferry which would take 3 hours to get to the south island, the whole time you can actually see the island in the distance so not the fastest ferry, but not as slow as the one in Laos thankfully!

The journey was actually very picturesque, passing throgh all the beautiful mountains and it was a perfectly clear day. The bus ride from Picton (ferry terminal) to Nelson took longer than the boat due to all the stupid stops for socks and toilet breaks. But the funny thing about this was that when we actually got into Nelson we were left on the coach for about 45 minutes while the driver bummed about so Aaron decides to go for a mooch...so me being a lovely girlfriend sits on the step to notify the driver if he got on. He did and I told him we were a man down, but he must have miss heard me and just started to drive, leaving Aaron behind. This is not an odd thing with Magicbus, if your not on the bus when they say you have to be there than they will just leave you, thankfully we were around the corner from the hostel so Aaron met us there, but the driver had no intention of going back for him! We laugh about it now, but jeeze people have been left behind in some random places!

Nelson is gorgeous, its a little town with about 500 people in it, its surrounded by mountains and has a beach not a long car drive away. The only thing about it was the music, Kiwi´s really need to be taught a lesson when it comes to music.

Our hostel was ace, it had everything you could possibly need, from mountain bikes (free) to hotwater bottles and to top it off it served free chocolate cake and ice cream EVERYNIGHT at 8pm. The was an eating out area and everynight everyone would gather around and have a good chinwag, swapping stories and green teabags!

We decided to take a couple of bikes out...we should learn really that Bikes and US dont go together at all, we lasted about 30 minutes until I realised that the little hill Aaron said we were going up turned out to be a real big him...a mountain in fact. Thankfully he got a puncture (nothing to do with me fidlng about with the air valve at all) and we had an hour walk back to the hostel. We did venture back out to go and see the cathedral and the Geo-national central point of the whole of New Zealand, which happens to be up a frigging hill...seriously!

Nelson is a lovely little town, well worth another visit. Sadly we only had one day here and were back on the bus to Franz Josef...cant wait!