Ok, so yes i'm 'travelling', but I don't have the luxury of actually being a traveller; one of the many that travel in heards on the Magicbus or Nakedbus(apparently nakedness is optional). I sleep under the same roof as these people, but unlike them I can't turn up somewhere and offer to work cleaning rooms for the day in order to get a free nights accommodation because I don't have the luxury of having another 875 days left to play with as they do. But I do get to have the benefits of being around these people. Like, I can pour wine at 5pm, sit on the backpackers balcony with the dudes. I can listen to the guy playing his acoustic guitar next to me pretty much nonstop for close to two hours. I can plan to read a book, but then decide that closing my eyes, feeling the sun on my face, listening to the guitar and sipping wine is about as good as it needs to get, so don't read anything. Everything from Pink Floyd to Rage Against the Machine, no singing to spoil it just the perfect playing of a good guitar. Then the dude leaves, so quickly that I don't even have time to say that was great.

I need to tell you about glow worms! Glow worms are amazing, they live in Waitomo; caving country slap bang in the middle of the North Island. Whilst drifting on black water in a rubber ring, in pitch black cos you've turned your helmet light off, about 20 metres underground in a cave that takes you 2 hours to get through, you get to see glow worms attached to the cave roof. Hundreds of them. They all glow green, as bright as led's. It's like looking at a green starry sky, really cool. They have the craziest life in the world. Whilst a worm they are actually an un-hatched fly, stuck to the roof. They live stuck there for 11 months. They catch food by attracting flies with their bright glow, and have sticky webs hanging down to catch anything that comes along. The stuff that glows is actually their poo! After 11 months they finally hatch into a fly. Only they don't have a mouth or digestive system, so only live for 3 days! 3 days to get as much sex as you can and get someone pregnant. Good 3 days but my what a lot of effort...

A did a wine tour at Vinopolis a few months ago. You got 7 tastings with a quantity of wine in your glass that if you'd have left it too long would have completely evaporated. You had no chance of getting even remotely pissed. Ah, not like the wine tour I did near Napier! Napier suffered an earth quake about a hundred years ago, completely destroying the whole city. They rebuilt it all in about 2 years, and decided to build everything in Art Deco. It's a striking looking place. Our wine tour took us to 6 vineyards and a brewery, six tastings in each. That's more like it. Trollied I was! Everything starts tasting the same when you're trollied, I gave up trying to taste melons, honey, liquorice, all that gilli whatsherfacecrap. Tasted good tho, and the cool thing is NZ wine is cheaper in england than NZ, cos they sell it us cheaper cos there's more competition here. Sweet as!

Easily a stand out city for far for me has been Wellington. For anyone that thinks NZ is all sheep and pies (I can't stress enough how they like their pies, they're everywhere, all with steak and often with cheese), this place was a revelation. This place is central London and Camden, on-sea. Full of London city types by day and bohemian bar dwellers in the Cuban Quarter by day. Strangely because of this it stopped feeling like I was in NZ tho. I started missing one street towns, insanely friendly people and bars called 'Curlys',where you could actually meet Curly.

You're reading this because I'm too exhausted to do anything else tonight. Tapping on my computer and drinking Mac's Gold is about all I can manage. That's because today I climbed a mountain in Kaikoura. Yes a mountain, not a hill. All 4500 feet of it! Imagine putting the treadmill up to maximum incline, then proceed to march up it for 4 hours. Make sure you're stood in full bright sunshine all the way as well. And then run out of water after four hours, only you've got to walk back down again, which is another 2 hours. And because it was so steep to get up, it's no easier to get back down cos the incline makes you feel like you're walking down stairs. Rumour has it i'm supposed to be on holiday as well :)