Wellington, the capital city of New Zealand and our final stop on the North Island. The drive here had been uneventful but quite a good one with a coast road resembling the Great Ocean Road in OZ but no way near as long. At this point of the trip we were a bit behind on our blogs along other various internet stuff, as well as not yet having booked the ferry to the South Island. In view of this we scrapped the rest of the day in favour of getting to a camp site early afternoon; this would allow us to get internet for the rest of the day, which is exactly what we did. Booking the ferry was an interesting task as our van was too short to be classed as a campervan but too high to be a car or a normal van, the end result after some phone calls was we were booked on the ferry as a high car! Now we had chosen the unsociable ferry time of 2:25am as this was the cheaper option. Our sailing would be the early hours of the Tuesday, and we were presently on the Sunday night which gave us a day to fit everything in.

Off the site for 10am we headed straight in to town which was surprisingly small for a capital city, but hey who are we to judge. We took the cable car from the city centre up the hill to the view point of the city and botanical gardens. At the top is a free museum about the cable car and its past, now this was a lot more interesting than it first seems. The 'cable car' is a Wellington icon across NZ the reason being that the whole city is built on hills; this means most of the houses around wellington are pretty difficult to get to. So almost every house around the city area has its own 'cable car' right to the front garden/door, and they come in some very strange forms. Several people's dogs go in to the car and sit on the seat when they want a walk, as they know every walk starts at the cable car. Anyone who has a dog will probs see the funny side to this as you will know how this sort of thing shapes your pets personality.

After a long walk back down the hill to the city we opted for a free guided tour of the parliament buildings, one of which is known as the beehive due to its shape. The parliament is made up of three buildings one of which is parliaments own library, the beehive is really a presentation or heads of state visiting area, and the middle of the three is the main workings of the whole thing. The tour was better than we expected with the best bit been in the basement, because the entire foundations had undergone some amazing engineering to make it earthquake proof. It's too difficult to explain fully but they basically cut sections out of the foundations and put big blocks of rubber and springs in place to allow movement under the buildings, the trick to this been that the buildings don't actually move at all above the ground!

A brief look around some shops had finished our day in Wellington off as far as sights were concerned, we did some sorting of the van before driving to the harbour. Once at the harbour we found a parking area under a bridge to dim the daylight a bit, so we could make our tea then have a snooze. We were resting here as it was pointless paying for a campsite for a night when we would have had to leave it in the middle of the night, it seemed most other people on that departure time had the same idea as the car park filled up pretty quick. At boarding time it all went without a hitch and we settled down with our quilt in the best seats we could find on the ferry, to try and get some more sleep before having to drive again at around 5:30am.

Our rude awakening came in the form of the speaker message asking all drivers to return to their vehicles to disembark, so we did and once docked set straight off for the West Coast stop at Punakaiki otherwise known as the home of the pancake rocks. We will leave you intrigued about that until the next blog!