Wellington

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11/06/09 Thursday Day 300
5 hour bus journey today from Napier to Wellington. It passed reasonably ok. Couple of small ones on board but generally they kept mostly quiet! We arrived into Wellington bus and train station around 1pm and got a taxi to our hotel, The Mercure on The Terrace. We went for a hotel this time because we got a 3 nights for 2 deal on hotels.com and it worked out around the same price than the hostels in the city. Very nice hotel, even includes a mini bar and great views of the city. The city is quiet hilly in places and the hotel is up on a hill overlooking the city, hence the great views.
We headed into the city then. It’s divided into a number of sections. Cuba is mostly alternative clothes shops and of course people! It’s got a pedestrian mall too. Courtney Place is another section. This is where all the bars and cafes are. Quiet a lively place. Lambton Quay is basically the high street. It’s got all the fancy and expensive shops. And finally is the Waterfront, which contains everything around the harbour. Most of the afternoon was spent walking around the areas to see what they’re all about.
We decided to stay in tonight because we’re here for the next two nights too so we’ll head out those two nights. We headed down for a swim in the hotel pool alright. Really nice pool. There’s also a small gym and a sauna there too. We had dinner in the hotel because we got vouchers for a two course meal for 30 dollars which was a pretty good deal since my supposedly medium fillet steak (turned out well done) was 32 dollars anyway.

12/06/09 Friday Day 301
Today we visited the Te Papa museum. This museum is huge, 5 floors of information. Again it’s got volcano information, wildlife and ocean creatures and Mauri culture information. Really good museum. It says in the map we got that it would take 2 to 3 days. We seems to fly through the museums in about 2 hours. All the museums seem to be looking the same to us. After the museum we walked around the waterfront area. Most of the buildings around that are either warehouses or bars and eating houses designed to look like warehouses. We’ve also seen about 3 Irish bars here too. There’s The Black Harp, James Murphy’s (Cork of course) and of course Molly Malone’s.

13/06/09 Saturday Day 302
There’s loads of places to get breakfast in this city. Since the place is full of cafes there’s really good prices for food here. We did some more exploring of the city to see if we missed anything. We didn’t! It’s quite a nice city and very easy to walk around it with the 4 main areas only a few minutes walk from one another. There’s loads of shops and bars and cafes so plenty of choice here.
So that’s the north island. It’s a really cool country so far. Tomorrow we get the ferry to Picton on the south island at 2pm. We’re half way through our journey though this country. We’ve another 2 weeks to cover the south island.

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