Hello North Island

---

Round the corner into the harbour I had almost forgotten what a sky scrapper was as there had been none like that in the South Island. For the last few days I had been slightly apprehensive about driving in Wellington and the North Island as people had told me that it was so much busier. It turns out that so far it has been fine. The only thing wrong with driving in Wellington is the bloody stupid one-way system that seems to exist on 95% of all roads in the city. If you go wrong you have to navigate the entire city to have another go at it.
We had not booked a hostel and this proved to be a mistake. Not only was this the capital city it was also Easter weekend. We tried several places and eventually found one that had room. Rosemere Backpackers, probably one of the worst places I have stayed in so far, and I thought only last night that our giant B&Q building was going to win the award for worst hostel
It turned out that most of the people staying there were going to university in Wellington and rather than bothering to find themselves a flat they had just stayed in the hostel for the past god knows how many months. The room I was in was occupied by 5 other people that had all been there for months so it was like staying in someone’s bedroom. Other rooms had even bought TV’s between them!! As everyone there knew everyone else it didn’t make you feel at home. The place was also riddled with bed bugs and I’m still scratching the bites now.
The first day in Wellington was mostly taken up driving around and around looking for somewhere to stay. When we did finally find the dump, I mean the hostel we went straight back out to pick up Orial and Garreth as their boat was arriving at 4.30pm We took the bypass but it turned out not to have an exit for the port so we went miles out of the way before being able to turn round. On the way back we hit rush hour so it took us forever.

After spending that length of time in the car all I wanted to do was get out of it!! That night we went out and found an Irish bar that had a band playing. They were far too loud for anyone to hear themselves think. I’m sure the manager would have noticed a pattern that every time the band had a break the bar started to fill back up again. Then when they started to play people left. As we couldn’t be bothered to find anywhere else we stayed put and just guessed what each other were talking about.

The next morning I wandered round the city for a while then climbed up Victoria Mountain, which is on the east of the city. It was lovely and sunny and gave great views across the city. Then after climbing down and walking the entire length of the city I took the cable car up the other side to the botanical gardens.

The next morning we decided that we had all had enough of the city, but before we left we visited Te Papa, the main museum of New Zealand. We didn’t go for the museum as such but it just happened to be the opening day of the Lord of the Ring Exhibition. The previous evening saw cast and crew attending the launch party. It cost $10 to get in but was definitely worth it. The exhibition contained all the original clothes, swords, and set pieces that were used in the film plus loads of videos about how everything was done. It was amazing how much work went into this film. It took three months to build a piece of set that was used in the movie for 2 seconds. The leading Ork costume took 5 people 12 hours to put onto the guy playing it. He had to start getting into is costume at 8pm the night before just to be ready for the mornings filming. As chain mail was too heavy for the actors to wear they made 12 million plastic rings that were all individually hand looped together to make each costume.
As you can tell there were a million interesting things about this movie.

There was much discussion on the best way to get out of Wellington. There are two State Highways, number 1 and 2. As we knew very little about the North Island we didn’t know which was the best to take. We eventually decided on the Number 2, about 10 seconds after getting onto the number 1. Luckily we were able to turn round.

---