Heading South

After 2 weeks of driving to all corners of New Zealand's North Island we felt that we were ready to head south, so made our way down to Wellington and booked our ferry crossing for the next morning. This gave su a day to explore the city and see if there were any sights. We started at an asian food market and then made our way to the Te Papa museum which, without question is one of the best we've ever been to. Entertaining both children and adults will all sorts of creativity from a detective challenge to an international festival of dance featuring acts as far off as Bolivia and Ireland. The most entertaining was a group of 5 woman from Zimbabwe, who walked onto the stage and told the audience to wake up and shake a bit. They were brilliant and the audience loved them. The rest of the museum covers New Zealand's history, it's fauna and flora and the geology of it's land mass.

We spoilt ourselves for dinner and went off to a restaurant called Kai that specialises in Maori-fusion cuisine. I went for the Hangi, which is a dish of meat that is cooked in a hole in the ground using hot rocks. My chicken was rare and the rest of the dish looked and tasted like roadkill. Highly recommended by many but definately not by us, never ever go to Kai!

The ferry the next morning left an overcast and wet Wellington at 8 and arrived in Picton, at the top of the South Island, at 11:30am. Somewhere along the way the weather had dramatically improved and we sailed into the Marlborough Sounds in wonderfully clear and calm conditions.