Onto Wellington

We left Taupo and went to a tiny place called "Turangi" where we had planned to do the Tongariro crossing which is a 6-8hr walk across volcanoes including Mt Doom unfortunately the weather was so bad for a few days that it was impossible to do. So we went on to Wellington instead both slightly deflated.

This is supposed to be the volcano used in the Lord Of The Rings as Mt Doom:-


I thought we were never going to actually get to wellington our bus driver was an ass and just keep stopping everywhere and anywhere. We stopped at this one place which is famous for "welly throwing" Yip you have read correctly. Now even a country bumpkin like me wasn't getting into this little competition, but yes we ended up spending about 40 mins or so here, watching idiots from the bus throwing a fecking welly in this arena, SAD but true. The one nice thing we did was stop at this place that had a farm attached to it there were some pretty cool goats there that were pretty darn clever aswell, one climbed up the fence and keep looking at me until i discovered he wanted me to pull the tree down to him so he could eat it. Cute really.

When we FINALLY did arrive in Wellington we both found that we liked the place - it has a nice vibe about it. We met the girls Lina, Marie, Mary & Gemma at the hostel and just ended up having a few beers and dinner with them on our first night. We decided to spend 3 days here and our time was filled with getting a tram to the botanic gardens which were small but very beautiful (they have a small peace flame which came from Japan it is in connection with Hiroshima and the fight to stop nuclear testing). We also went to the national NZ museum - Te Papa which was cool.


We went for a malaysian meal on Valentines night and Al managed to get himself into a right drunken state and there went my night of passion ;-) but we did have some excitement we had our fire alarm go off at 3.30am and we all had to evacuate. Now the funny side to this is that Al decided to grab everything he could, 1st thing of course was the lap top, I on the other hand barely managed to put my clothes on, no glasses no bag nothing... It was of course a false alarm some drunken idiot (not Al) thought it would be fun, 3 fire engines came to our rescue they were actually there by the time we got down the stairs so that was pretty fast.