We only spent one night in Wellington but it was so great I’ve decided to write a whole blog on it 🙂 After leaving our host in Hawke’s Bay, we were pretty excited to move on. We had another long bus trip from Hastings down to Wellington, about a 5 hour ride. We got into Wellington at around 1:30pm and had a bit of time to kill before we could check into our hostel. We hit up the McDonald’s (or Macca’s as they’re called here) and tried a couple frozen cokes (yum!) then chilled in a little park outside the railway station. After checking into our hostel we were able to run wild and free all over the beautiful city of Wellington.
We started off with some window shopping down the many streets full of stores, looking for some postcards and oohing and aahing at all the nice stores they have there, wishing we could just shop and shop without having to cram all of the things into our already stuffed and super heavy backpacks. We came across a couple of restaurants we thought might be cool to eat dinner in (including one called Bad Grannies!) but finally settled on a wood stove pizza place called Heaven. And man was the name accurate! We were super hungry (after a week of scrounging for food) and we ended up eating a whole pizza each!
We wandered around a bit more and found the harbour front. It is so gorgeous we just sat there for a couple hours watching people in dragon boats, staring at the beautiful view, and watching some people do fancy jumps off the pier into the water. So nice!
Eventually we moved on, and after hearing that passionfruit sundaes exist at McDonald’s here, we were determined to try one! And oh my goodness I think I found a new favourite!
We decided to hit a grocery store to get a few provisions for our full day of travel the next day, and stocked up on chips, granola bars and ciders. Oh and these ciders, peach and passionfruit flavour, man were they good!!
When it got dark out, we decided to head down to the harbour again to see all the pretty city lights and it was so lovely! The weather was perfect (but a tad chilly) and the atmosphere was so beautiful! The harbour front was dotted with all of these glitzy fancy restaurants and they were all bustling with people, even on a Monday night. We sat and watched the twinkling lights for a while and dreamt of what it would be like to live in a city like this where we could do this every day. We really loved it in Wellington!!
The next morning we headed out early to meet the ferry. It’s about a 3.5 hour ride of the most beautiful views of the ocean and shoreline. There was a bit of spray coming off the ocean and we got salty lips and misted glasses. We didn’t leave the top viewing deck once the whole time. Oh man I really enjoyed that ride! The weather was so perfect for sailing. It was chilly and windy to begin with but as we got further along our journey it got very fine and sunny.
We even happened to see some dolphins which was so exciting!! I managed to get a short video of them but no pictures. Ash was so excited she almost cried. At first we saw just two hopping along the surface, but about five minutes later we saw a huge group of them bounding along towards the boat. Some of them got so close. It was such a cool experience!
We got into Picton a bit early but our bus down to Christchurch ended up being about half hour late. We eventually got on our way and had another 5 hour bus ride down the east coast. Such a beautiful drive! We even managed to see a few seals sunning themselves on the rocks but we were on the wrong side of the bus to get any pictures. Then we got to Christchurch and met our next hosts, but thats a story for another time!
A Couple of Runaways 
So glad you’re experiencing this. Can’t wait to hear all about it.
LikeLike