New Zealand, Wellington: Our Second Time in the Capital City

The ferry crossing from Picton to Wellington was the worst boat journey either of us had ever been on, and the damage caused to the on-board cafe is evidence
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To get back to New Zealand's North Island from the South Island, we had booked ourselves onto a return ferry journey from the town of Picton to Wellington. Our last few days in the country, after spending nearly a month there, were going to be on the North Island, as we travelled up north on the island towards Auckland. Auckland was where we were due to fly from, in order to reach the last country on our year-long trip - Australia. We also had to turn in our campervan in Auckland at the Britz Backpacker Campervan rental office.

The ferry journey we had taken a couple of weeks earlier, to get to the South Island from the North Island, was smooth and uneventful. The weather was completely fine that day and a clear blue sky was seen for miles. The journey back was not as uneventful, and has now been classed as the worst boat journey either of us has ever been on in our lives. What started out as a calm journey soon became a bumpy, hair-raising thrill ride that was fun for the first couple of minutes, until everyone around us starting puking their lunch up into small paper bags.

It was like a disaster zone, with people were huddled together on the floor, or on sofas, clutching their sick bags, which were often full in many cases

Yes, those that were faint-hearted and not able to withstand the massive 16-foot waves we were travelling along were the first to get sick. This was mostly children and women, but we did also see several men clutching their paper bags precariously, waiting for their turns to blow chunks. The winds and waves in the Cook Strait were most violently rocking the boat as soon as it was out on the open sea, and away from the safety of the channel with land on either side of it. The ferry driver did an excellent job getting us safely through the waves, but the journey on the rough water took over two hours, during which time we started to feel the effects of the waves ourselves, and were really ready for the trip to end.

Neither of us got sick, fortunately, but there was one occasion where Kyle grabbed some sick bags and placed them on the table in front of us; it didn't help that we had eaten heavy fried food and drank coffees just before the boat started rocking. The boat was tilting so much that all of the equipment in the cafe we had ordered our coffees from crashed to the floor, causing a massive mess for the girls running the place to clean up. Eventually, we couldn't stand the ferry's movement, and we decided to walk around the other sections of the vessel to see how other people were faring.

It was like a disaster zone, with people were huddled together on the floor, or on sofas, clutching their sick bags, which were often full in many cases. Children were crying, and there were naked children nestled in their parents' arms, where the kids had thrown up so much over their clothes that they had to be removed. Husbands were comforting sick wives and young people were helping their elders, who seemed to be feeling the brunt of nature's brute force. It was an awful experience, but an incredibly memorable one as well.

When the ferry arrived in Wellington, we drove Bessie, our campervan, to Te Papa Museum in the city centre, where we planned to stay for the night. During our last trip to the country's capital city, we found out that it was possible to leave our vehicle in the museum car park by day, and pick it up at night, leaving without having to pay for parking, since the car park ticket booth closed around 6:00pm. After two nights in a Top 10 Holiday Park in Richmond, our campervan's batteries and water tank were at 100% and we could afford a couple of nights "on the road".

Since we had already been in Wellington, there weren't any sights that we wanted to see, and we decided to chill out there, taking advantage of their excellent cinema scene and cafes. The films we saw during our second visit were "Elizabeth: The Golden Age", "Control" and "Death Proof". They were three completely different films and we liked them all for different reasons. There was a Starbucks Cafe inside the shopping mall where one of the cinemas we visited was located, and we spent some time there one evening after watching a film.

It was in Wellington that Kyle decided to go to Arkansas, in the US, for the week of Thanksgiving. He had received an email from his stepdad (Marc), who was planning a surprise 60th birthday party for his mum (Judy), and was wondering who he should invite. Marc had no intention of inviting Kyle back to the party, since he was on the other side of the world, but Kyle felt that getting back to see his family was a necessity, since he had found out that his granddad (Bob) had passed away a couple of weeks earlier, and a surprise for Judy would have been an excellent treat.

Things on Judy were tough; she had had to take off a couple of months from work to take care of her mother, Kyle's MeeMaw (Jenny), who was in the advanced stages of Alzheimer's disease and who needed 24-hour care. The sad, but ironic, thing about Kyle booking a flight back to the US was that a couple of days later, he found out about another tragedy on his dad's (Leon's) side of the family. You can read more about that in our next journal entry for Taupo.

In Wellington, we ate kebabs the evening after we left Starbucks. There was a kebab shop near the Courtenay Place shopping mall and we opted for a quick meal from there instead of cooking in the campervan. We ordered a lamb doner kebab to share, which was filled with tahini sauce, a garlic yoghurt sauce, mild chilli sauce and many vegetables. The wrap was so delicious that we ended up ordering another one to share after devouring the first one in a few minutes. At the time of writing this journal entry, we are feeling quite hungry and wish that we could snap our fingers and have duplicate doner kebabs appear before our very eyes, in place of the laptop, which we have come to love so much since purchasing it back in April, in Hong Kong.

The other food we ate in Wellington included some tortilla wraps that we made ourselves and breakfast sandwiches at a well-known fast food chain. Our appetites had waned somewhat after the terrible ferry journal from Picton, so we weren't massively hungry during our time in the city (except when we ate the kebabs, which was over 24 hours after the harrowing boat journey). Since we ended up seeing three films in Wellington, there's a high possibility that we also had soft drinks, popcorn (for Kyle) and crisps (for Dan) during one or more of the films, but we can't remember.

It was dark when we left Wellington after deciding not to spend another night in the Te Papa car park. We wanted to be on the road to Napier the next morning, and staying in the car park might have caused us to have to pay to leave, with the ticket office employee surely manning the gates in the morning. It was late and we were both tired, so we only made it to Upper Hutt, a few miles north of the city, but we found a picnic area at the side of the road there, with ample space, and we were both dreaming not long after pulling over and parking the vehicle.