You gotta love the locals!

Spongebob at the Winter Gardens
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Nice early start to catch the ferry, but at least we had good weather this time, although it was a little rough.

Drove north west from Wellington to Wanganui, to catch up with our German friend Saskia for a couple of days.  Decided another bbq was in order, as it was a really nice day, and the information centre recommended a beach called Kai Iwi, as it has free gas bbqs.  Unfortunately when we got there we discovered that the gates close at 8pm, so it was no good to us.  There were lots of locals fishing on the beach, so Rob went over to chat to them, to ask if they knew where we could go to have a bonfire, and one of them said "yes, you can use my private beach!"  How cool is that?  Some total strangers come over and tell him they want to set fire to stuff, and he says yes, do it on my land!

Spooky!
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We had a really good night - a huge bonfire with sausages, chocolate bananas (a la Dad) and fireworks. We couldn't actually get right down to the beach as the path was very hazardous (especially in the dark) so we had the fire on the clifftop overlooking the beach.

The next day we went to the Winter Gardens, the Victoria Lake and the Bason Botanic Gardens, all of which were really impressive.

We then set about finding another bbq spot for the evening, and ended up at the beach again (we never did find out what the beach was called). Anyway, it looked like a perfect spot - big beach, plenty of space away from the dunes, loads of dry driftwood....  We saw a chap fishing so Rob went over to talk to him, to find out how far the tide came in so we could pick our spot; good job he got chatting to him as it turned out that the last person to have a fire on the beach did set fire to the dunes, and had to pay a $20,000 fine, plus the cost of the four fire engines, two helicopters etc it took to put out the fire.... guess we won't have a bbq then....