Not having been to the West Coast region, I decided to spend a few days in Franz Josef village and then head back up to Hokitika. It’s pretty tricky to do this by public transport, so I ended up hiring a car from Rad Car Hire who gave me the car at Hokitika airport and I dropped it back there on my way out, four days later. After driving my electric car for a few months it was strange driving a petrol one again, but I managed.
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The train ride down from Blenheim was lovely – beautiful scenery from vineyards to rolling hills to rocky coastline. Luckily it wasn’t too busy either so I had a double seat to myself.
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This trip is to celebrate the beginning of my long service leave, a nice chunk of time where I can focus on things other than work. And what better to do than travel?
I’d originally planned to be in the UK at this point, but decided that a quick jaunt closer to home was in order, especially since R and I will be heading to Europe together in June. I hadn’t been to NZ for a while, so it seemed like the perfect opportunity to tick off a couple of bucket list items, the first of which was to visit the Marlborough wine region.
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So after a few days here we’ve been exploring Wellington at a much less frenetic pace than we usually do! Since we’re staying with friends we’re tending to get up slowly and potter around a bit before heading out for lunch and doing some wandering.
The central city has some great lunch specials, with most of the pubs and restaurants doing a $10-$15 menu. We’ve tried out the $10 pub grub at The Four Kings, $12 curry at Great India, $15 pub grub at The Grand. Yum! All very recommended.
I’ve been vaguely looking for a warm wooly coat, and thought NZ would be the place to be, but even though we’ve done a few circuits of the shopping strips and I haven’t found the perfect one. I did pick up a cute pair of purple and black heeled ankle boots though, and some books and souvenirs in the form of chocolate.
Yesterday we headed out of the city on the windy roads through the mountains (hold onto your hats!) to the wine region to the north, stopping off in Greytown to browse through the boutiques, handcrafted cupcake and confectionary shop and art galleries. The next stop was Martinborough, where we were a bit too late to do much wine tasting, but we did stop off at one winery to try the local offerings and picked up a dessert white and a red. Hopefully we’ll be able to get them home safe and sound!
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We landed in Wellington late yesterday afternoon after a quick two-day catching-up-with-friends stopover in Melbourne. As usual, that involved a lot of shopping and tasty food.
The shopping wasn’t terribly successful this trip, mainly being focused on fruitlessly searching various ALDIs in the vicinity of wherever we happened to be, for the elusive Expressi machine, one of those newish pod coffee machines, made even more attractive because of its $79 price tag and the availability of chai latte and hot chocolate pods as well as the boring coffee varieties. Since Perth doesn’t have ALDI, we thought we’d buy one and send it home in the post.
No luck though. Three ALDIs and no machine. Sigh.
In any case, we were fortified in our struggle with the awesome culinary delights of D’Lish Fish, a yummy fish’n’chippery in Port Melbourne who does gluten free batter, the unparalleled Brunetti for patisserie, and delicious Asian fusion restaurant Gingerboy
And on to New Zealand! Almost. The flight was deleted by an hour and a half, which gave us ample time to have breakfast and consider unwise duty free choices at the airport, before hopping onto the little 320 to jump the ditch. (It looked really little when the qantas A380 swanned past!) We were sitting at the back of the plane behind a family who seemed to spend the entire 3.5 hours wrestling each other in the aisle. Apart from that, and some turbulence (perhaps the pilots didn’t appreciate their wrestling either) the flight was pretty uneventful.
Landing at Wellington was a bit nerve-wracking, mainly because the landing strip starts at the shoreline, so a lot of the final descent is over water. All you can see is the water getting closer, only relieved by some random mountains looking pretty close! All this, and it was a very smooth landing.
Baggage and customs check was easy (and the sniffer puppy dogs didn’t really want cuddles, sadly) and we were out into the brisk Aotearoan air.
Wellington hasn’t changed much since the last time we were here. Lots of different styles of houses all mixed in, the CBD isn’t huge, and all cupped into a valley between hills facing the Cook Strait.
We stopped in for groceries at New World which we’d stayed next to on our last visit (and saw the wine we’d had at Gingerboy last night much cheaper than in Australia!) and found delicacies like peanut butter icecream and lots of varieties of gluten free bread.
Next stop was our mates S and A’s place, where we’re staying. They’re right in the middle of the action here, and we haven’t seen them for about six months, when they moved over here.
We gave into our weakness for Hell Pizza for dinner, and washed it down with local brews – Rennaissance chocolate stout for R and Isaac’s Winter Cider for moi. Tasty!
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The whirlwind tour continues, with a visit to Wellington, New Zealand’s sleepy capital city. I knew a couple of people who lived there, who I’d met on the Egypt trip earlier in the year, so it was lovely to catch up with them, and they showed us a couple of the sights of the city, like the Beehive… er… the Parliament Buildings. They also introduced us to the amazing Hell’s Pizza, which did gourmet (and gluten free!) pizzas.
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Our whirlwind trip of New Zealand in 10 days started in the South Island, in Christchurch.
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Two Weeks Away 
