New Zealand Day 29 & 30 – Wellington

Gorgeous Welington (when the sun is out!)

We were grateful for a bit of a lie-in the next morning but felt somewhat guilty that Jamie and Matthew had to get up for work after the amount of wine consumed! We had a fairly easy (hungover) day exploring Wellington in the car, mainly lounging in cafes and antique shops and that evening the guys took us to their local Indian for a right old feast!

The next morning was a Saturday so we had Jamie and Matthew as our own personal tour guides. Our first stop was Chocolate Fish – pretty much just a little shack down near the water a couple of kms outside the city that serves nothing but fish sandwiches, and awesome fish sandwiches at that. Jamie, Matthew and I coupled ours with a spider (or coke float for the other side of the pond) but James was a fool and got a smoothie instead.

From there we took a drive around the coast to check out some houses that we will never be able to afford (including Peter Jackson’s!) – many even had private lifts up the hill to their front door, amazing.

After our coastal tour we took a climb (in the car of course, we were full of fish and ice cream) up to Mount Vic for some pretty spectacular views of the city. The wind was getting pretty full-on by this point so Matthew mentioned a nice beach about 30 minutes away that he was pretty confident would be less windy. Jamie didn’t seem too convinced but we thought we’d give it a shot anyway.

The drive was pretty awesome in the sunshine, but unfortunately when we pulled up in the carpark the wind was so strong it almost ripped the car doors off! Luckily there was a café on the beach so we stopped for a cup of tea and a scone before heading back to the city.

The infamous windless beach - and Mathew braving the sea!

All a bit exhausted from the previous couple of days we opted for a quiet night in and Jamie cooked us a rather amazing roast dinner while Matthew created the soundtrack for our evening and left James and I with a burning desire to start our own vinyl collection!

We probably should have got an early night in preparation for our 6am start the next morning but we all got sucked into watching The Illusionist on TV and thanks to advert breaks every 4 minutes we didn’t get to bed until gone 1am!

Good times!