We took the ferry from Wellington to Picton on the South island. It takes about 3 hours and is largely without note, aside from some nice scenery. We left it a bit late to book our ferry tickets, in that we didn’t do it until the lady from the hire car company reminded us when we landed in Auckland. Evidently it’s a busy time of year, so we ended up catching a ferry at 7pm, getting off and joining most of our co-passengers on the same damn road at about 11pm, not making it to our motel in Nelson until gone 1am. They’d left us a key under the mat. The whole of New Zealand is like some idealised version of England in the 1950s.
Nelson was a contender for the capital once, I think due to its dubious claim to bring the dead centre of New Zealand. Otherwise it's another small and pleasant place that one can see the length and breadth of inside a day. We went to the pictures and saw the newest Hunger Games and their quaint old cinema - that was cheery.
This changes *everything*
It’s cake made from penny sweets and liquorice allsorts. It comes with a side of insulin.
New Year’s Eve was marked by some very drunk but friendly revellers, an enthusiastic band set up in the town square, and some amusingly dire fireworks. There was a bloke loosing off some supermarket-bought rockets from his garden at an askance angle across the river that outdid them in the awe stakes.
Nelson lives next to Abel Tasman national park, near which is the famous Split Apple Rock - a granite boulder whose splitting is the source of countless mythological explanations. It lies off a small beach, isolated by way of a lengthy drive up into the hills and a twenty minute walk through the woods. Despite this the locals are enough like their British counterparts to seek any sand on a bank holiday, as it was pretty crowded down there.
So this 2016. We're about two thirds done, but first there is some wine that needs drinking.
Kurzfassung auf deutsch: Frohes neues Jahr!
