Wellington, Auckland, and Papamoa

After saying goodbye and leaving Christchurch we began our journey to Wellington - a six hour train ride

followed by a three hour ferry trip.




The trip was very nice and the passing scenery reminded me of Canada with the mountains, rivers, farms,and small towns. The train had a cool "outdoor" viewing car...


but once we got onto the boat, Amanda couldn't help but act all weird.

I think it was all that fresh air made her all giddy.

We did another Couch Surf in Wellington, but only stayed for one day with our host. Nice as he was...

his house had the strong smell of cat urine, and it was just too much, so we left the next morning and got ourselves a room. Exploring Wellington was a real treat.


Amanda and I both loved the city (the nation's capital). Highlights were the "Te Papa" museum, the botanical gardens,


and a tour we happened to come across of a volunteer group restoring a 1920's vintage boat-crane. That's a big 100' ship with a giant rotating crane mounted at its center capable of lifting 80 tons at a 45' reach. But it wasn't so much the crane that was so entertaining,but these three British guys who joined tour. They seed to think themselves pretty clever, but it was immediately obvious from their questions that they were not too bright.

For example, the tour guide lady said this crane had been used to salvage metal from a sunken ferry that was resting on the shallow sea bed. One guy asked if the shallow waters had been deeper, would the wreck have been discovered further down. "Hmmm - I suspect so" said the tour guide. I think so too!

Later in the tour our guide explained that this boat's crane was used to lift a really old and huge 25' wide iron anchor from the sea bed near the Wellington harbour. This time it was a different guy who wanted to know what boat that anchor had come from, but our guide didn't know -there was no other wreckage to correlate this artifact with. Certain that he had a winning strategy he suggested that this group of volunteers working on the restoration of this crane-ship could instead look through all the harbour records for the past several hundred years in search of candidate ships that would have needed an anchor of this size and then further research all of those vessels to see which might have lost an anchor. Ya - right.

At one point the nice tour guide lady was getting pretty tired of our British guests and told this guy to stop arguing with her when she said they could not determine the ship from which the anchor had come from. He was now suggesting that its metal could be carbon dated and assayed and chemically tested to determine its metallurgy and from that it could be inferred that it was from some era which could then possibly hint at its ship of origin. She just told him to not argue with her at that point. Brilliant! For Amanda and I it was all we could do to not burst into laughter whenever these guys asked a question. An Australian guy on the tour was also snickering and had to excuse himself before he burst out laughing too. That was definitely the high light of the day.

Anyway, we were in Wellington for three nights, and then once again boarded the train for an early departure. This time to Auckland. The journey was a relaxing 12 hour ride through more picturesque country, but the problem when we arrived in Auckland was that our next Couch Surfing host still hadn't given us her address or phone number. So what could we do? We went out for sushi and then found a place to stay for the night.

The next day (April 27) we spent mostly at the meritime museum where we had a really nice harbour side lunch

and then found our way to our next Couch Surfing host. If only she'd told us that she lived near the local Lamborghini dealership it would have been so much easier to find her place...



We then hatched a plan to meet up with our Italian friend with the German name (Reinhold) who lives in Opotiki, NZ. We would drive half way and he would come the other direction and we'd planned to meet in Papamoa. And it turns out my parents know someone who has a house there who agreed to let us stay. Wow - nice place...

and so that's where we are now. Tomorrow morning we meet up with Reinhold, and who knows what will happen next!?

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