Hello !I'm writing to you from The Marion in Wellington. We've had a lot of rain the past few days. They even declared a state of emergency shortly after I arrived. (Unsure if this is a coincidence) This was the last week of our south island road trip, as Bethan splits to go north and I stay in Wellington. Last Wednesday we went north via Wanaka and camped in a free camp not far from Mount Cook.  A fence covered in bras. How strange!  This guy again...  The view from the campsite On Thursday we hiked near the base of Mount Cook. We weren't as lucky as I had been when taking the bus north a few weeks ago, as the mountain was shrouded by cloud.  Not the best view, but still amazing!  I love these mini suspension bridges. I always make sure to walk out of step with everyone else to stop them swaying too much (Like happened to the Millennium Bridge in London!)  A very well behaved goat in the visitor centre We spent the eve camping near Lake Tekapo. In the morn we hiked up to the observatory for a nice view over Lake Tekapo.  Turns out hobbits are real and they enjoy caravanning like the rest of us  A perfect evening campsite beer right here  Stars!  We left to Oamaru in the afternoon afternoon, and arrived in time to see some penguins come in for the night. We didn't see any of the rare yellow eye penguins come in, but plenty of the tiny Blue Penguins at another spot.   What that dawg doin?  Penguins, facing a wall of people  It was nice seeing the penguins initially. We made sure to keep quiet and relatively far back. It was clear they wanted to get up and cross the road. We felt quite off put by the whole experience, however, as there were 10s of tourists just stood right at the penguins, pointing cameras at them. Theres a dedicated man to tell people to give them space, who was clearly sick of dealing with us tourists. Please don't be these people. I hope they all got some nice pics to look at once in exchange for stressing these penguins out! We spent Saturday morning wandering around Oamaru. It turned out to be one of the favourite towns I've visited so far. Because of the lack of native trees in the area, the original settlers built everything out of the local Limestone. This made for building with much more character than the average Aus/NZ buildings of the time. It's a shame there was absolutely no nightlife past 10pm. No wonder all the young people move to Australia!  This building reminds me of brutalist council housing blocks. Please hear me out... There was a period of time in the UK where they wanted and started to tear down all the old Victorian buildings because they looked "ugly". One bloke decided that he would try cleaning his big Victorian building's frontage. People very quickly realised the buildings weren't ugly, they were covered in decades of ugly smog. We very quickly stopped tearing them down. I think its a very similar story for the brutalist buildings in much of the UK. We've never cleaned them, they now look horrible and people want them gone (also they want them gone so they can replace social housing with private rented housing, but that's another issue). This building shows really well what putting a bit of TLC into your city can do to how it looks. Thank you for coming to my TED talk.  Whats nicer? The buildings on the left or the woolies on the right? I much prefer how the woolies is devoid of any features that make it interesting to look at... In all seriousness, its this bland kinda architecture which is why im pretty keen to get back to the UK at this point  Enough ranting about architecture... Heres a bull bloke on a laptop in the Steampunk museum!  Metal frog  Pretty sunset from the car Saturday afternoon and Sunday were mainly transit days, passing through Christchurch on the way to Picton to catch the ferry to Wellington.  This guy!  The harbour at picton. We took a slightly larger boat across the Cook Strait Monday and Tuesday were chill days. I'd drank a lot of beer the past few days! (And i drank a lot more on tuesday too, oops)  Silly Kiwi  A succulent Chinese meal! Mapo tofu (which is not, as I had assumed, veggie, owing to all the pork mince in it)  I felt like I was in some sort of fever dream walking past these blokes at 11pm whilst the city was entirely empty.  Coffee Club: I enjoyed this coffee and croissant. (The rest of the coffee has still been mediocre compared to Aus)  Strange dog   Another succulent Chinese meal! Chongqing Hot and Sour Glass Noodle Soup. I'm happy I went medium spice only! Tomorrow I'll be heading to volunteer at Mangaroa Farm, north of Wellington. They're a "community food hub and education centre" practising regenerative (friendly reminder that regular intensive farming is killing our land, regen all the way!) sheep and beef farming, alongside a small veg farm for their farm shop. Depending on how it goes, I'll be there for between a week and a month. (And if I enjoy it a lot, maybe ill swap my keyboard for a spade when I come home) Bye for now! P.S. P.P.S |
