Westport is not a “happening” town. We were warned by our driver to stay away from two of the town’s main pubs, and probably the others just in case, due to previous incidents involving Kiwi Experience passengers. There wasn’t a whole lot else to see. A small group of us ventured down to the beach, which was nice, but there weren’t many people there and my fun was mitigated by stepping on a crab.

It turned out that one of our fellow travellers was a Brazillian chef called Fabio, who lauded it over the rest of guys at Lake Rotoiti (where we stopped for a walk on the way to Westport) with his six-pack and wet hair flicking routine as he went for a swim. Fabio was one of a group of new people who joined us as we arrived in Picton, having chosen to travel only the South Island or the South Island before the North. He took it upon himself to make a roast lamb dinner for as many people as he could get a hold of. Regretfully, I wasn’t one of them.

The most exciting part of Westport that we encountered was probably the hostel itself, which was not Base and so therefore quite pleasant. It contained at least four cats. My Danish roommate, who was apparently allergic to them, wasn’t especially enthusiastic about this.

The trip to the South Island began in spectacular fashion as the bus driver swerved illegally over to the curb to collect me as I ran out of the Wellington YHA. I hadn’t slept in. Far from it – I’d actually been killing time looking over my photos, and just happened to kill a little too much of it. This earned me fame throughout the bus, and probably gave the driver – who was new, both to us and to Kiwi Experience – a taste of the sort of incompetence to be expected of passengers in the future.

The journey proceeded with far more organisation from then on. The ferry was “full”, which essentially means that half the passengers don’t get seats because the seating arrangement of the other passengers leaves numerous small gaps, not sufficient to seat groups of people. Throughout the voyage the decks were thick with people who looked like they might be in search of the Promised Seating Area. We reclined instead on a couch and several arm chairs arranged between the toilets and the pay phones, and attempted to acquire some more sleep. The view from the top deck wasn’t all that exciting.

The ferry dropped us off at Picton, where we waited a bit for another Kiwi Experience bus to turn up. It did, and it turned out to be the oldest bus in the fleet, much to the annoyance of the driver. The drive to Nelson was fairly uneventful.

Nelson’s prominant tourist attraction appears to be the geometric centre of New Zealand, which is situated on the top of a hill overlooking the town. I was a little sceptical of this. It’s not obvious how the geometric centre of a shape as complex as a pair of islands can be calculated definitively (I can think of several different methods, which would all give you different answers), or why it should correspond exactly with the summit of a hill. Nevertheless, the view was well worth the climb, and we watched the sunset from the top.

The hostel was a nice little establishment, as practically all non-Base hostels seem to be. However, they were a little narky about me eating my own food in the outdoor restaurant area. I had to retreat several metres to the outdoor hostel eating area, which is (as far as I could tell) on the same property and owned by the same people.

Wellington is a smaller but more interesting city than Auckland (the Kiwi Experience brochure describes it as the “cultural capital”, as well as being the actual capital of course). I and a large number of my fellow travellers spent Christmas Day and Boxing Day there. The bus skipped one of its normal stops – “River Valley” – because the “adventure lodge in the middle of nowhere” wasn’t doing anything for Christmas, and… well, it was in the middle of nowhere.

Christmas Day began with me in the YHA kitchen mixing and frying pancake ingredients purchased in Taupo. The trouble with buying food while travelling is that supermarkets won’t sell you, say, only three cups of flour, 3/4 cups of sugar, three eggs and exactly the right amount of maple syrup, which means you have to carry around extra random food items for the remainder of the trip. Pancakes are delightfully easy to make, even with the dubious cookware that you find in varying states of disrepair in backpacker hostels. They went down rather well among the group I invited to get rid of them. The YHA reception was enlisted to finish the leftovers. The pancake breakfast merged into the hostel’s own “Champagne breakfast” a little while later.

Lunch (because eating is an important part of Christmas) was a little less well-planned. I’m still not sure whether it was a bad joke or just ignorance on his part, but we’d gotten the impression from our bus driver that Kiwi Experience and/or the hostel was organising a cheap meal. It turned out, after we’d made our way to the given location, that this was for the homeless of Wellington, not for the kind of people who might, for instance, spend a thousand dollars or more travelling from other parts of the world to get there. We gave up on that venture in a mild state or disgust and wandered over to the Te Papa museum instead.

Te Papa was exceptionally well designed and run, but we were mostly a little too exhausted to take much of it in. To be honest, I’ve never been good with museums, no matter how interesting, and after about two hours (punctuated by a very nice “sun-dried tomato wrap” at the cafe inside) my feet were hurting and my brain was in stand-by. Still, it’s certainly a must-see in Wellington.

To round off the unconventional food situation, we had ate junk food at the beach in lieu of dinner. Some of the group decided suddenly to go for a swin in what predictably turned out to be absolutely freezing water.

The following day I was left to my own devices to wander the city and take in some more of the sights. It took me quite a while to find the start of the cable car leading up to the botanic gardens overlooking Wellington. The view wasn’t overwhemling, compared to the other high-up places you get to in New Zealand, but it was nice.

One random thing that struck me about Wellington was its overhead tram wires, running along some of the main streets. In my two-and-a-bit days in Wellington I never saw any vehicles that actually used them.