Truckin' Right Along

As some of you may know, since leaving Wellington I took a ferry to Picton (a 3 hour trip from Wellington to Picton- not the one Gilligan was on) where I stayed in Tombstone Backpacker's for 3 nights. It is named for the graveyard across the street so the hostel comes complete with a coffin shaped door and a little metal skull key chain on the room key. The linens are appropriately black and white but the common rooms are painted in a painful orange-and-yellow-with-teal-trim scheme. Aside from that there is a gorgeous patio overlooking the harbor, town and the hills behind. The patio, thankfully, is walled in on 3 sides with glass to block the strong wind coming off the Cook Strait. They've got a spa for visitors use and chairs to sit out in the yard on a sunny day. There's not much to the town aside from a library, grocery store, video rental, a few cafes and more souvenir shops. The town exists mostly because of the ferry landing. There are some nice hikes out of town, but they were a bit crowded for my taste. So I took a stroll along the waterfront which was quiet an lovely and nearly disastrous. It was after I'd hiked a good kilometer down the narrow, narrow beach before the tides occurred to me! I realized while I was sitting on a rock reading that while there was still plenty of space where I was , I didn't really know how high tide gets there and I didn't know what time high tide was. So I packed it in and it was a good thing too because on my way back there were stretches of beach that had been tricky to maneuver on land on my way out but on my way back in I was forced to wade out into the water. No harm done and worst come to worst, I could have swam back easily however I had my camera with me which would have been the end of that.

Then I took the bus to Nelson, the sunshine capital of NZ. It lost the title last year to Blenheim, breaking Nelson's 20-some-odd year reign, but they won it back this year. Of course, I was there for 2 and a half days and 2 of them were rainy. Only on the first day when I decided to walk the 2km from town to the hostel with all my gear on my back, did the sun decide to shine. However, the town of Nelson is exceedingly adorable and while I would have enjoyed the weather to go to the beach, I ended up getting to see the cathedral over the city and spent one afternoon reading in the House of Ales watching the rain fall outside. The hostel there named "The Bug" was a really friendly place to stay and festooned with WV bugs in paintings, tins, miniature cars, even the rooms were named things like "Travel Bug" or "Love Bug" instead off having numbers. I took an early bus from Nelson to Fox Glacier on my third day which took most of the day.