Day 10 continued- Wellington & Crossing to South Island

After a quick Google and remembering the recommendations given we decided to look around the famous Te Papa museum in the free time available below the ferry crossing. In a mad panic we booked onto a guided tour commencing in 3 minutes! Meaning a sprint to the building, except the entrance wasn’t at the front, panicking more we ran the whole way round the building before finding the entrance. Running in, there was no obvious ticket counter! After asking someone and dodging so so many people (typical there’s an entire school trip there) and up a flight of stairs we got to the kiosk, through huffing and puffing I explained we were supposed to be on the 12pm tour (it was now 12.07 ????) and the guide looked blankly at me ‘we don’t have a booking’! Desperate for my phone to load the website to show her the confirmation it was stubbornly refusing! Finally, we decided although we got confirmation it hadn’t actually gone through (maybe because we completed the transaction at 12.01; after it should’ve started). Ok panic over! We bought tickets for the 1pm tour instead and went to scavenge through the gift shop, we do love a gift shop. Typically, we ended up with hands full of goodies; another Christmas decoration, a general decoration of a kiwi for our next home and a pair of kiwi earrings. Like I said, we’re a sucker for gift shops and kiwi's apparently!

Wasting an hour in the sun looking out at the docks and discussing how ridiculous it is that no one likes or is interested in Christmas, let alone excited.
Back to the kiosk for a tour we’re actually booked on this time. There was only the two of us and one other woman. Turns out we paid for some speed tour consisting of ‘this is x exhibition, feel free to come back after the tour in your own time’, what we then realised is... entry is free and we could’ve come in at anytime and not wasted an hour wondering pointlessly around, or paid for this ‘tour’. She told us a couple of facts we wouldn’t have known otherwise but nothing ground breaking. We’d been sucked in to the tourist trap ???? unfortunately we only had about 10 minutes after the tour ended before we needed to get to the ferry. Which was a shame as the museum was amazing and we would have loved to spend more time reading about New Zealand and the Māori culture. Cue a bit more running round the exhibitions we wanted to look a little bit more at, mainly the Māori one and the wildlife one (well Andy wanted to look at the wildlife one).

Even more running, yet while back in the car I remembered that during our original run I had received an email from the ferry company but hadn’t read it. Turns out our ferry was delayed from 4pm to 7pm... so we did have time to look around Te Papa and none of the running had been needed, typical! We’re always running late so not even questioned when we have to... or don’t have to in this case! We made some pack up for lunch and went to eat at a more leisurely pace on the dock before heading back to the museum for the third time. One highlight for us was an art installation demonstrating a never ending celebration with 200,000 individual pieces of confetti suspended in air/time. The effect was magical.

There’s a few different breeds of birds in New Zealand that don’t fly because they never evolved wings as they were never prey before humans came to the island so had no need to fly away. Although an interesting fact it does mean there is so much road kill since they can’t get off the road quick enough.. well and a lot of possums clearly ‘playing possum’ when they see a car so end up under the tyres!
The Māori part was clearly where Disney had been for a day trip for inspiration for Moana! Moana's outfit, the ocean swirl in her name and even a boat with a pig and a chicken were all witnessed in the museum. However unfortunately photos were banned in this section.

The museum really was well done and we would recommend it to anyone of any age. You could have spent all day in there and a few more hours did whizz by but it was now time for a beer, especially after all the running we had been doing! Once on the ferry for our revised time we headed up stairs to the passenger deck and in search of plugs, one thing while traveling you forget is general first world luxuries, like electricity! Andy came back with a treat of nuggets before we settled in for the four hour trip. Once the blog was up to date and with hunger setting in we made our way to the food court, for some surprisingly reasonably priced! We tucked in to our hot meals deciding what to do for the remainder of the crossing. We downloaded a series on Netflix before we left the UK and decided to make a start on that, it’s strange that saying it out loud doesn’t seem much of an adventure (especially in comparison to the adventure we’re on now) but how doing such a simple thing with your best friend can make you so happy.

Arriving in Picton and getting off the ferry gone midnight (we were supposed to arrive at 7pm before our delay!), I had the joy of driving half an hour to the campsite up and down mountains with crazy corners which I couldn’t drive any faster than 20mph around (photo below). Guided by the light of the moon and praying nothing came the other way we made it safely to our campsite for the night; all tucked up for bed ready for our hike around Abel Tasman tomorrow. Life is pretty good!