When we arrived in Paihia it was quite late, so we checked in then went out for a couple of drinks. The town was clearly almost completely artificial and for the benefit of tourists. All the other people in pub were young, except for the predatory locals, and they were determined to have a party, getting very drunk and dancing on the tables. We just sat quietly at the side, drinking and watching.

Youngsters going wild

The next morning I assessed our finances and realised that our drinking the previous night and the first night in Auckland meant that we had spent several day's money. It was nice to be able to speak English again, but the cold and wet was not pleasant and now I was realising that the cost of New Zealand was not really our thing either.

Our time in New Zealand was quite short so we only had two nights in most places, Paihia included, however we had realised after arriving late on our first day that we were leaving early after our second night, so we really only had one full day there. It wasn't nice weather and the main attraction of Paihia is supposed to be the scenery in the Bay of Islands. The weather as it was, we didn't think we'd be able to see much on a cruise which seems to be the usual activity there. Joanne spotted a leaflet for a skydiving company in town and she seemed keen, so we decided to do that instead. The other usual option apart from a cruise is a scenic flight; this would have cost only slightly less than a skydive, so we felt we would be getting two-for-one. As far as the budget was concerned it simply couldn't be counted or else New Zealand just wouldn't work out at all. I wasn't sure how we'd square that but what does that matter when you're about to jump out of a plane?

Joanne getting ready to jump

Finishing touches to Joanne's kit

During the briefing before our jump they asked if we wanted videos and photos of our jumps. Since it would almost double the cost and neither of us are fond of the lens-end of cameras, particularly video cameras, we said no but, just as I had feared, they said they would film it anyway so we could decide afterwards. I just thought of this situation that we were going to have to feel awkward and self-conscious without even getting a video as reward at the end of it. Joanne's tandem partner was jumping with a video camera in one hand, whereas my video was to be taken by a solo jumper rather than my tandem. Sure enough, they irritated and embarrassed us by making lots of faces close-up in the camera then shoving it in ours for us to do the same; there was considerable use of words like “crazee”, “rad”, “awesome”, and so on, as well as lots of “cool” hand signs and fake excited screams. It was really tiresome and we responded by doing nothing but looking embarrassed, which probably only encouraged them into greater heights of hardcore wkd awesomeness, or something. I wished they would just leave us alone to meditate on the absurdity of jumping out of a plane and enjoy the free incidental scenic flight, which was affording very lovely views of the Bay of Islands.

I have skydived once before, over the Namib Desert, and loved it, so I wasn't anything like as nervous this time. Joanne had been excited and looking forward to it until we got on the plane, when the engine noise and cameras made quiet discussion impossible; now she looked nervous. Last time I had been so anxious at the point we jumped, I couldn't really remember that part of it and only really became aware again a couple of seconds later. This time, not being so overwhelmed, I was able to take it all in. We tumbled right over before my tandem partner stabilised our fall and flattened us out. I had missed that last time. Next I was aware of lots of damp, icy wind hitting my face, very painfully; this didn't happen last time in the desert! My ears were also getting very sore and I wished I was wearing a balaclava or a deer-stalker at least. Only when the parachute was deployed did I realise that the ear pain was mostly due to the pressure build up, not just the wind, and I equalised my ears just like you have to do when scuba diving. With the ferocious biting wind reduced to a breeze, I was able to appreciate the view again as we floated slowly down to Earth.

When we landed, the camera was in my face again: what did you think of that? I was asked. I just said freezing, which wasn't at all the answer they were looking for. I don't know if it was just the discomfort or if it's that you can never get that same first-time high back again, but I wouldn't say this jump was anything more than OK. Last time I had thought it was the best thing I had ever done. Joanne had loved it, so maybe the first-time theory was correct, and she hadn't really noticed the cold, although she did prefer the floaty parachute bit more than the free-fall, which I reckon was probably subconsciously because of the cold. No sooner were we indoors again and the hard-sell for the video started. Joanne's was edited and ready in no time and we were sat down to watch it. The company owner was very pleased with Joanne's apparently. My video wasn't so good because the solo jumper had not managed to keep close to us and I was just a dot in the distance for most of it. We explained that we really couldn't afford to buy them, and this is why we had originally said we didn't want one. This wasn't strictly true: the main reason we had said no was that we didn't want the cameras to be there the whole time, but now that we had gone through that anyway, there was no way we were going to be further inconvenienced by paying a fortune for the evidence. Joanne did want her video though, so I thought we could maybe cut a deal by spinning it so as to emphasise the financial aspect. He soon agreed to give us Joanne's DVD for about one third of the asking price, after all they had filmed and written it anyway, hadn't they? He threw mine in for free since it wasn't much good. Clearly our time in Asia had trained us well in the art of negotiation; he had never stood a chance!

written by  The Happy Couple on August 16, 2009 from Paihia, New Zealand
from the travel blog: Michael's Round-the-World honeymoon
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Surely an Uphall is all that's required

On the way, the bus stopped at a small place for lunch, where a sign greatly amused me: it was for a probus club, the word probus being defined, I thought, in The Meaning of Liff by Douglas Adams and John Lloyd ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Meaning_of_Liff ), the text of which can be found here: http://folk.uio.no/alied/TMoL.html. A little research has revealed that it does not feature there, but it was probably the Official Supplement to the Meaning of Liff and a clue to the meaning may be found here, where there is a small excerpt: http://www.2000ad.org/oscar/liff.htm.

By that evening we had accepted that we were not going to be able to afford to eat in restaurants or drink in bars. It was the supermarket for us. For the first time since leaving South Africa the supermarkets were almost like home: we were enjoying drinking red wine and good coffee, and eating wholemeal bread, pasta, cheese, spicy food, and cold meats. Meat, particularly beef, seemed very cheap compared to Scotland, whereas I had expected lamb to be the cheapest; maybe they export enough to keep the prices up. Vegetables were very expensive though. Oh well, let them eat steak! It was also nice to have the opportunity to cook for ourselves again: hostels and guesthouses in Asia don't have kitchens. At the same time it would have been nice to go out too, but New Zealand is just too expensive. At least hardly anyone in New Zealand smokes and it's banned in commercial buildings, which was a nice change after China.

Another, not so welcome, change we were starting to realise was not just an aberration is that beds in New Zealand are disgustingly soft. We like a firm bed anyway, but months in Asia had got us used to the firmness of futons or tatami. We hadn't slept very well so far on the marshmallows they call mattresses, and we were developing lots of joint and muscle aches and pains.

Also, I had been hoping to get some peace and quiet in New Zealand after the constant racket of Asia. I was viewing New Zealand as a bit of a break from travel, really, a rest between difficult continents, a home antipodally away from home, and it did feel quite like that. Since I expected it to be much like home, I wasn't expecting much interesting culturally out of New Zealand, with the exception of maoritanga; I was mostly here for the fantastic scenery everyone raves about. But I did also expect some peace. Unfortunately, New Zealanders and the people who travel there all seem to be addicted to television. We had hardly seen any TV for all the months we had been in Asia and I had not missed it one bit, but now that we were back in Western culture, we were constantly subjected to this, one of its greatest diseases.

We spent out first full day in Rotorua walking about town. Other than maoritanga, Rotorua is famous for its geothermal activity. And the smell of rotten egg. Actually the smell wasn't as bad as I had been led to believe, but I did keep thinking I had ham and egg sandwiches in my rucksack.

Black swan on the sulphurous lake

More black birds

First we took the walk in the Government Gardens, past some Victorian bath houses, and along next to Lake Rotorua. We gave the hot baths a miss since we had done that in Japan. On the bank of the lake there was some bubbling mud and steaming pools. It was pleasant enough, but not exactly exciting or beautiful. Apart from the geothermal stuff it could have been a flat bit of Scotland or a hilly bit of England; again the cold probably helped this impression, but at least it wasn't raining here.

Bubbly mud next to the lake

Detail on Maori church

Maori church

All that really remained to see was Kuirau Park which is the main hotspot in town, so we walked around steaming ponds and saw some more bubbling mud, which all created a nice spooky atmosphere. And eggy. So that was it: Rotorua in a morning and, although there were more Maoris walking in the street than Auckland or Paihia, I didn't really feel we had connected with the Maori soul. There was nothing for it: we had to book a tour. Generally opposed to tours and hardly believing that it would be an authentic experience, we had barely read the leaflets but, since we were there for Maoris and saw no other place to find Maori culture, shelled out more than we could afford and booked a Maori experience evening for the next night.

Steaming pool in the park

Somehow very Calvinistic view of a pool in the park

written by  The Happy Couple on August 18, 2009 from Rotorua, New Zealand
from the travel blog: Michael's Round-the-World honeymoon
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Later on we were off for our evening of Maori culture. A minibus going round all the hotels and hostels picked us up and took us to Mitai, the “Maori village” not far out of town. I hadn't really been looking forward to this event, expecting it to make me cringe agonisingly. I was expecting something similar to a “Zulu village” I'd been to in South Africa. They were living in mud huts, wearing animal skins, carrying spears, doing traditional dances for the whites, and the women were all topless. After we left, outside, we saw the same people, wearing jeans and tee-shirts, get into their cars and drive off. Fair enough, but they had presented it as if they were all living in this Zulu enclosure, as if it was real life. Luckily Mitai was nothing like that.

We filed in, paid, and sat at our allotted tables. A Maori MC with a microphone started to welcome us. He kept referring to us as “Tribe of the Four Winds” and Great Tribe of Many Nations and said he would deal with each nation individually, welcoming them in their own language. Quite a bold claim! He almost succeeded, but he was stumped by Guam and the slightly dubious Cornwall, but both of the natives from these places could say only hello and nothing else anyway. For the other thirteen countries, he was able to engage in a little banter. When I said Scotland he said to me “How's it goin'?” then said an Englishman had told him to say “There's a moose loose aboot this hoose”. But he managed Welsh, Irish, Japanese, Portuguese, Maori of course, French, Dutch, Afrikaans, and colloquial English greetings from the US, Canada, and Australia. There must have one or two others I've forgotten (Spanish or Italian maybe), but it was really quite impressive. The young boy who said he was from Guam informed him that hello is haffadai (don't know the spelling) in whatever the official language is there and the host clearly filed it away: he turned to an older Maori guy sitting behind him and said “not a whole day, but half-a-day – that should be easy to remember”. After that we were “Great Tribe of Fifteen Nations”. An Irish chief was chosen from our great tribe after the young Guamese boy was told he was too young to be a chief.

The hangi waiting to be revealed

The hangi revealed

Maori "warriors" paddling down the river

Maori show underway

Maoris near the end of their show

Finally it was time to eat. On the way back to the food hall someone said to the MC that the “warriors” must be cold in their loin cloths and he responded “that's why I drive the bus”. The food was delicious, and the first time we'd eaten lamb in New Zealand. It was a buffet, which I normally try to avoid, due to my propensity to overconsume, but since we had paid so much money for the evening, overconsumption was mandatory. The hangi cooking method certainly seemed to leave make the meat succulent. At the end we were invited to re-don our traditional plastic ponchos and come into the forest to see some glow worms. Some people seemed to be too afraid to turn off their provided torches, so much of the time we could see nothing but, when we managed to get away from those people we could see that there were thousands of little dots of light all round the forest. At the start of the walk he had shone his torch directly on what seemed to be beetles. Apparently those we the glow worms.

It was a great evening and, although it was totally artificial, at least it was all done with a sense of humour and they were honest about it. It seemed to be the only opportunity we would have to experience maoritanga.

written by  The Happy Couple on August 19, 2009 from Rotorua, New Zealand
from the travel blog: Michael's Round-the-World honeymoon
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When we went to get the bus I obediently left my bag down because of the scolding I had received in Auckland for trying to pass my bag to the driver. This time it was a female driver and she said “Can you bring the bags over? I'm sick of carrying other people's bags. I'm not paid to carry other people's bags”, so it seemed like all New Zealand bus drivers are grumpy, but each in their own individual little way. This is odd because generally kiwis are extremely nice. Actually another exception seems to be the people who own cafes that the buses stop at: most of these cafes have nasty signs up warning you that you are not allowed to eat any of your own food even if you buy something to drink, “This is not Macdonalds! Food takes longer than 10 minutes!” and lots of other angry-looking signs; lists of rules in a little road-side cafe. Several times we had to shiver outside in the rain, to eat our pre-made sandwiches, and only then go inside to order our hot coffee. I wondered, coming out of one of those places, why the owner's friends had not suggested that the hospitality industry wasn't really his field; maybe because he didn't have any friends. But all this only made it seem more like home: where would the world be without Highland hospitality? I bet he had a Scottish surname. What they need are Aussies, South Africans, and East Europeans, who have revolutionised the hospitality industry in Scotland.

When we arrived in Wellington, Stephan, our German host, kindly picked us up at the bus stop. We had a couple of bottles of wine and chatted with him. He is a computer programmer, with permanent residence in New Zealand, working for clients mostly in Germany. He does his web-based work via the internet. It's my dream, I told him, how does he do it? Apparently there is a German website where you can register. I've still not checked, but I am dreaming that there is an English language equivalent, so we can live in Nepal earning European wages. Or somewhere else. Stephan was very accommodating, but his living room, where we were located, was a bit on the chilly side; and it had a cat in it. I love cats, but I'm also slightly allergic to them. I just had to remember not to touch my eyes after touching the cat. We had known about the cat in advance as it was on his Couchsurfing profile, so I could hardly complain. Self control, that was all I needed.

Joanne didn't sleep because of the cold, but I had been alright. And I woke up without itchy or swollen eyes! I had managed not to transfer cat hairs to my eyelids, which I regarded as a personal triumph. We had been told that the Wellington Museum is the best one in New Zealand so, despite the disappointment of the Auckland one, we thought we should go. After Auckland we had decided to restrict our museum visits to those considered the best.

View from Stephan's lovely home

With the daylight, we could see that Stephan's flat was in a fantastic location and the view was stunning. Wellington is a port surrounded by hills, one of which Stephan's flat was on, hence the great view. It reminded by quite a lot of Cape Town which has the same sea-plus-hills formula, which is almost always a winner. Stephan told us we were very lucky because “windy Welly” hardly ever sees the sun and it was a gorgeous day. We were already forgetting what the sun was like, so were keen to get out in it.

View from Stephan's lovely home

View from the waterfront

The waterfront

Kayakers coming into the harbour

Next door to the museum was a microbrewery. How could we not? There weren't any seats there either, but there were benches at the very boundary of the drinking area where we found a couple of spaces. And we sat in the sun and had a couple of beers / wines for Joanne. Then a couple more drinks, watching the Welly skateboarders out in force. Some of the beer was quite nice; of course I had to try all of them to decide which I liked best.

Sk8!

More skateboarding

Finally we felt obliged to go into the museum, but we were just slightly to sozzled to get much out of it. It did seem like a really good museum, with lots of interactive exhibits and much better organised than the Auckland one had been. Actually thinking about it, much of what I said I learned from the Auckland museum was probably from Wellington instead, just too fuzzily remembered to place correctly. We enjoyed it but it was wasted on us. Or were we wasted in it? After about just a week of cold, rainy weather, we could not see a sunny day go by without sitting around enjoying it. How are we ever going to adjust back to Scotland?

Dusk over the harbour

Joanne had offered to cook for Stephan to thank him for hosting us, so she cooked pasta and pesto with roasted vegetables. It cost us a fortune. I've said it before, but vegetables are really expensive in New Zealand. It would almost certainly have been cheaper to cook three steaks instead. Stephan's flatmates happened also to be entertaining that night, so we joined them drinking and talking after our meal. His flatmates and most of their friends were seismologists, Wellington being a world centre for it, receiving San Francisco levels of earthquakes. One of the guests was a cosmologist, which is my own field, and she had of course heard of my evil ex-supervisor George Ellis, “he's famous”, she said, although nobody outside of cosmology circles thinks so. We stayed up late and drank many bottles of wine. Everyone insisted the weather in Wellington is never like this. I suspected this was a lie perpetuated by Wellingtonites (Wellies?) to prevent other people from moving there. From what we saw it was a really lovely city, although in the wind and rain the allure of the hills and waterfront may have diminished somewhat.

The next morning Stephan drove us to the ferry terminal, which we had not thought very necessary until we saw that the terminal for our ferry company was much further out of the city than the terminal we had seen. What a gracious host! And what a lucky sod as far as his work goes. We were very lucky that he could host us because later that day he was leaving for China to spend some time with his Chinese girlfriend in Beijing, where he could continue doing the same German-rates work.

written by  The Happy Couple on August 21, 2009 from Wellington, New Zealand
from the travel blog: Michael's Round-the-World honeymoon
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First tantalising glimpse of the South Island

The ferry trip to the South Island was very pretty, although the wine from last night's dinner party meant that we didn't have our best sea legs on. It wasn't just a matter of sailing away from one coast and landing at the other: it was about one hour at each end of channels and islets, a complicated jigsaw of land rather like Scotland's West Coast. Much of it reminded me of the ferry journey to the remote Knoydart peninsula in Scotland. The only real difference in the ladscape was that it is covered in trees in New Zealand because, I supposed, the English didn't cut all of them down in New Zealand. It was beautiful. Finally it seemed like we were getting to where this famous New Zealand scenery was.

Queen Charlotte Sound

Nice wee house in Queen Charlotte Sound

Queen Charlotte Sound

Queen Charlotte Sound

Me!

A couple of minutes after the bus was due, I dialed the number you are supposed to dial “if you have any problems” on our New Zealand SIM card. A recorded message told me I couldn't dial premium rate numbers, so Joanne went back across the road to the information place to buy a phone card to dial the “help” number on their public phone. After about ten minutes, she came back raging; phone cards for public phones cannot dial premium rate numbers either. My phone with the UK SIM card couldn't dial premium rate New Zealand numbers either, so I phoned customer services on the New Zealand SIM, incurring the NZ$1 charge, only to be told that there is no “unlock” for premium numbers. Our bus wasn't there and there was no way for us to phone the number for help! We didn't know what to do, so I went into the train station to ask just in case there was a train to Blenheim from the port. There was one a day, but it had left just ten minutes ago. The lady behind the desk at the train station was extremely nice and helpful, and explained that they get a lot of Naked Bus customers very confused, never knowing whether they are supposed to get a bus or a train and wrote a complaint email on our behalf. “You won't get any money back from them, though”, she assured us.

A short time online across the road, at the information place who had told us to look out for the Atomic Shuttle, revealed that we should have been on the train. The text messages we had paid extra for, so that we wouldn't have to print out the instructions, were truncated to one sms length, which meant that some vital facts were missed, like it was not a Naked Bus we would be getting and it wasn't a bus at all. There was no way to contact them on the website and we couldn't phone them, so we just had to give in and accept that we had lost out. We saw now on the website that Naked Bus only actually run on the North Island; on the South Island they contract the routes out to other companies. Luckily there was an Atomic Shuttle four hours later and, since this was our shortest journey in New Zealand, it didn't cost us too much to replace our train journey with this minibus. There wasn't that much to do in Picton where we were stranded so we just waited in a bar.

We only had to phone when we arrived in Blenheim and we were picked up in the hostel minibus. On the way to the hostel, the guy who had picked us up told us that they were having an international night where the guests at the hostel were all cooking a dish from their native country for everyone else to share. It sounded nice, but it would have meant us improvising something Scottish in 30 minutes from the meagre bag of food we had brought with us. In retrospect we could have made porridge, but I don't think it would have gone down very well for dinner. The hostel was really nice and the staff were very friendly.

After everyone had finished their dinner we went to join them for a drink in the “shed” which was a small building detached from the hostel with a darts board and table tennis and, of course, a beer fridge. It reminded me of a school six year common room and I got the impression the staff more or less left the place alone. Everyone else at the hostel was working in the area, mostly as pruners on the local vineyards; in contrast they asked us if we were “just passing through”. They were a nice crowd and the atmosphere among them was excellent after several weeks working together. After most of them had gone to bed the Irish guys we were talking to produced a bottle of Jamieson's from the freezer. I would have thought this to be sacrilege, but they insisted we try it. Apparently a German guy had done the same a few weeks previously and they were totally sold on the idea. It goes down so smoothly they enthused, whereas I like the way that whisk(e)y burns when it's neat. We weren't complaining though.

Not having been prepared for such a party atmosphere, we had under-catered on the alcohol front and the only nearby licensed premises was a rugby club across the road, we were told. None of the pruners had ever been in it but we decided to give it a try. Before we were even close to the door, a girl standing there called to us and waved us over, inviting us in. It was her 30th birthday and it seemed rather empty considering the time. Only a few people remained, so she invited us to sit down with them and got us drinks. She was far too sober for the end of her 30th birthday but, she explained, she had children to go home to. After a couple of drinks, more people left, bringing the number of guests down to four: us, her brother, and her ex-boyfriend, so we thought it might be time to take our leave. On the way out I asked if I could buy some of the stack of beer and she told us not to be silly, insisting that we leave with an armful for free. Kiwis really are nice! We returned to the Irishmen and shared our bounty, as well as the explanation about where we had been. More frozen Jamieson's followed.

The following day we weren't feeling much like it, particularly Joanne, after all the booze the night before, but we were in Blenheim to go wine tasting, so there was no way we weren't going to do it. The excellent hostel had bicycles to borrow for no charge, so we followed the girl's advice on which were the “best two” bikes. My back tyre needed pumped up quite a bit, Joanne's range of gears was extremely limited, and I was missing a few. What on Earth were the other bikes like if these were the best? My navigation took us a slightly longer route than intended to Hunters, the first vineyard, but the scenery was quite pleasant: rows of severely pruned vines and hills in the background.

There were some other people already tasting when we arrived: an Australian couple with a kiwi friend, who seemed to be quite a successful Maori business woman. They certainly seemed much posher than we did, arriving on bicycles, but I was still quite miffed when I realised that the tastes of each wine we were poured was less than half what the others were poured. The whites in particular were very nice, in fact we had tasted the chardonnay in the Wellington sun, which is why we had chosen to do a tasting there. Since they had started before us, we had missed a couple of wines that the others had tasted and they were ready to leave before us. The Maori woman asked us casually which wine was our favourite, then immediately bought a bottle of the chardonnay for us, despite our slight protestations. It's a wedding present she explained. This was the first thing we had received on the trip for our wedding; we had hoped that being on honeymoon would guarantee us upgrades on every flights, but so far we had received nothing. But this was yet more evidence of the generosity and niceness of New Zealanders.

We only made it a hundred yards or so in the direction of the next vineyard when I had to stop thanks to my tyre being completely flat. We hadn't brought the pump with us but, even if we had, this looked like a major puncture which would not have been helped by just a pump. Luckily the girl working at the hostel had given us her mobile number and offered to pick us up if we were too tired to cycle home, but we thought we would be able to get at least one more vineyard in if we changed our plan and headed for the nearest one. On the way a local shouted over the road to us to ask if we'd had too much wine to cycle. Very funny. The wines at the next place were nicer but much more expensive. The brut, which could easily have been mistaken for champagne, was delicious, so we reasoned that since the gift at Hunters had saved us money, it made sense to spend more than we had intended on the wine we did buy. We bought a bottle of the vintage brut and one of the Gewurtztraminer which, we were assured, would be the perfect accompaniment for the curry we intended to cook that night.

The Gewurtztraminer did go very well with the curry, although it's not the style of wine either of us would normally drink, and the sparkly worked reliably as an aperitif. Making the curry had involved working around huge piles of large green-lipped mussels, which were in both ovens and seemed to be in every pot. Soon some Taiwanese pruners appeared and admitted being responsible for the haul. It had only taken them ten minutes to collect all of them, one guy told us. There were quite a lot of people, but there were plenty of mussels each. They gave us a couple each and told us to help ourselves if we wanted more. I was a bit suspicious of the mussels, remembering being told that easy-to-pick mussels are usually there because the locals know a very good reason not to pick those ones. Nonetheless it was only two each and we ate them.

The next morning we were both slightly unwell and I wondered how the Taiwanese people must be feeling after each eating a large pile of suspect mussels. Just before we left to catch our bus about lunch time (getting another lift from the lovely people running the excellent hostel!), one of the Taiwanese guys came into the kitchen for some water, still wearing his pyjamas. They were supposed to have left for work at 6am! I wondered if they were all in bed instead of work.

written by  The Happy Couple on August 23, 2009 from Blenheim, New Zealand
from the travel blog: Michael's Round-the-World honeymoon
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Joanne cooked us both nice big steaks for dinner but the kitchen got a bit smoky in the process, and there was no extractor fan, causing the manageress to run through and make a huge fuss, coughing, fanning the air, and apologising to everyone, much to Joanne's embarrassment. The steak was delicious though. New Zealand supermarket pricing policy was turning me into a dedicated carnivore. Other than the steaks we had also stocked up on loads of other food and whisky because we had heard that the glaciers, where we were heading, were so far from any large towns that the prices were ridiculous.

It was a terrible night's sleep. A full dorm makes loads of noise, everybody coming back at different times, but the worst was two girls next door, talking really loudly until very late. Of course usual “no noise in the rooms after 11pm” rules applied, but they didn't seem to care and I was already too determined to get to sleep to get up and tell them to shut up. On top of that, the bed was too short for me to be comfortable and double glazing doesn't seem to have hit New Zealand yet, so the fact this hostel was on the main road meant I was listening to lorries all night. Definitely the last YHA we stay in!

Useless!

written by  The Happy Couple on August 24, 2009 from Nelson, New Zealand
from the travel blog: Michael's Round-the-World honeymoon
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