So we’re part of the way through our second week in NZ, and there have been some big things happening…
Firstly, we’ve decided to cut our roadtrip short by quite a bit… we’re aiming to get to Wellington by this Sunday. Two reasons: the campervan we bought broke down the day after we bought it, and we had to spend more than we’d planned on getting the stupid thing fixed. Lesson learned: don’t buy a used vehicle from backpackers who need the money to buy their plane tickets home, even if they swear black and blue that the vehicle is in perfect order.
The second reason that we’re cutting our roadtrip short is that neither of us realised before now how important it is to us both to have a proper home, a base to operate from… living out of a van which contains all of our wordly belongings is more stressful than we had imagined it would be. We’ve found that we both desperately want a place to call our own, that we can make into a home. So we’re coming to Wellington to find jobs and a place to rent, and then next year we’ll do the trip we originally planned, taking the minimum amount of stuff with us and safe in the knowledge that we have a home to return to at the end of it.
We’re both really looking forwards to settling into Wellington, we’ve applied for some jobs and are looking for a place to rent. Do any of you guys have any advice as to what suburbs are good and which ones to avoid? We’re looking around the Hutt Valley area since we want to be a little way out of the city.
Oh and another big change… Matty and I got engaged! 
He proposed on Sunday at Arrowtown, a cute little place near Queenstown. We’d gone on a walk and had stopped for a rest at the top of a little mountain when he asked me to marry him. So yeah… we’re both really happy about that development! Not sure when we’ll get married, but probably sometime in the next two years. Pretty exciting stuff 
So far we’ve visited Akaroa (a little French-style town about an hour and a half out of Christchurch, where the van broke down), which was a beautiful little place, very green! We went for a walk up one of the hills there and saw a mumma sheep with her little baby lamb that was only a day or two old, so cute! We also fed some ducks that lived near our camping site there and saw them have a massive duckfight over some bread. It was brutal, I didn’t even know that ducks fought like that.
After Akaroa we drove south along the East Coast to Timaru, and then inland to Pleasant Point, where we spent a night in a little park in the town. In the middle of the night a cat jumped onto the roof of the van and I woke up thinking that someone was trying to break in… fucking cat.
From Pleasant Point we drove to Lake Tekapo, which everyone had told me was amazing but which I actually didn’t like, because it rained the whole time we were there and everything was dead and grey and muddy. That day and night was the most difficult for me, I was really upset because I was homesick and missing my family and it was freezing cold and everything was wet… but I hear it’s beautiful in the spring. Lol…
After Tekapo we drove to Arrowtown, and stayed there two nights. It was my favourite place that we’d been at that point, and will always be special to me now It was so cold there at night that a big pond in the park was completely frozen over and we chucked big rocks into it to see how thick the ice was and it didn’t even break. We went for a walk along the riverbank on the second evening we were there and a big black dog came up to us and we threw sticks for him to catch. No idea whose dog he was, he had a collar on and a name tag and seemed to know his way around but we couldn’t see his owner anywhere.
The next morning we drove into Queenstown and wandered around the town for a few hours. It’s really pretty, very different from what I was expecting, I thought it would be bigger and more city-like but it was really nice. Touristy, but nice. Then we drove to Wanaka and stayed there last night.
Tonight we’re staying at a little hotel at Franz Josef… it’s been pouring rain all day so it’s nice to have a break from being in the van. We drove through so much beautiful mossy forest on the way here, and walked up to have a look at Fox Glacier on the way. Glaciers are so weird, they look surreal sitting right beside lush green forest.
We’re heading up towards Greymouth tomorrow, and then working our way up towards Nelson, and Abel Tasman National Park, before heading to Picton on the weekend sometime to catch the ferry across to Wellington. I’m not looking forwards to that trip… I hate being on a boat, and it’s a 3-hour trip that I’ve been told can get pretty rough if the weather is bad. But can’t wait to get to Wellington!
