wellington rocks!
i arrived in wellington in the late afternoon on sunday and immediately took a liking to the place: it has a lot of cafes and galleries dotting the streets, and just looks like a good place to exist for a few days. it really hasn't let me down, although my japes have been aided by the fact that i met some lovely people on the bus from kaikoura (nuff love paul, and tinika and anneka... crazy names, crazy dutch!)i've always wanted to try rock climbing ,and i knew there was a big indoor wall in wellington, so, having bullied paul into coming with me, we trundled off there on monday morning. in typical kiwi fashion (no liability for personal injury is a great thing for these guys) we got a sparse five minute explanation on how to use the harnesses, and we were off. i am absolutely hooked, it is the best fun you can have with your clothes on... i haven't tried it without yet, you'd probably get some nasty scrapes. it was just so good to actually be doing something active again, and not being bled dry for it: as this isn't really a tourist thing, it was $10 for as long as you want, and we were in there for over four hours. we went to the national museum in the afternoon (also free! can the people in charge here please spread the word to the rest of the country), and while the maori stuff was very interesting we could only manage an hour before having to have a restorative cup of tea.
we relocated the girls and all cooked dinner together that night: fajitas, with a three litre box of wine (captain classy) on the side. it doesn't take a genius to predict what happened, and at 3am everything had got a bit out of hand. the japes were verging on jolly.
i woke up in the morning feeling surprisingly good, and ran into a couple of welsh girls that i'd met earlier in kaikoura: it wasn't long before they had been wrangled into coming to the climbing wall with us. zoe and lai ping (barbara to her friends) are so, so safe, got as enthusuiastic about the whole thing as us, and we were climbing from midday to half seven. it was just so good, although i did almost kill zoe near the end, and my forearms are absolutely shot. we were wise to leave when we did though, my confidence was getting too high and i'd just got a slapped wrist for a cheeky free (no harness) climb. i feel like an idiot for not having tried climbing before, and already have a few more climbing walls sorted out for a some of the other cities coming up.
have to leave tomorrow, and i'm quite gutted... wellington has been the best city here by a mile, definitely a place with the elusive location personality i keep going on about. we're meeting the guy who works at the climbing wall for a drink now: he is really sound and had to deal with our incompetence for hours, so is definitely deserving of a pint.
posted by bicrom @ 7:37 am
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