It’s not often you get woken up at 5 in the morning by a helicopter out side your room, however, this is exactly what happened this morning. Well, sort of. This lovely B&B is surrounded by vines. should the air temperature fall below 5 degrees, these vines need to be kept warm, otherwise they will get damaged. In order to keep them warm, they fire up these huge propellers on tall steel towers which blows warm air over the fields. When John opened the lounge windows to see why the helicopter wasn’t taking off, he realised that the noise was coming from one of these propeller heaters, directly opposite our room.
Nothing would block out the sound. Just when we were about to get up and make tea, they stopped! Wonderful. We jumped back into ebd and slept until 8am.
At breakfast we met a whole host of people. Three from Poland, then the four English, followed by two Germans.
We finished breakfast, paid and started our drive to a place called the Putangirua Pinnacles at Cape Palliser, about an hour from the B&B. We walked up the river bed and into the forest. It was a steep uphill climb, but well worth it when we arrived at the viewing area for the pinnacles. They comprise hundreds of rock spires, eroded by the weather. Some areas look like an open cathedral. The walk was supposed to take 4 hours, we killed it in 2.
Then we drove to Wellington via a place called Featherston. Fantastic drive, with wide green valleys, filled to the brim with cattle and sheep, with mountains in the distance. We drove up and over the mountain range into Wellington and found our B&B in a trice.
The place is well equipped but has a damp smell to it. Still, we can do our washing, cook in, connect to the web and watch Sky TV. The weather today was great, plenty of sun, quite warm and DRY!!!
After settling into the house, we headed down to town. Wellington is like many other big cities but it sits on a very large bay, which looked lovely in the sun. Fiona wanted to buy a summer dress for our stay at Hamilton Island, but after trawling 5 shops, we gave up.
We took the tram up to the town viewing point and then took the 30 minute walk back to the other side of town, giving us the opportunity to walk back through the centre to the car.
We popped back home, met our host, and watched the end of the All Blacks V Scotland Rugby. Not a good result for Scotland!! Kiwi’s were very happy, both due to the rugby and due to the Nationalist Party winning yesterdays general election. They have had the same party in power for ten years so seem to just want a change.
Fiona made a wonderful Spaghetti Bolognaise. With twenty minutes to go before dinner, John phoned Qantas Airlines to chase our Christchurch to Sydney flight change on the 7th of December. To our horror, the Qantas lady told us that they had now decided they could not change the flight, having already toldy us a week ago that they had. John explained in the strongest terms that this was not an acceptable situation. After being on the phone for over an hour and talking to various supervisors, John lost it big time. Eventually, they told us that, if we were willing to change our BA flight back to the UK to a Qantas flight, same class etc, they could allow the Christchurch – Sydney flights to happen. We agreed, as they also pre assigned us window seats on both flights, put us on the top club deck and said we would be able to claim all our BA miles. So now we are flying back to the UK with Qantus. Don’t you just hate BA!!
Dinner was had whilst talking to Qantus, so it was not the relaxed night we had hoped for. We also booked up our Kayaking and Dolphin safari for next week.
Fiona phoned pat to wish her a happy birthday. HAPPY BIRTHDAY PAT!
