Napier to Wellington

I landed in Wellington yesterday after a week on the road form Napier - I'm up on a total distance of over 600 km now. Pretty well done if I may say so myself. From Eketahuna I continued to Masterton and Carterton, where I stayed the night at the campsite, and got a tip about Martinborough having a fair. Hence I continued to Martinborough with a stop at Aoteroa Stonehenge, whoch must be one of the worst toursit traps I've ever seen.
Quoting the kiwi couple who also came to see it "I think I just got ripped off!". It's pretty alright made, but it's really just a huge compass made of concret slabs, and not terribly interesting. The ghost house on the hill nearby makes for a much more dramatic spectacle, and let's face it, Stonehenge is interesting because it's so old and was an incredible feat for the time. Nowadays anyone with basic math skills can calculate a Stonehenge.

Well settled at the campground in Martinborough I splurged on a delicous steak from the local butcher Friday evening and saw the market on Saturday, which was rather filled with random knick-knack, whereof a little to much was made in China, and the stuff which actually was local craftmanshipwas far out of my price range when it comes to souvenirs. Instead of loading up more stuff on the bike, I continued towards Featherston, stopped by the Domain camp by Lake Wararapa, which has a lawn filled with kids on quad bikes, a loo and no drinkable freshwater, so I decided it was a bad campsite and continued into town. There I asked the local hippies having a garage sale if they knew about a place to put up a tent, and within fifteen minutes they'd set me up in their old camper in the yard. I've rarely meet sucha nice family; they've quit wotk, bought a big campervan, stuffed all the kids in there and now travel NZ. The smallest one is India who's just two weeks and the oldest is Tor at twelve. Then there's also Leif, Paris and Galilei. Next door is Uncle Leo and his two kids, who also where happy to have strage biker passing by, and we had a big fire, G&T's and white wine and I ended up staying two days.  That was pretty great, and it really proves that biking was and is a good idea, I'd never met such great people if I was just whizzing by in a car. Hopefully we'll catch up on the South Island.

And now I'm in Wellington, here I ran into Bjørn that I shared a hostel with in Napier, and had a coffee date with Hedy, who also had come to Martinborpugh for the fair. It's quite nice that NZ ins't any bigger than that, you actually do get around to meet up with people.
Tjhe adventures of Wellington so far has been a ramble aroudn town, Te Papa museum, which is huge and diverse and very interesting, and sleeping on the rooftop of the hostel (no, that's not allowed but we did it anyway) along with a 24 year old Candaina guy, who told tales of travelling Africa, while I wondered why I spent so many years reading books at university. So generally pretty good so far.
The plan from here is to get my grubby hands on a Pedallers Paradise - South Island and get on a ferry on Thursday and then go explore the south. And yes, my dear, buy a ticket to Fiji.