Wellington

Wellington is proclaimed to be the ‘craft beer capital of the Southern hemisphere’ – with a number of craft beer breweries and pubs all close together in the city centre. Having got the earlier ferry, we now had time to investigate!

The beer trail has its own website and map, and if you so desire you can collect stamps along the trail, and then claim a free beer trail t-shirt... we decided not to bother with that, but to pop in to one or two places to taste.

The bus ride into the city centre was definitely the scenic route: up and over Mount Victoria (there is a tunnel that most traffic uses)... I genuinely don’t know how our bus driver didn’t clip any wing mirrors!

When we arrived in the centre, we felt like complete country bumpkins. Having spent 16 days on the South Island, where a place is busy if half the seats are taken, we were quite taken aback by the hustle and bustle – and random drunks yelling at each other – of a proper city centre... so much so that we ended up at the Fork & Brewer, which is at the top end of the main beer trail, and so a lot quieter.

Wellington has loads of street food – with little kiosks and holes in the wall everywhere, selling every kind of food you can think of. I think probably we needed more than one night here, a) to get used to being around people again, so we could b) explore it a bit more!

Instead we settled for a froyo (Jess) and a hot waffle (me), which we ate opposite an enormous backpackers’ hostel, which is painted like a zebra (really!).