Picton -> Wellington -> Napier

Hiii. We're in Napier right now, which is a little city on the south east coast of the North Island with a lot of character and a lot of wineries and vineyards in the area. More on that later.

Wellington was quite the nice city, but very windy. It's very pretty, and has maybe five times the urban hipness of Edmonton despite being less than half the size. Its hip city centre is totally cool! The YHA was huge and very nice. In Wellington we checked out the parliament (including the “Beehive”) and when on a tour there, and we went to Te Papa, which is Wellington's big ol' national museum. We were going to go to the city art gallery but it was CLOSED for renovations. Cafes and restaurants were visited and we had lots of good food, including splurging on some good sushi for dinner, which was overdue, I'm sure. Well, Wellington was nice but we have other places to see, so we headed off to...

Napier! Napier's really cool. It's been around since the mid 1800's I think, but an earthquake leveled the place in the early 1930's. The Art Deco style of architecture was very popular in America and Europe at the time, so all the buildings were rebuilt in that style. As a result I think it's pretty much the only place in the world with such a high concentration and amount of Art Deco architecture in the world. And I love it! It's so cool. It's retro but fresh at the same time. Like Coca Cola Classic, no? Other than than Napier is in the Hawke's bay area which is one of the oldest and more prestigious wine making areas in the country. Yesterday we rented bikes with the intent of biking to some nearby wineries to check them out and taste some samples, but the area was surprisingly built up in suburbia, with plenty of traffic. Well, we did make it to two wineries, but we'd had enough. Erin says it wasn't really what she expected. No little country roads, the wineries surrounded by suburban development.

I have no idea where we're going today. We're visiting the Napier museum and going to the NZ National Aquarium which is in town here, and then we're off to … I don't know. Either Gisborne, which is further east and north along the coast (it is the first city in the world to see the light of the new day... really ahead of the times), or into the interior, where there is our next tramp, volcanoes and geothermal activity, and a massive lake. Depends on the weather, Erin tells me.