Our next stop was Nelson, it took us a full day to get here, about 8 hours sitting on a coach.
Unfortunately our few days here didn't start off smoothly. The owner of our hostel 'bug' forgot to pick us up at 7pm so we had to walk a 45 minute walk out of town with our huge backpacks. Luckily it wasn't in the heat of the day and we needed to stretch our legs after that long coach journey.
We finally made it to the hostel and the only thing on our minds was 'why did we decide to book into a hostel this far out of town' it was surrounded by a primary school, residence housing and an industrial estate. nothing particularly appealing at all. Then, Cj remembered it being rated the best quality hostel in New Zealand. To be fair, the hostel was pretty good, really clean, had good wifi and one of our cheapest. We stayed in an 8 man dorm. We both ended up with a top bunk. We didn't have our best nights sleep here as being in a 8 man dorm normally means you are not far from your next door neighbours feet. It was a cozy room had a few snorers, along with it being pretty stuffy.
Dorm room aside, we woke from our first night not feeling totally refreshed but ready to check out Nelson.
We did the art walk. This is basically following the map around the town to each numbered destination. These were craft shops and galleries by local artists. It was actually really interesting, watching them work and seeing loads of cool handmade things. One of the shops 'jen hansen' was a jewellers. This is where the one ring from the lord of the rings was made. The rings were displayed on the counter. I even got to try a couple on, a tad out of my price range though.
This artsy walk was a little boring for Cj, but he did take a shine to one particular craft shop...the handmade soap boutique. This was because they made the genius beer soap. Made with and smelt of different kinds of beers.
The next day was another exciting day for Cj as we were visiting the famous Nelson Saturday morning market. It wasn't anything on Asia's amazing markets but it was pretty cool. We ended our day with a cheap veggy pasta dish that we cooked in the hostel kitchen before making our way back into town to watch the American Sniper in the cinema. As we don't have the luxury of a TV, and because cinemas are a hell of a lot cheaper then in England, we have been making the most of the cinema's abroad when wanting to avoid our hostel and spending lots of money on alcohol in the evenings.
The next day (our last) was a quiet one. It was raining and didn't start off too well as i realised i'd some how lost my really cool bright pinky/red mac. Cj was happy but i was pretty annoyed as i managed to get that for a bargain price and now had to buy another one (they are not cheap in New zealand) and it was pouring with rain all day. we originally wanted to go on a day trip to Abel Tasman national park. In the end we decided not to as if was quite expensive and we knew it was going to rain.
The rain did eventually ease off so we decided to head into town. We had seen everything in Nelson so we thought we'd just go to the cinema again as we wanted to watch the film Wild. We arrived at the cinema and it seemed everyone had the same rainy day idea. The cinema was fully booked for the rest of the day. This meant one thing...to the pub. So we spent the rest of the day in one of Nelson's locals.
No comments:
Post a Comment