An interesting bus journey

I travelled down to Wellington from Auckland on an Inter-city bus. I knew that this probably wasn't the best plan as whenever I mentioned it to anyone they looked a bit concerned about the state of my mental health. The problem is that it's an 12 hour journey and the buses have no toilets. They are also packed so you're guaranteed to spend a good deal of time listening to the tinny rattling of MP3 players from the people sitting next to you. Most people choose to split their journey into smaller chunks and stop off places, but I'd already been to most of the places en route, and was keen to get down to the South Island.

You get to meet an interesting bunch of people on the bus - the most noticable of which was a Kiwi girl who also got on at Auckland and talked to the whole of the bus for a large part of the trip. I don't mean that she spoke to everyone individually at some point, but rather she addressed the whole of the bus every time she talked. On three separate occasions she got out of her seat excitedly to look out the window and announce "Hey, look at that car! That's awesome, I'm gonna get that car!". Fearful that we might be drawn into one to one conversation, each time we got off the bus for toilet breaks everybody tried to avoid eye contact with her in much the same way as one might avoid eye contact with a gorilla or a grizzly bear. She asked one unfortunate passenger if she could borrow his CD player and in an attempt to quiten her he obliged, but instead of shutting up she started to sing to us very badly and very loudly. The guy didn't get his CD player back until we arrived at her stop some 10 hours later.

I had an interesting assortment of people coming to sit next to me at various points of the journey:

• A huge Maori guy who took up half of my seat and pretended to be asleep.
• An intimidating looking German girl (where I pretended to be asleep).
• An old man of unknown nationality (we both pretended to be asleep, but at his age I'm willing to concede that he might indeed have been asleep).
• A talkative Canadian Girl called Krystyne (see my post on International Loudness Statistics), where I tried to pretend to be asleep but had to keep waking up to retrieve the filling from her sandwich that she kept dropping on my lap

Despite the lack of vowels in her name and her dyspraxic eating habits (I could tell from the state of her top that she was no stranger to mealtime accidents) she was very good company and we chatted for quite a while. She was also freakishly organised and had printed out most of the internet and was carrying it round in her bag. This came in very useful as I hadn't booked any accommodation for Wellington and I already knew the hostel I wanted to stay in was full and there were 50 backpackers on the bus also looking for somewhere to sleep. She managed to find me the number of a hostel opposite the bus station and I called them up on my ridiculously expensive UK mobile. When the receptionist apologised and said that they didn't have any beds I began to think about how heavy my backpack was and taxis to expensive hotels. But then I asked her if she was sure that they had nothing at all she said "No, apart from in a room with 20 beds". This sounded suspiciously like accommodation to me so I asked if I could have one of those. "Really?" she said incredulously. Evidently they don't get a particularly high demand for beds in the sardine suite, but my only other options were a cold pavement and hypothermia or an expensive hotel and ostracism from the backpacking community, so I decided to take it.

I didn't know anyone in Wellington and wasn't meeting Sarah till the following day, so Krystyne asked me if I wanted to go out with them. She was travelling with another Canadian girl, Michelle, and two German guys, Tim and Sebastian. So once I'd squeezed my rucksack into my luxury dormitory I went over to the hostel where they were staying. I went over to the supermarket and bought a cheap bottle of wine for $15 that I reckoned would be pretty drinkable. Here I learned another important backpacker lesson. Buy the cheapest wine you can - chances are it will be ok in New Zealand, and if it's not by the fourth glass you'll stop noticing the methylated spirit aftertaste. The prices start at $7 or $8 - if you're spending $15 on a bottle of wine you are the backpacker equivalent of Donald Trump. Let's face it, there's no point in spending $15 on a bottle of wine you're only going to end up drinking out of a teacup.

So we had a few drinks in their room then met a guy called Steve who was an English expat who was also in their dorm. Having a modicum of local knowledge he showed us to a decent bar where we could get cheap drinks and avoid getting beaten up. Pretty soon I was wasted - must have been because a couple of Kiwi's kept on trading my cigarettes for chugs on their box of wine. I really didnt want to suck on the soggy cardboard and tried to just give them cigarettes, but they insisted each time that trading was part of the Maori culture so I had to keep putting the box up to my lips.

When the bars shut, in another Donald Trump moment I got a cab back to my mammoth dorm and crashed out. No pretending to be asleep this time.

here's a great photo from near Rotorua that I didnt include in that post - it's of either the Blue or Green Lake - not sure which as they both looked pretty similar to me...