Wellington, New Zealand

We said goodbye to the South Island today, taking the Interislander ferry across the Cook Strait to Wellington.

We had breakfast at Sime’s cafe on the way out of Kaikōura. We had just missed the end of breakfast yesterday and so I was able to have their eggs benedict today which was excellent. The food came out quickly and we were back on the road a little after 10am.

It’s about a two hour drive from Kaikōura to Picton. The drive is beautiful, as all drives here seem to be. We were back in wine region, this time Marlborough.

We arrived at the ferry around noon and checked in. I had bought our tickets as soon as their summer schedule was released back in May. In the local media there’s warnings about how busy the crossing is right now and to book ahead, so lucky we knew our itinerary so far in advance.

We waited in line until 1pm when they started boarding. We parked our car and grabbed some good seats for the 3.5 hour crossing.

There’s the option to book car rentals where you drop off the car in Picton and then get a different car on the Wellington side. But that meant dragging all our luggage across as carry on, and also chancing that there may not be a vehicle waiting on the other side. So we booked a single car for the full trip and paid for its ferry crossing.

The ferry departed right on schedule. The first part was interesting, through the Queen Charlotte Sound / Tōtaranui. It looked similar to sounds we saw in Fjiordland except the hills are much lower and flatter. But still very scenic.

The waves increased slightly when we left the protection of the sounds and entered Cook Strait. The swells were about 1m which is considered good. There’s websites that forecast the swells and so we knew in advance what to expect. We only really noticed it when we got up and walked around.

It took a while to disembark in Wellington. We docked around 5:30pm and we didn’t drive on to shore for another 45 minutes. It gave me time to memorize the route to our bnb in the centre of town.

We had got used to remote areas and parking anywhere to unload the car. It’s a whole other story in a busy city. We parked in a loading zone and hoped we wouldn’t get a ticket. There’s a few very popular restaurants on our street so all the meter parking was occupied.

I then drove the car to a carport about five minutes away, while Heather finished getting everything up the stairs and into our apartment.

We had reservations at 8pm so rushed to get ready. I then looked up a similarly sounding restaurant in Google Maps and we walked 8 minutes in the wrong direction. So I called the real restaurant and let them know we were running late so they’d hold the table.

We ate at Atlas, which was one of the better restaurants we’ve eaten at, probably only Restaurant Ö was better. Their website said they had a 3 or 4 course tasting; when we were seated it turned out it was actually a six course tasting. It was all excellent, with no misses. The wine pairings were good too. It hardly seemed like we started the day on the South Island.