Let's take buses! 8/29/2011

A day in Wellington went mostly smoothly, except for the two hour hiccup in our attempts to find the high-ropes course. We must have taken half the buses in Wellington in those two hours. All in all though, it was a wonderful day.

I woke up at 8 the morning after arriving at Tama’s and was surprisingly awake. After brushing my teeth and cleaning up a bit I went back to the room to read and jot some things down for the blog as Julia and Ellie were still asleep. As I did so, I started to feel some chills and my head started to ache. I hoped that it was typical morning “grog” and went about my day as though I felt fine. Our plan for the day was to go into town and then head on to Adrenalin Forest, a high-ropes course in the near by town of Porirua.

Entrance to Te Papa

We went into town by bus and visited Te Papa, museum of New Zealand. I really wanted to be engaged in looking at and reading things inside the museum but by this time I was significantly colder and my head felt as though it was about to blow off my neck. Needless to say, I was sick, again, and this time with a fever, since my entire body was rather hot and I was feeling cold.

Anyways, our visit to Te Papa was rather brief as we got a reservation for Adrenalin Forest and realized we should go soon if we wanted the full three hours that they allotted for us. What ended up happening was that instead of calling the Wellington branch we had called the Christchurch branch. Furthermore, we had their mailing address instead of the actual address. Of course, we find out after we took the train and the bus out to basically the middle of nowhere. It was okay though, because we got to see some government housing and Julia had given me Advil, so my head felt less like blowing up. The good news was that after two hours, we finally arrived at Adrenalin Forest where we met Matthew, our guide that taught how to basically not fall off the course. Here are a few things that I thought were really interesting. To begin, you don’t sign a waiver. And two, there is no one supervising while you went through the course, you were responsible for yourself. This means you had to attach yourself with the carabiner and make sure of your own safety. Matthew was not watching us. This scared me a little bit but after a little while I got the hang of it and it was pretty fun.

Funny that Ellie got this photo of me. This challenge was called the "rolling logs" and the logs literally rolled when you stepped on them. Since it had just rained, all the logs were also wet. I decided to step on everything that wasn't a rolling log...

Ellie and I only completed three of the six courses, while Julia had secret monkey ablilities and finished four. She also managed to faceplant into a couple of mats after flying foxes, which was amusing for me and Ellie. For those of you who don’t know, New Zealand flying foxes are zip lines. I had tons of fun on the ropes course and basically forgot that I was actually sick until we were done and waiting for the bus again. This is about when I realized I was actually exhausted and that my head was beginning to throb again. But soon enough, we were back in center city Wellington in a warm and cozy restaurant called Arizona. I had a lovely burger, but it was huge and I only ate half of it, and doggy bagged the rest. I only mention this because later that night we had to fly to Auckland and my half eaten burger and fries made it through security! Another one of the perks of New Zealand airports. Julia, Ellie, and I also shared an appetizer which was chili garlic corn bread. While it was delicious, it was pretty far from corn bread, it was really just garlic bread with cheese, but delicious, so no complaints.

Julia and I with our dinners. Yummy food. 

After dinner, we went back to Tama’s to gather our things before heading to the airport. We arrived at Ellie’s house at half past midnight and her mom made us some hot drinks. I had some camomile tea and some medicine and headed to bed.