New Zealand has two islands, and the ferry that crosses between them goes from Wellington (reasonably famous) to Picton (not very famous). Picton’s a touristy sort of place with parking for $2 a day and lots of nice crinkly coastline nearby.

As a result of the coastline, there are a lot of winding roads about, with 50km/h speed limits. Some people liked to sit up my arse as I traversed them. A special place in hell is reserved for these people. Hopefully, they’re stuck behind people like me there, too. Driving presented another challenge when I discovered that New Zealanders give way to right-hand turners when turning left. This at first created many awkward “you go!” “no, you go!” moments. This is nothing though, when you consider the terrible peril we’re in if any New Zealanders come to Australia and assume they have right of way turning right. What? I’m being told New Zealanders can come and go to Australia as they please. What happened to deciding who would come and the manner in which they did it? Madness.

Back to Picton. It’s a big port. It’s also a big tourist destination. Disappointingly, this means the restaurants are often over-priced and not that good. When your main consumer base keeps shifting every year, you can get away with this. If you are in Picton, I hear that Spinnaker is nice. We meant to go there, but never found it, instead opting for a few not completely impressive places. In general though, I never had a steak I didn’t like, so you can be reasonably comfortable ordering them from anywhere. Be warned; some places won’t serve you coffee unless you’re getting food. Tremendously uncivilised. We did however stop in at Alan Scott Winemakers on our Wine Tour and found the food there to be pretty awesome.

Our place of residence was A Sea View B&B. I have no idea why they called it this.

If you like amazing scenery, cooked breakfast every morning, handy local knowledge, and chickens, then A Sea View is the place for you.

The best thing about Picton is the stuff nearby. You can go kayaking, you can drink yourself silly in the Marlborough wine region, you can hike along the Queen Charlotte Track.¹ Our kayaking was with the Marlborough Sounds Adventure Company, who took us around the Kenepuru Sound, which is rather pretty. The day started off relaxing and interesting, but got a little intense at the end when we needed to do a big open sea crossing to get back in time for our co-kayakers to check out of their hotel. Pah!

I’m already getting annoyed by rating towns out of ten, but I’ll do it once more; eight peaceful tourist towns out of ten.

1. There’s more, I’m sure, but we only had four full days. ↩

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This entry was posted by the illustrious Tom Charman on Sunday, January 11th, 2009. It concerns such pressing issues as new zealand, travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.