Wellywood

Our last stop on the south island was Wellington, capital city of NZ. We rolled in on Waitangi Day and immediately assumed that was why everyone was wearing crazy costumes - ie drag queens, smurfs, reno 911... but actually we simply had the best luck ever to be in Wellywood for the 7's, a rugby tourney gone wild. It was one of the highlights of the entire trip so far - for visual explanation see facebook pics. We partied our jandals off.
Took the ferry over to the south island and drove around beautiful Abel Tasman. On a sour note I got another staph infection on my elbow, and Koos had the tremendous good fortune to lance and drain it with a tack we burned. State of the art med care. We went to our next wwoof job, Nikau Gardens, which was like MMC/home. Angel cards, prayer flags, no shoes, organic veg food, ganesh and shiva statuettes, meditation room, the works! Takaka was a cool hippie town and we spent our days mulching, harvesting, weeding and caulking inside on rainy days. It was great to have a big bed with a comforter. On Valentines Day we drove to Rosy Glow Chocolates for homemade truffles and then to Wharariki beach, which is one of the raddest ones ever. Our mate described it as Dali on acid. Tunnels, arches, sand dunes, caves were abundant.
From there we drove down the entire West Coast checkin out the wonders along the Tasman Sea. In Franz Josef I saw my first Glacier, and we spent a rainy afternoon at the hot mineral baths drinkin wine. Ahhhhh. However, to end this relaxing time I ran back into town for the clothes I left air drying at the laundromat (possibly the first time I've been away from Koos) and the car decided to explode. Big bang, heaps of smoke, had to walk 2 hrs back to our campsite at night in freezing Glacier country. HELL. It would have cost 2x what we paid for it to fix it so we had to ditch our wheels and try to keep our chins up as we hopped on a bus to Queenstown. Can't win 'em all, but hey.... at least it wasn't a broken leg. (Thats always how we look at the silver lining.... not sure what we'll change that to in the event we really do break a leg).