Day 43 : Nelson – “Where are you from!?!” – “Far, far away.”
We backtrack to Nelson and prepare for a day of doing nothing, casually recharging batteries before enduring a mammoth journey south to Fox Glacier, Wanaka and, eventually, Queenstown.
It’s pissing with a ferocity I haven’t seen since Rotorua as we locate the YHA Hostel, drop off our bags as we can’t book in before 2pm, and then brave the rain again in search for coffee and muffins. We find both at an almost hidden cafe on one of the town’s main-streets run by friendly Chinese ladies. A veranda protects us from the bad weather as we sit and eat and talk.
If there is anything to do in Nelson we don’t find it. There’s a McDonald’s, which we zero in on like a pair of meat-eating homing pigeons, and we play with the idea of going to the cinema before realising that there is not one film showing at the local theatre we’d consider even mindlessly sitting through. I am cornered in the McDonald’s bathroom by what appears to be a retarded gentlemen who desperately wants to know where I’m from. I tell him “”Far away” with the vain hope that it will confuse him enough so I can make my escape. But such an encounter could happen anywhere and is not a local trait of Nelson itself. At least, I hope it’s not.
Our time in the town is treated as an interstitial day. One of those non-events in your holiday where the idea is not to do anything. We accomplish this feat with aplomb, sleep well in our twin room and wake up the next day ready for what I’m sure with be an adventure in vomiting. Six hours on a coach. Can’t wait.
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