Sometimes you will arrive in a new place and everything will fall in to place. With no great expectations, you can be so pleasantly surprised that it can become one of the highlights of your trip.
Nelson in New Zealand turned out to be one such place for me.
A great hostel can also make all the difference. If you are comfortable in the place you lay your head, you can conquer even the gloomiest of days or the most un-scenic of cities. Luckily for us we had to conquer neither of these things.
When I walked into our hostel room to find brightly coloured walls, fresh towels on the bed (free towels are such a scarcity in New Zealand that I could have wept with silent joy) and a great view of the outdoor courtyard, my spirits were instantly lifted. “This,” I thought, “I can work with.”
Downstairs, a blackboard announced free chocolate pudding every evening; statements like that can make a girl never want to leave a place. All in all, the city would have had to have done something very wrong from there on out to have made a bad impression. Thank goodness it didn’t.
Tree-lined streets and a gentle river gave way to avenues of shops strung with fairy lights and pubs with outdoor beer gardens. After an am-az-ing brunch on the second day (have I mentioned that Kiwis do breakfast and brunch REALLY well?) I was pretty much ready to sign the immigration papers and take up permanent residence.
The only downside was that I didn’t take enough photos to document my time there. I spent so much time eating, cycling, hunting down wifi, eating chocolate pudding and generally just enjoying having nothing much to do that I became lazy and complacent. Which actually turned out to be the best thing of all.
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