After the scavenger hunt yesterday, we returned to the hostel and once the lot of us were kitted us in our Springbok gear, it was off next door to the hostel to Blend Bar & Cafe for some pre-game Jagers, and then headed towards the Stadium - once again at The Cake Tin. At least last night was a whole lot warmer than last Monday for the SA vs Wales games - unless we have just acclimatised over the past few days. The atmosphere and vibe in the streets heading to the stadium was amazing - it felt much like the walk to Ellis Park on a match day. Every second person was singing the anthem, some parts of Shosholoza or bits from a random Leon Schuster song. Brilliant!

At the stadium, we again had pretty decent seats, quite low down, but still enough to get a good view of the entire field. We were split up into three seats and three seats like before, with Si having his set of three tickets and me having my set of tickets. Obviously in an ideal situation we would've all sat together, but the plan was to meet up straight after the game, so was hardly an issue.

The game itself was good - with SA putting on a decent score and ran in six tries to overwhelm Fiji, who only managed a single penalty against us. Morne Steyn managed a healthy 21 points in the game, which put the final score at 49 - 3 to us. The support was South Africa was amazing, which wasn't all the unexpected after walking around Wellington throughout the day - all there seemed to be was a sea of green and gold jerseys. So glad the boys managed to put on a decent performance tonight in front of everyone. Lets just hope they keep it up for another few weeks until the end of October.

After the game, while leaving the stadium, it genuinely felt like a local home game at Ellis Park - the flags, the jerseys, the accents, the singing, the anthems... the list goes on. We headed back to the hostel to drop our bags, cameras and anything else not needed for a night out. Then it was over to Molly Malones (Haig and I were just there on the Friday night) for Si's birthday night out. His cousin Dave was scheduled to be playing in the live band later that night, plus we were just in time for the Australia vs Ireland game, and being in an Irish bar we knew it would be festive for sure.

And so against all odds, Ireland managed to beat Australia by 15 points to 6, which was just brilliant. Strangely enough, after that final whistle, not one Australian jersey could be seen in the pub. Funny that. And needless to say the Guinness was flowing nicely :) And by Guinness I'm definitely not excluding Jager, Olmeca and Springboks! We also met up with Anita and Regula, the Swiss Germans from the tour bus who had stayed an extra night in the National Park. So was a good crowd of us out last night. Si was on good form as always, and slowly but surely rather quickly descended into a right proper mess. As expected.

Dave's band on stage was incredible, a 4 piece cover band in which he was the drummer. You can't really go wrong with an Irish pub, live cover band and a few hundred people all up for a party. The band played for what seemed like hours, which was absolutely brilliant, never get tired of good live music. Once Mollys was starting to close in the rather early hours of this morning, we too called it a night, and headed back.

Needless to stay we all could've done with a nice sleep in today, but as they say, no rest for the wicked. Well actually we had to check out, got nothing to do with the 'wicked' really. After a good breakfast down at The Lido Cafe again, it was time to say our farewell to Wellington and head down to the South Island. Si, Suze and Duncs still had another few days in Wellington before heading home, so after our farewells, it was off to the airport. Haig's flight is only later this afternoon, so while he's off having a catch up with Pete and Andrea, I plan to catch up on some sleep down in Christchurch airport. Here's hoping to get some comfy seats in the arrivals lounge...