Since it was Si's birthday yesterday, there was no chance of any form of sleep in after Haig and my pub crawl on the Friday night. It was a fairly early start, with us and his extended family all meeting up for breakfast at The Lido Cafe - the smallish cafe down the road from our hostel. It was an order of full English Breakfast all round, always a good start to the day. Wellington could quite easily have been Johannesburg just before any big international rugby game - there was nothing but SA jerseys, bokke flag and shouting Afrikaaners everywhere. It was bizarre, yet very patriotic, the amount of support for the Springboks!

After breakfast, Si's cousin Helena had organised a massive scavenger hunt / city sightseeing day out. It basically involved a series of tasks for Si to complete, and involved all the interesting elements of Wellington. We hopped in their cars, they drove us up to the top of the Wellington Cable Car and dropped us there - the start of the adventure for the day.

We started off catching the cable car down, and the tasks for that were to interview the driver of the cable car, as well as for someone to suddenly break into panic, which happened to be me as the selected one, much to the onlook of the various passengers on the way down. From the cable way, we had to head over to the statue of Plimmer and his dog to get a video of Si interviewing the dog. Interesting. But not out of the question for Woolley.

After the statue, it was then onto the library, the Wellington City Council and then the bucket fountain where our task was to form a human chain around it. Which meant having to get a few randoms from the street involved to complete the chain. After the bucket fountain, it was onto the Cuba Street umbrella sculpture and then onto a bus down the road where we had to perform a Mexican Wave while onboard.

After getting off the bus, we made our way to the crocodile bikes and hired a couple of them for a few hours, and headed along the waterfront towards Te Papa - the museum of New Zealand. Along the way, we stopped off at the Solace in the Wind sculpture, then at the Kupe sculpture, then further along the waterfront, over the bridge and onto the Wellington Underground Market. There we met up with Helena, who runs the market and she showed us around to a few of the more interesting stands. It was then that we met up with Pete and Andrea who were over in Auckland for a few days, and we had tried to meet up with them on the Friday night, but never quite made it. So was good to see them again, it had been a few years since I last saw them, so good to catch up while they joined us on the scavenger hunt.

Outside the back, at the Frank Kitts park, the task there was for all team members to slide down the higher slide backwards, so there were the lot of us, competing with 2 and 3 year olds, to try get a turn down the slide. Nice. At this point one of the crocodile bikes went missing - we left them both outside the market and when coming out, one was gone. A bit weird really. So after searching around for a bit, I decided to return one of the bikes and left Toby in charge of searching for the other. Eventually he found it, some kid thought it was a free-for-all and was taking it for a spin around the harbour. After getting both bikes back, we headed to Te Papa - the museum - and to the earthquake house inside.

After the earthquake house, it was back outside to the harbour edge, to where the plank was, leading out into the harbour's water below. The task there was for Simon for literally 'walk the plank'. Which he did, twice. And that brought to an end to the day's hunt and tasks. The final stop was at Mac's Brewery for a debriefing and obviously, nice cold beer. Definitely a good day out and around Wellington - seeing things we probably wouldn't have if we were just ambling around.

After a beer, we all decided to split, and the few of us who were staying at the hostel headed back there to get our Springbok jersey and other gear on, in time for the game later on!