It's been a week in Wellington, and the only bad thing I have to say about the city is that it ate my sandals! I want my sandals back!!!!!!!!! I will have more to say on Wellington in a while. But now it is time to hit the road once more, or, in this case, the sea, and in the wee hours of the morning we will take Wedge aboard the Inter-Islander ferry and make our way to the South Island. An interesting thing about the South Island is it rides directly on the boundary between two tectonic plates, the Australian and the Pacific, and the Southern Alps (model for the Misty Mountains and a range that extends the whole of the Island) are the physical evidence of this. There is a huge fault system running the entire length as well, and geologists are awaiting the overdue earthquake that will occur when the fault slips. Here is a cheery article with more details.
Geologists are such a doom and gloom bunch, eh? "Don't live in Vancouver, there's going to be an earthquake, don't live in San Francisco there's going to be an earthquake, don't drive a campervan on the South Island, there's going to be an earthquake . . . " Luckily I am trained in the fine art of geology, so I declare us to be safe.