Nelson held many other pleasing distractions, aside from an excellent cinema and one of the best veggie restaurants I've come across (perhaps even rivalling Birmingham's Warehouse Café). I also managed to see a full moon and confirm, once and for all, that it was upside-down.

It wasn't until I was on the Rose Express hurtling down winding country roads back to Picton that a vague memory wafted into my mind connected with the town of Nelson. A quick web search confirmed my suspicions: all those days I'd been pootling around in Nelson I had been but kilometres from the birthplace of New Zealand's most famous physicist, Ernest Rutherford! My guidebook had spectacularly failed to mention this at all.

I had one more night in the haven of the Juggler's Rest before hopping onto the Interislander again. As Picton dissolved into the surrounding forested hills, I waved goodbye to the South Island with its glaciers, mirror lakes, penguins and dolphins - my home for the past month. It felt like leaving the country. The ferry dropped us, unprepared, into Wellington's rush-hour and the contrast between North and South could not have been sharper.

Wellington is pretty relaxed for a capital city, despite my initial impressions. It is positively sedate compared to Tokyo or Bangkok, and I hope it stays that way. Low colonial-style wooden buildings surrounded by white picket fences sit shoulder to shoulder with art-deco anomalies and silver skyscrapers. The architectural emphasis appears to be on fun and imagination rather than, as in Hong Kong, on creating icons of corporate power. Wellington does share one thing with Hong Kong - both have a Mount Victoria. Wellington's is lower than its northern hemisphere cousin, but still gives a dramatic view over the city, which spills down to the glittering, yacht-filled harbour.

Sightseeing

The interiors, however, are somewhat more harmonious, and the tour I signed up for was actually rather good. The expensive, but not overtly ostentatious decor betrayed its roots in Westminster, even down to the green leather seats in the second house. It's probably not called that now because, although based heavily on the British system, New Zealand ditched its (first) House of Lords a while ago. The present government is also the first one here to be elected under proportional representation. On our wanderings we passed a woman wandering down the corridor, flanked by two civil servants, to whom she was softly speaking. After a double-take, I had that feeling that I always get when seeing people in real life that I had previously only seen on TV or captured on film - it was the Prime Minister, Helen Clark.

During our tour of the chamber, our guide apologised for making us stand and explained that only the MPs were allowed to sit on the seats in the House. At this point a middle-aged blustering gentleman barged in followed by a bunch of bumbling schoolkids. "Sit anywhere you like!" he shouted to them, pushing aside the excluding ropes. Our guide ushered us out and then explained in hushed tones that no-one is actually allowed to sit on these seats, but that this was the deputy speaker and these schoolchildren were from his constituency. "Democracy in action" mumbled one of our contingent, dryly.

Wellington provided the usual capital city accoutrements of libraries, art galleries and museums, but the New Zealand National Museum rises above the rest. Three hundred million NZ dollars and five floors of crafted colourful multimedia interactivity. Rows of glass cabinets with badly typed descriptions on small white pieces of card are out and multi-million dollar hands-on exhibits are in. It even has a purpose-built Modern Maori Marae (meeting house) on the top floor - the entrance to a spectacular floor of Maori artefacts and cultural history, including ships and whole buildings. One of the best museums I've seen so far.

Now my visa anomalies have been corrected and I'm in no immediate danger of being booted out of the country, I'm heading up the west coast again in search of more volcanoes.