Wellington Wednesday 22nd February

The Cable Car

 

Not apparently as large or as culturally diverse and ‘touristy’ as Auckland, Wellington is an attractive little city stretching along the seafront on a narrow plain with the suburbs stretching up into the hills.  Like Auckland it has lots of British-style architecture though the houses are made of wood not brick.  It houses the Government having taken over as the  capital in 1865  - it is listed as being an important port and major industrial and transport centre.

We started the rather rainy day with a local bus trip through Victoria Mountain tunnel to  visit Weta Cave.  This is not a cave but a small museum and showcase for the WETA company (founded by Peter Jackson amongst others)  which built the animations for some superb films – their first large success was Lord of the Rings and they have also worked on Avatar, TinTin, Planet of the Apes, King Kong, District 9 and lots of others.  We watched a fascinating DVD showing some of their work and interviews with staff – it looks like a wonderful place to work with so much creative talent gathered together (design, model making, engineering, computer animations etc.).  I bought a book showing all of the locations used in Lord of the Rings – many of these are around Wellington, wish I had time to take the tour!

In the Weta Cave

Our next stop was the Te Papa National Museum of New Zealand on the waterfront where we visited the section on Maori life and traditions – they even have a full-size carved Maori meeting house created for them by a modern-day Maori craftsman.  We also answered my question about bird species and yes, the blackbirds, sparrows etc plus various mammals were imported from Britain ‘to make the immigrants feel more at home’ and possibly to replace the huge amounts of indigenous wildlife which were lost in the deforestation which made way for all the sheep pasture (around 90% of the original forest in NZ has been removed since the late 19^th century).

By this time the rain had stopped and we took the historic town cable car up the hills to the Botanic Garden.   The garden itself was lovely with lots of huge trees and plants and the view from the observation deck were worth seeing.  A couple, Jean and John,  offered to take our photograph and it turned out that they live near us and are friends of our friends Joy and Barry in Knebworth – a nice coincidence.

We found a nice pub in which to have a farewell beer but were rather shocked by the price – round about 8 pounds for a pint of Stella!  That was all the money we had left but luckily there was a nice free Cunard shuttle bus waiting to take us back to the ship.  Next stop Dunedin on 24^th.