Wellington, NZ

We spent 3 days in NZ's capital, Wellington. A beautiful city known as "the windy city" and it's easy to see why. It's the world's windiest city by average wind speed. Because of its location beside the Cook Strait (the only major gap between the mountains running the length of the two main islands) it gets over 170 days per year with winds gusts greater than 60km/h. The weather is quite variable, the sun is so HOT (due to the ozone hole over NZ) when there's no cloud and no wind and 5 minutes later, the wind picks up and the sky clouds over and we need to put all our layers back on. It's summer here and people wear tuques!!!!

We strolled along the waterfront and hiked up Mt Victoria for a nice view of the city. We watched a cricket match at the Wellington Basin Reserve which was a lot of fun and grabbed dinner on eclectic Cuba street. Yesterday we spent the day walking in Zealandia which is a native wildlife sanctuary setup in a beautiful 500+ acres forest where we saw many threatened native birds. Today we went to the Te Papa New Zealand museum to learn more about the Mãori culture which is very vibrant (with the Mãori language being an official language and used everywhere). We took the Cable car up the hill to the Wellington Botanical Gardens for a stroll.

Tomorrow (Jan 12) we leave the North Island taking the Interislander ferry to cross Cook Straight to the South Island. Czytaj więcej