Te Papa - National Museum

Huge national museum, with six floors of spectacular exhibits. The entry ticket is valid for 48h so you can come again the next day but I only had a few hours to see the whole thing.
Super cool nature exhibit, with the world’s largest real Colossal Squid on display. Lots of endangered and extinct species in New Zealand as it’s so separate, lots of the fauna and flora is unique to NZ. And apparently no endemic mammals, other than bats, before the Polynesians came. So hard with lots of new predators, there’s efforts to return New Zealand to a predator free country.

Really well done exhibit on the battle of Gallipoli in turkey during World War One, where lots of NZ soldiers fought. Including a Māori contingent. Stories and history and dioramas complemented by huge lifelike “giants”, sculptures of people involved, at 3x or 4x life size. Ultra realistic and made by the same people who did some for lord of the rings, super powerful. Quite a heavy exhibition, emotionally, but really well done

Also a garden with different biomes of NZ and some Māori exhibits, one on Polynesian navigation and modern Māori identity, and one on the treaty of waitangi, one of the founding documents of NZ where the Māori signed over sovereignty to the crown. Lots of contention around it though because the Māori and English versions are translated quite differentlyRead more