Wellington recap

No progress on the Australian visa, so I’ve been wiling away my time here in Wellington. I’ve got a great one-bedroom apartment Airbnb smack in the CBD. It’s less expensive than a hotel room and I’ve got a full kitchen and laundry, which I considered must-haves. Paul, who owns the apartment and lives upstairs in the building, is a great guy and he gave me a rundown of a number of things to see and do in Wellington.

First up was a place called Zealandia. This is a one square mile preserve that is surrounded by a critter-proof fence. All the invasive animal species have been eradicated from the preserve in an effort to recreate a natural New Zealand landscape from the time before Europeans arrived.

I walked down to where the free shuttle departed and hopped on. I was the sole rider, so I got a personal rundown on what Zealandia is and how it works from the driver. Once there I paid my entrance fee and walked in. I was immediately impressed with how beautiful it was. Just green everywhere, with huge tree ferns making it feel like a place where dinosaurs should be roaming. There were many trails, so I picked the main one and took off. I’d hoped to spot a few New Zealand birds even without my binoculars, but I was not prepared for how great the birding was. I almost immediately had a kaka, a New Zealand parrot, fly right over my head on the trail. I also spotted Tui, North Island Saddleback, Stitchbird, New Zealand Pigeon, and several more.

I wound up walking around for a couple of hours at Zealandia, just soaking it in. I enjoyed it so much that I returned the next day to do it again! The ticket was good for two days, so it didn’t cost anything extra. I took a bunch of trails I didn’t take the day before and wound up spotting a few more local birds. I totaled fifteen life birds on the two days.

The next day I went to the New Zealand National Museum, or Te Papa. "Te Papa" is the Māori name for the museum, meaning "container of treasures." The museum had a number of exhibits covering everything from the native flora and fauna to how the Māori built canoes to the immigrant experience in New Zealand. The highlight was a large installation covering the failed invasion of Gallipoli in the first world war. This was really well done and did a great job conveying the absolute misery those poor souls endured.

The day after the museum visit I walked up to the Botanical Gardens, which basically sit between the apartment and Zelandia. Wellington is built on a hill (I guess all of New Zealand is basically mountains with water on both sides; I’m not sure any of it is flat), so if you like to walk, and I do, you are going to be doing a lot of climbing. Many of the sidewalks turn into stairways to cover the steeper sections. I was huffing and puffing by the time I got up to the top of the gardens. Well worth it, though, for the views of the city and the bay. The gardens themselves are quite nice. Not as spectacular as Zealandia, of course, but for a park in the middle of the city they were wonderful.

My other outing was to visit the Weta Workshop. If you’re not familiar, this is the special effects studio that did the work for the Lord of the Rings films as well as many others. We’d scheduled a ship’s excursion for this, but I was more interested than Liz or the boys, being the huge LOTR nerd that I am, so we decided that I’d go on my own and we’d all do something else when the ship is in Wellington. I took the bus over to Weta, but it turned out that I took the wrong bus. There are two Number 2 buses that go to similar but slightly different destinations. Why are there two number two buses? Numbers are not in short supply. Why not give every bus route its own number? At any rate, by the time I discovered that I wasn’t headed directly where I needed to go I was about two miles away. It was either get off and try to find the proper bus or get off and try to cover those two miles in the 20 minutes I had. I decided the latter course was better, so off I went.

Since this is Wellington, a good chunk of the walk/jog was straight up the side of a hill. That just about did me in, but I conquered it and carried on. Google maps thought I’d be late for my 10:00 tour, but I took that as a challenge and made it by 9:55.

The tour was cool if you’re into that sort of thing. If you know what the shards of Narsil are or who the Witch King of Angmar is, then you’d love it. If you don’t, you’d still probably get a kick out of seeing how face casts are made.

I miss Liz and the boys something awful, but I’ve been trying to make the best of my time here in Wellington. It’s a great city. It’s the capital of New Zealand but only has about 200,000 people. It’s very walkable, has a great bus system (once you figure out which one to get on), and is surrounded by beautiful countryside. It really feels like a place I could live in.Read more