Wellington
Yesterday in
New Zealand
Wellington is apparently one of the windiest city in the world and to greet us to the windy city our flight had a lot of turbulence as we were landing which was not very nice. Once we picked up our Yaris car, that would hopefully transport us around the North island for the next two weeks we headed into the city to our hotel The Set Up. To see the sunsetting we headed up to the Botanic Gardens to get a pretty view over Wellington harbour. To get there we rode up the hill on the famous Wellington cable car. It was a lovely way to introduce ourselves to Wellington.
One of the main things to do in Wellington is a tour of the Weta Cave workshop. This was set up to product sets and props for films. It has been part of the production for many big films including Lord of the Rings, Avatar, King Kong and Narnia. The first part of the tour showed us how props are created from concept to being turned into phsyical props through various methods of manufacturing like molding, milling and 3D printing. The props are then individually hand painted so that the plastic or silicone props look real to be used in the filming. I loved seeing the detail in the different prostetic eyes that have been used in various films. The second part of the tour was a walk through of the miniture sets that are used in the production of the new Thunderbird series. The miniture sets are made of various pieces of junk stuck together such as a circuit board as a city landscape and toilet rolls as chimneys. We learned that every episode has a lemon squeezer somewhere hidden in the set because someone complained to the directors of the original series about a lemon squeezer that was used as a fan so the directors took that as a challenge to include one somewhere in every episode. I thought this was quite funny. The minitures look real when they are used depending on how the light is shone or where the camera is positioned. It was fascinating seeing how scenes are visualised and how some miniture sets had huge amounts of details while others that are used for widespan has less detail.
For the afternoon we headed to the Te Papa Museum where there was an exhibition explaining how the Maori people arrived and settled to New Zealand. There was also another exhibition commenorating Anzac day which is celebrated on the 25th April every year. It commenorates all the soldiers who fought at Gallipoli against the Turkish army during World War I. It was really interesting hearing the stories of how the battle happened by different soldiers. In the end, the battle was lost and the New Zealand and Australian armies retreated after thousands of casualties. I thought that this exhibition was well designed and I found it interesting to learn about this period of time.
The following morning we drove to Taupo which is five hours north of Wellington. On the way we stopped at the Rugby Museum in Palmerston North. This museum explained how rugby was brought to New Zealand from England and the political problems it had to overcome over the years. There was a conflict about weither to allow Maori people to play in the All Blacks Team and there was a debate about weither to go to South Africa for a Test series during the civil war. There was a lot of cool memorbilla from old match programmes to old jerseys and rugby balls. It was well worth the stop off.Read more
