Wellington

The weather forecast was pretty pants for the day so we decided to do some indoor activities. Wellington has the nickname 'Windy Welly' and we can certainly see why!

After breakfast we headed to Weta Cave, the company that did all of the special effects for the Lord of the Rings and Hobbit movies as well as a plethora of other movies including King Kong and District 9. They also have a digital department that worked on a lot of the digital effects for Avatar. They have a small museum there that you can look around for free as well as a short documentary on Weta and what they do. In addition to this there are a couple of tours that you can do. We decided to do the workshop tour which was around 45 minutes long. We are so glad we spent the extra money as the tour was really interesting. Our tour guides parents work for Weta in the special effects and make up department and he now also works there and I honestly don't think there is anything that he doesn't know. We got to see lots of props and costumes from a variety of the movies they work on, from futuristic guns to Elven swords. He also explained a little bit about how they make some of the props using CNC machines and 3D printers. We even got to catch a glimpse of a CNC machine in action which was in the process of making a full size horse.

Unfortunately we were unable to take photos inside as everything is subject to copyright however outside they have 3 huge models of the trolls in Lord of the Rings so we didn't go away empty handed.

With the weather still pants we went to the Te Papa museum in the afternoon. The museum is absolutely massive and spans over 6 floors. You could probably spend a week here and still not see everything. Best of all though it is completely free so we spent a good few hours there checking out a couple of exhibits. The best exhibit was a temporary one they had on Gallipoli, which many New Zealanders invaded alongside the British in the First World War. As part of the exhibit they had huge models of soldiers and then you learnt about their story. The soldiers had been made by Weta and they were absolutely amazing. We learnt on the tour that the hair on their head is real human hair and someone had to painstakingly insert every single hair. The other hair on their face and arms was yak hair. They were so realistic. The exhibit was very interactive and really interesting. A harrowing, yet incredible experience.Read more