| New Zealand North Island: Wellington |
| on to the South Island & Nelson ...or |
| The next morning we got up bright and early to make the trip to Wellington. We headed out of Whakapapa Village, wound around the south end of Tongariro and past the ski resort area, which is pretty deserted in the summer! Before we left the area, I |
| had Frank pull over so that I could get a nice shot of some of the tussock plain vegetation that we would being seeing a lot more of over the coming week (pic left). Notice that I was standing fully upright when I took the shot. These are very tall plants, sort of like birds of paradise, but bigger and redder, adn they always seemed to be surrounded by those tall yellow seeded grasses you can see in the background. |
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| We reached the nation's capital of Wellington by about noon and headed straight to the national museum, Te Papa (Maori for our place). Every friend we spoke to, Kiwi or otherwise, before departing Oz insisted that if we only had time to do one thing here, this was it. The museum (pic |
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| now extinct bird) and glowworms in it. It had a great section on the Maori, including its own marae (mini-village), information on European settlement, and a very interesting section on political relations between the two cultures. There was also lots of kid friendly interactive stuff that was more like an arcade than a museum, but we didn't exactly linger. We had other things we were keen to see and do before the sun went down! |
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| We travelled to them via parliament to be as efficient toursits as we could be! Parliament was a bizarre assortment of architecture (pic below left). It is best known for one of its attached office buildings known as the Beehive. The picture should tell you why it is so named (bulding on left). It was Sunday, so the buildings were closed, so we did our loop around the ground and continued on our way! |
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| We left the museum and walked across the street to our chosen luncheon spot. To our pleasant surprise, aswe arrived at the museum we had noticed a micro-brewery pub right across the street! :). So the Wellington Brewery poured me a sampler tray of their beers while Frank had a stout and we snacked on fries and a dip platter (pic right). Our next stop was going to be the Lady Norwood Rose Garden at the botanic gardens. |
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| We arrived at the rose gardens around 6:30pm. Fortunately, they stay open until sunset which was more like 8:30, so we didn't need to panic except that teh sun was lowering for photos. The garden was a big fenced square with a |
| lovely fountain in the middle, with every colour and type of rose you could think of in the many small plots in the square (sample pic right). Frank & I had a bit of a flower picture competition. For some reason, after my great success in Mt. Gambier, I was unable to get his digital camera to focus well enough for the close-ups. While I love the concept of my best photo (pic below left), I had |
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| to bow to Frank's (pic above right)! You can even see the water droplet on one of the petals...Our last noteworthy sightseeing activity was actually a bit of an accident. We walked through a park as the quickest route back to our hotel. The walk we took was called the memorial walk. The park was named after a dead guy so that made sense, but that wasn't how the trail got its name. We were walking through one small piece of a very old graveyard that was in the middle of the city (pic below left). The entire main hill of the area was once a graveyard and now it is crowded with houses and parks. Why let a few old graves get in the way of everyone enjoying the cool forest landscape? |
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| They had even fixed/reassembled some of the oldest flattest headstones that had fallen down over the years. When we got to the other end ther was a church with pamhplets apparently describing what noteable people lay in various locations around the area... Once again we were caught out doing a walk in the wrong direction! We stopped to pick up some junk food to eat at a convenience store (the only place we could find that was open in the ghost town that was the CBD at 8:30 on a Sunday), and headed back to the hotel to watch the Sunday Night Movie. We had to catch the ferry over to the South Island the next morning at 7:30! Still, we did a pretty thorough job of touristing for only having half a day in the city! |
| Frank & Lisa's Amazing Aotea/Kiwi/NZ Adventures |
| below right) was not what I expected - definitely a family place for fun more than a stuffy archive of national history. Frank got a picture of the castle from Mordor (pic below left) before we headed to an outdoor section that recreated some of the country's natural wonders. It even had a cave with fake Moa bones (a huge flightless native & |
| Northern Territory: Red Centre , 2 / Top End , 2 NSW & ACT: Hunter Valley / Sydney / Canberra , 2 Queensland Coast: 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 South Australia: Barossa Valley / Kangaroo Island / McLaren Vale & Coonawarra Victoria: Great Ocean Road , 2 , 3 / Melbourne New Zealand (North Island): Aukland / Rotorua / Tongariro / Wellington (South Island): Nelson / Westland / Queenstown / Milford / Dunedin / Mt Cook / Christchurch |