Wellington is known for it’s gale force (>60kmph) winds on 175 days of the year. We arrived for 2 days of occasionally feeling a slight breeze when doors were opened quickly.
We spent the first afternoon walking up a sizeable hill to the Botanical Gardens, discovering at the top there was a cable car that could’ve saved our legs. We then proceeded to accidentally walk past the gardens to the bottom of the hill again. We did at least manage to find the rose gardens and these probably not native birds.
We popped by the New Zealand parliament on the way home to see if we could find Jacinda Ardern and convince her to make a late election bid. Sadly she wasn’t around, but the ‘Beehive’ building and sculptures were pretty impressive. It’s probably a bit much of an ask to run two countries anyway, even for her.
We stopped for some supplies, and Andrew picked up another flavour of Kombucha to try. (Please note, Andrew has taken the left field decision to make this blog primarily about Kombucha, with intermittent stories about our travels).
The next day we decided to walk up yet another hill (because apparently that’s our only passtime now), Mount Victoria, to take in the views with our packed lunch.
On the way down we bumped into a friend from our AirBnB in Paihia. We caught up with his adventures since then, and arranged to meet up for dinner later.
Te Papa was our next stop, the massive 5 level national museum. We couldn’t tackle it all in one go, so visited a really interesting nature exhibition about climate change.
On the walk back, we “accidentally” stumbled across a microbrewery, and thought given the glorious weather it would probably be rude not to. So another tasting board appeared.
We got ready for our dinner date, and chose a pasta restaurant 1154 (named after the year of the first recorded mention of pasta). Full to the brim of top notch pasta, we stumbled past another micro brewery (there’s a big food and craft beer scene in Wellington), and our German counterpart insisted we went in despite our “very strong” protests. Another tasting board. We introduced our friend to Exploding Kittens and regretably challenged him to a game of Jenga. It turns out mechanical engineers are good at this.
On our last day we took a tour to Weta Workshops, the crew behind basically anything cool you’ve seen in a film including The Lord Of The Rings, Avatar and District 9. Another informative morning on movie magic, plus a few fanboy selfies.
We stopped for a delicious Indian lunch on the way home. The food in Wellington has been the best of the trip so far. Andrew also got to try yet another Kombucha.
We had to turn our last afternoon in Wellington to administration, because there’s been a massive storm and mudslip that’s blocking our route down the south. It’s touch and go whether it will be open, but we’ve come up with a few back up plans just in case.
We’re now on the Interislander Ferry, which means we are saying goodbye to the North Island. We’re heading to Nelson to explore a bit of Abel Tasman national park – which should provide some pretty spectacular scenery.
There & Back Again 