Windy Wellington – Phyllis – "On the Road Again!"

Harbour Views

Our current hotel is central to all our activities. We are in a corner suite on the 8^th floor with wonderful views of the harbour and are a stone’s throw from Queen’s Wharf. Nothing we wanted was farther than a 15-minute walk from the door.

Wellington is known to be a windy city. All through last night I was wondering if the windows were going to be torn off the building. The noise, itself, was unsettling. I have three choices of headgear to work with when I’m tired of my hair whipping my face and I had to resort to a scarf to tie it all down.

This is a busy government town and feels completely different than Auckland. There are more people on the street, bustling from one place to another during the day. Coffee shops abound all over the country but the restaurant scene here is a bit more dynamic and reservations are necessary for a lot of the downtown venues. We had read that the purpose of a visit to Wellington was to eat. Just across from the hotel there is a food truck coffee shop in the plaza that has a circle of office ready people gathered to chat each morning.

Despite the wind, there is generally more of a street life in NZ than in Calgary. There really isn’t a need for a plus 15 system as long as you can manage the rain and gusts strong enough to make one lean into the wind.

The Wellington Food Scene

Oddly, the bars stop serving meals at 8 pm. Our first night we had to settle for a quick beer and snack foods after our long train ride. We made up for it after that.

We found a literal hole in the wall Chinese restaurant down an alley on our second night. Conceding that we are spoiled by Peter Lao cooking for us, we tried the local variety of Chili Salt Squid, Beijing Hot and Sour Soup, as well as a chicken dish and a pork dish. It was all very good.

Next it was lamb night, finally! We managed to get a table at Charley Noble’s just before the crowds piled in on Valentine’s Day. I am very fussy about my lamb and had a piece of medium rare roasted leg with garlic and herb butter. Ken is not a big lamb fan, but he was quite happy with his meal, as well.

Tonight was our last night in town, so we headed to Cuba Street and came across a small Thai restaurant with great service and delicious food. Cuba Street is the trendy area in town. Two blocks are cut off to motorized traffic and there are shops and eateries, street artists and crowds throughout.

Te Papa

Te Papa is the national museum. We opted to take a one-hour guided tour to get a feel for the building and then spent another 4 or 5 hours exploring on our own.

The museum has adopted a fingerprint as its logo because it is a common human feature of all peoples, yet unique to each individual. All staff wear blue shirts with a large fingerprint on the front and the logo is used liberally around the museum and in its promotional materiel.

A few aspects caught our attention:

The Gallipoli exhibit was remarkable. The floor was marked with a time line of the events and illustrated with multi media presentations, personal accounts, projected video dioramas of the movement of the New Zealand and Australian forces on a 3D model of the area, exquisite mannequins and voice overs for some key soldiers. These mannequins are 2.5 times life size.
The settlement history, first of the Polynesian peoples (Maori), followed by Europeans and then others, gets a lot of attention in the museum right up to the influx of Syrian and Ukrainian refugees recently. NZ is presenting itself as a country of immigrants that goes beyond its Maori and British beginnings.
We had toured the Waitangi Grounds at our stop in Paihia. One part of the negotiations and agreement between the Maori People and Queen Victoria’s representatives that is still contentious today is that the English version of the treaty and the Maori version do not say the same thing. On December 11, 2023 protesters defaced the English display of the agreement at the TePapa because it did not agree with the Maori version on the wall across from it. The museum decided to leave the defaced version in place, acknowledging that this was still a problem today. The guide told us that there are plans to change the entire display to better reflect the reality of the treatment of the Maori people.
The modern interpretations of traditional Maori motifs, a stained glass version of a Maori house and multi-coloured traditional Maori carvings fill one hall,.
An enormous wind chime is situated on the 5^th floor of the museum. It took the artist 10 years to collect wind chimes form all over the world for her piece. We were amused that one of the places she visited was Fogo Island, Newfoundland.

We also visited the Portrait Gallery and the Wellington Museum. The most interesting room covered the Wahine inter-island ferry disaster of 1968 where a ferry, caught in a tropical storm coming into Wellinton, capsized, killing 51 people.

Cable Car

There is not a lot of flat land around the Wellington Harbour. Very early on in the city’s history developers were looking for a way to bring in more people and still give them decent living conditions. The answer was a cable car running 360 metres up the mountain.

It is no longer used for daily commuting, but tourists and visitors use it to get up to the Botanical Gardens which were filled with interesting plants and flowers.

The old wheel house now hosts a small museum. Some enterprising Lego fan made a replica of the cable car and its route out of 5,160 blocks.

The Beehive

We had hoped to tour the NZ Parliament Buildings, but they were booked up for the duration of our stay. I am not a fan of mid-century brutalism as an architectural style. My blunt opinion is that the Beehive has to be the ugliest parliament building in the Commonwealth.

Matiu/Somes Island

This afternoon we took a ferry over to Matiu/Somes Island. Islands in bays near big cities seem to be useful for quarantining people, prisoners or animals everywhere.

NZ is very sensitive to the introduction of foreign life forms and strenuously works to protect itself. All passengers are ushered into a small hut right off the ferry to clean and sanitize their shoes, inspect their clothes for bugs or seeds and given explicit instructions on how to behave on the island.

At various times, the island has been used as a high-level quarantine for incoming livestock, immigrants and experimental breeding of hardier sheep. In 1942 when the US finally joined WWII, a base, complete with 5-gun placements was built at the apex of the island. They left in September 1944. Side note – 1500 NZ women married American soldiers in that time period.

Today the island is a well monitored environmental preserve visited by tourists and school groups. We met a high school science class of rowdy boys from a private school coming in for an overnight stay. There was also another private school group of 5 and 6 year-old girls, all decked out with matching uniforms and adorable red sun hats completing their visit to the information centre.