When we arrived in Wellington on Saturday afternoon, the weather was beautiful- a nice change from the persistent rain of the past few days. Wellington isn't the biggest city in NZ, but it is the capital. It also holds the record for the windiest city in the world with an average windspeed of 16km p/h.
That evening, we were in for a sporting treat- ENG VS NZ in the women's rugby world cup final was on in the hostel bar. There was a dozen or so English people on the bus- everyone else sided with the Kiwis in the bar. Even though we lost, it was really exciting to watch a final in the host nation.
The following day was mainly a life admin day of clothes washing, food shopping and cooking, but we did manage to ride the famous cable car and walk down through the beautiful botanical gardens.
On Monday, we went to Mount Victoria, which I was obviously far too excited about! On the way back down, we attempted to find the "Hobbit hideaway" filming location, but we quite literally couldn't see the wood from the trees as neither of us could remember the scene in the film.
In the afternoon we went to a museum called Te Papa. It had lots of interesting exhibits on Kiwi nature, on the effect that sitting on two tectonic plates has on the country* and Maori culture. But the absolute highlight was an amazing exhibition on the battle of Gallipoli. Nearby art department film studios "Weta" had created huge life-like models of soldiers and nurses in the battle, scaled up x2.5. It honestly was the most moving war exhibit I've ever seen and almost moved me to tears, so I hope they tour it at some point. I did however spend the first 10mins of the exhibit thinking that it was odd that they fought over the Galapagos island and it's tortoises before I realised...
We continued our cultured day by hooking up the hostel tv to my tablet so we could watch the new series of The Crown, much to the delight/horror of the other guests.
On Tuesday, we went on a tour of the "Weta" workshop- the art dept company mentioned earlier, who do props and costumes for a gazillion films and TV series inc LOTR (obvs), Spiderman (Andrew Garfield era) and Dune. They also did the first two series of the new Thunderbirds and had an entire warehouse of model sets, which was F.A.B.
We then did a flyby visit to The Beehive- houses of Parliament, but sadly no Jacindas were spotted.
We didn't quite know if it was going to be our last evening in Wellington that night. Kiwi Experience is advertised as a flexible "hop on, hop off" coach tour, but post pandemic they are completely full to capacity and, imho, have oversold tickets. We were on the waitlist for a seat on the coach right up until that morning, then for some reason, only had the second leg of our journey booked. Luckily, the following morning, we snagged a lift to the ferry port, and it was plain sailing from there.
Next up- Abel Tasman National Park!
*I've had to get over the fact that there are slightly terrifying Tsunami and earthquake signs everywhere, gulp.
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