We had decided to take local transit into Wellington, when a sudden shower changed our mind. We drove down, and found parking with a minimum of fuss. We asked the GPS which way Te Papa was - it pointed in a totally different direction than made sense - so we ignored it and walked to the waterfront, directly into Te Papa. Te Papa is the NZ Museum. I believe the translation is "Of the People". As we had heard, it is extremely well done. We took the 1 hour intro. tour with a guide named Jen. Due to the NZ short "e", it comes out "gin" aurally, so that took us a bit of straightening out. So Jen-short-for-Jennifer took us into the first gallery, about NZ geology. There is a huge aerial map on the floor, lit from behind. This was fascinating, because we could trace where we had been, and see some of the very large marks that volcanoes and tectonic action had made on the landscape.
They have a display of all of the flora and fauna - stuffed - but set in realistic scenes. And a giant squid, or rather, the remains thereof, with a film about how the poor thing held onto a "jawfish" that had been captured by a longline, and was therefore brought to the surface, which spelled death for it (decompression).
There is a Maori area - with a beautifully carved meeting house from about 1850, and a model catamaran of the type used to travel between islands - considerably faster and with more capacity than Cook's ship, the endeavour.
Eric and I then made a beeline for the Brian Brace photographic exhibit. He is a NZ photographer that did a lot of work for Life and other publications, and also a book on NZ with excellent photos - landscapes from a great distance, and people in close.
At 1:30 we decided a break was in order, and went to find the CityBus that does the hop-on, hop-off city tour. We did the circuit, then "hopped off" at the bottom of the cable car that goes to the top of the city. There is a great little museum at the top with the history of the cable railway. Wellington is rather vertical, and in order to persuade people to buy properties up the hillside, there needed to be a convenient way to get up and down. So the property developers got together and started the cable railway - and did a good job according to the records - no accidents from mechanical failure.
Coincidentally, the top of the cable railway also accesses the Wellington Botanical Gardens. There is a lovely walkway, happily downhill, from the top to the centre of the city. We picked up our bus at the bottom, and went back to the Te Papa stop. Our bus driver pointed us to the main street for restaurants, and we found a noodle shop that suited our taste buds at that point, and a chocolate eclair from the bakeshop next door. We returned to Te Papa, finished looking at the photo exhibit, and wandered through a few more displays.
Our tour bus ticket is good for 24 hours, so we are going back tomorrow. Zealandia is one stop - an area where they have tried to restore Kiwi wildlife before humans interfered. More info. to come.
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