Trolleys, Transit and Trees

Tuesday, January 10: Coffee at a restaurant on the waterfront overlooking fountains and the Wellington skyline with good yoghurt was not a bad way to start the day. We walked through the downtown of this rather vibrant little city (it’s about 400,000 in the metro), stopping at various statues, and noting a lane, Chew's Lane, now a passageway between buildings, that was named after a gent from John's hometown of Middleton, Lancashire, England.




Then we rode the cable car to the summit.

At the top is a museum to Wellington and New Zealand’s trams and cable cars, which had a rather good movie presentation. Of course the view at the top is quite spectacular with a vista of hills and house similar to San Francisco or Seattle. Wellington has more physical charm than Auckland.

The walk down through the Botanical Gardens, with the many different varieties of flowers, shrubs, grasses and trees was a learning experience. As far as we can make out just about anything will grow here with the mild damp climate: there were even grand succulents in one of the gardens. There was even a sundial where Ben was the indicator! The area outside the Gardens is a mostly Victorian part of town, some of the houses looking as it they date back to the original founding in the mid-19th on tiny Ascot Lane.






From there we walked down the hill, had a look around the outside of Parliament and the Beehive, the building that houses the Cabinet of the unicameral legislature. We stopped in nearby downtown to make dinner reservations and then boarded a trolley bus for an hour of riding.

John has been an avid rider of trolley busses, and couldn’t pass up a chance to ride the only system in Oceania. It makes up for Edmonton, where the busses were stopped the day we arrived in that Alberta city. Here they are all new and roam the hills on many different routes. The clunk as they go through the intersections and the whine they give off alert the unsuspecting of their arrival. Ben enjoys the ride and watching the people. We bought an all day bus ticket which we will use again tonight as we go out to dinner downtown. We took route 11, maybe the city’s longest, from downtown to Seatoun and back. It runs through a couple of tunnels and even has to run on a broad arterial highway as it connects various city neighborhoods. Many of them are composed of a wide variety, though very English style, bungalows--made of wood rather than brick.

From there we stopped at a grubby noodle house for lunch. Surprisingly the curried chicken noodles for Ben and a spicy Thai seafood noodles for John were very good.

Now to Te Papa, the national museum. It's protected from earthquakes by massive rubber footings! It’s an imposing edifice on the waterfront, and we went to see new Maori art. Along the way we saw an exhibit of the Treaty of Waitangi, where the Maoris gave the British the islands, so to speak. However, the Maori collection is nowhere near as good as the Auckland War Memorial Museum, nor, surprisingly, was the Maori art as good at the Auckland Art Gallery’s collection. One of the docents explained that they didn’t have much on show, having put some of it away for a while. We returned to the hotel and are readying for dinner tonight, where John expects to have Venison Wellington!

,