BoomerGirl Diary

After a pleasant night in Masterton, we continued on by car to Wellington. The first stop for us is The Museum of New Zealand, or Te Papa.

Te Papa is one of the largest museums in the world and is spread over five levels. We took the hour-long Introduction To Te Papa Tour to get an overview of what this shiny new museum has to offer, and then went back to explore on our own.

Te Papa has a great natural science exhibit called Mountains to Sea that features skeletons of many sea creatures. The largest is the skeleton of a pygmy blue whale that is almost 70 feet long. There is another exhibit called On The Sheep’s Back that looks at the role sheep have played in the lives of New Zealanders and their country.

But very importantly, Te Papa is a partnership between the Maori culture and the culture of European descent New Zealanders. It includes some of the country’s most significant Maori treasures, as well as Te Marae, a beautiful 21st century carved Maori meetinghouse. To me, the best part of Te Marae was that the master wood carver chosen to build this house did not cut down ancient trees to carve for the entryway decoration. Instead, he experimented with carving a plywood-like product and then steaming the resulting pieces into curved, three-dimensional shapes. The result is a lighter, almost lacy material for the formation of traditional tribal motifs.

Facing the entrance to Te Marae is an enormous door of stained glass. The outside light coming through this wall of glass casts a beautiful pattern of colors across the floor of a large gathering area. Important visiting dignitaries are often welcomed to Wellington in Te Marae. I cannot imagine that they would not be impressed.

Next comes the most challenging part of our driving to date on this trip: the return of the rental car. I had been doing fairly well with the driving until this point, but now we are in the middle of a large busy city with one-way streets, buses, trolleys and unsympathetic fellow drivers. To top it off, our GPS gizmo that had been a great help in the open countryside decided to lose its mind every time we drove under the electric trolley lines. It took quite a while and all of our patience to find the rental agency, but we did finally make it and then continued on foot, dragging our luggage behind us.

Luckily, our hotel was not far up the street on the Cuba Mall, which is thought to be one of the hip and edgy shopping areas in Wellington. We did enjoy doing some window-shopping along this street, but hip and edgy has never been used to describe either my husband or me, so “just looking” was enough.

I have to say, though, that there are a LOT of good-looking men in Wellington. We had coffee made for us by a Colin Firth look-alike, and later traveled with a tour guide that reminded me of Orlando Bloom. While eating dinner at a sidewalk café, I began to think that the adjoining pedestrian mall must instead be a fashion runway. The clothes were not particularly fabulous, but the fellows appearing from around the corner all seemed very photogenic.

Our second activity in Wellington was to take the Kelburn Cable Car that travels from the city center to the top of surrounding the hillside. The view of Wellington and the harbor were spectacular from this vantage point. New Zealand’s parliament building is distinctive for its domed shape and is known as the beehive. I think it is the most unusual feature in the Wellington cityscape. The Wellington Botanic Garden can be accessed from the top of the cable car’s run too, so we spent a while wandering around the gardens. The trails through the garden mostly lead down the hill towards the city, and time permitting, it would be pleasant to walk back to the city center. But we had purchased round-trip tickets for the cable car, and it had already been a big day, so we took the cable car back and headed back to our hotel.

Tomorrow we explore Wellington’s natural wildlife treasures and not so natural computer generated treasures ...