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Wellington is the capital of New Zealand. At first it was Auckland, but it was decided that it should be a more central city. Picton, on the South Island, applied as well, as being even more central. But in 1865 Wellington was chosen. Wellington has several attractions for tourists, apart from the parliament buildings. The Te Papa is a big museum with a lot of different exhibitions, ranging from the geology of New Zealand to modern art. In between you find something about the nature, the Maori culture and the immigrants. |
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| Te Papa is enormous, you can spend hours and hours inside. There's only one disadvantage to this: after seeing the Te Papa, you don't want to see any other museum in New Zealand. Whatever they have on display in the other museum, you've seen it in Te Papa. |
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| Wellington covers several hills. Between the main shopping street and the botanical garden runs a cable car, so you can easily cover the height. |
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| In the botanical garden you can also find the Carter observatory. Here you can find out how you can locate the south at night by looking at the stars: first find the Southern Cross, and there it is. In the northern sky are the 'normal' astronomical signs like Leo and Scorpius, but they are standing upside down. |
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We like botanical gardens and often visit them on our trips. The one in Wellington is really nice and offers a lot more than leaves of roses floating in a pond. But to include all our pictures of the flowers here, would go too far. |
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Windy Wellington: every other day the wind blows with a speed of 64 km/hour or harder. The first day we were here, it blew not so hard, and the second day it blew harder. The bowl of silver ferns at city square is firmly attached, so no problems here. |
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Close to Wellington, at Paraparaumu is the Southward car museum. Mister Southward collected cars in his spare time, and apparently he had a lot of spare time. He even found a car that would almost fit into our backpack, a Suzuki a lot smaller than the Fiat 500 that is parked next to it. |
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Another collections item is the car made of copper. The horn is a real eyecatcher
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| We also saw a Suzuki T20 motorcycle, just like the one Mirjam used to have. Cool collection, mr Southward !! |
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