Windy Welly

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City with flair


Kristy and I take a leisurely morning to Skype with our menfolk and do a couple loads of laundry in the farmhouse. From the living room window, where our guest bed sits, I can see the opposite tree-covered hill, just as steep as this one. Occasionally a tui bird wings across and I press my face close to the chilly glass to get a better look at the unknown species gadding about. While getting dressed, I glance up and promptly forget my half-dressed state as I squeal and call for Kristy and Heather because there’s a PARROT right outside the window. It’s a kaka, a dull-green native parrot that is rather a nuisance/menace (depending on your perspective) in the cities due to its propensity to rip things apart. Like telephone wires. Or car innards. Or a tree trunk which is what it’s attacking right now. It gashes and gnaws at a dead branch in an unpausing search for grubs.

With the second load of laundry in the dryer, we set off to explore this country’s city of hills. Windy Welly is calm today but again the sky remains overcast, nudging towards rain. We walk from Heather’s to downtown Wellington, stopping for a brief vista point at the Botanic Gardens. Turns out the Gardens and the other wildlish spots hemming in the city were designated long ago to be undeveloped in perpetuity. Of course, there are legal wrangles and the wild boundary has shifted somewhat but there’s still an amazing cuff of green around the city proper. Ambling along to downtown, I see traces of distinctive architecture in the Victorian-esque gingerbread trim and porches. Due to the city’s steep hills, there are wooden car parks on platforms, many of them hanging above their respective houses. With the hills, the colorful houses, and the rampant vibrant greenery, this city captures us all, making us think of San Francisco, Seattle, Portland, the livelier colorful American cities near and dear to our hearts.

Downtown feels like any thriving, satisfied metropolitan place with overpriced cafes, polished office spaces, and flashes of inspired (or at least interesting) architecture. We check out the distinctive Beehive, part of the Parliamentary complex, looking like something out of the new Star Wars. Moving to the waterfront, we follow it until we reach the large, acclaimed Te Papa Museum, the museum of New Zealand. Inside we ooh over the colossal squid (I get a little pin to commemorate my love for the blanched, pickled giant.) There’s a snazzy and mostly informative exhibit all about the human-caused extinctions and invasive species problems. There’s a Maori section (less art-exhaustive than the Auckland museum), neat interpreative things (a hologram movie!), and all sorts of fun factoids. Did you know that some islanders sailed by coconut?! Oh yeah, they drilled holes in the coconut in the shape of known constellations and would hold that up to the night sky and steer by them. Or…something like that. Anyhow, it was really cool.

We meet back up with Heather and have dinner at a Cambodian restaurant. We head back to the house after that because there’s a chance that we’ll get to volunteer to go kiwi trapping! One of Heather’s flatmates is a kiwi (bird) researcher at the bird sanctuary, Zealandia, and she needs some extra hands to help hold the wee things while she searches their nests and collects data. We’ve been told they’re absolutely adorable and they’ll try to run in the air while you’re holding them. Kristy and I tell each other again how glad we are that we’re scientists and have such awesome connections. But alas! It’s supposed to rain that night and the kiwi researcher doesn’t want to risk them being stressed and wet and cold. Understandable but disappointing. We turn in early after planning out our next moves of New Zealand travel conquest.

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Photos

Kaka!
Native parrot ripping apart a branch. Adorable.

Colossal Squid!
Awesome! Though rather pickled now...At Te Papa Museum

View from our bed
This is what I call a sweet sleeping set-up

Bamboo ballerina
I would be a ballerina if I had costumes like this. At Te Papa Museum

Comments

[Chris and Nikki]

That must have been cool to see! :-)