We arrived in Wellington, the capital of New Zealand, located at the southern tip of North Island, after a 45 minute flight from Auckland. Cloudy skies but no rain met us with the notification that we had also arrived at the Middle of Middle- Earth.

The giant birds and Gandolf are hanging inside the terminal and quite a sight! Wellington is where Sir Peter Jackson, director of Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit movies, is from and where he has built the studios, Weta Workshop and Weta Digital, plus many post-production film facilities. The film industry here provides many jobs in Wellington and the tours of the studios adds to the booming tourist economy.

We were lucky to not have rain (yet) and it was still early enough so that after we checked into our hotel, we immediately went for a walk. The city itself is in a flat area near the water but the residential areas are in the hills surrounding the businesses. There’s a cable car that comes down into the downtown area and many residents use it to commute. Some people have their own private lifts from the bottom of the hill up to their homes. We took the cable car up the hill to the Wellington Botanical Garden and wound our way down the hill through this beautiful park and also through the town’s original cemetery.

Once at the top, the view was stunning even on a cloudy day. You can see the cable car tracks and the hill we climbed.

The Wellington Botanical Garden starts right at the top of the cable car so after looking at the views, we began our meander through the gardens.

We wandered into the old cemetery and found a real mix of people there. Usually various groups of people have their own designated areas but here everyone seemed to be together. We found out later that a few years ago the city needed to put a major roadway through the lower part of the cemetery so they moved the plots in that area up to the higher area. That helps explain some of the arrangements.

The next day the rain was here for the duration with an inch expected. We took the Hop On, Hop Off bus tour and got more information about the city, saw some cloudy views of the whole area, a lot of architecture that looks like San Francisco, made a few ‘Hop offs’ to see kiwis at the zoo, a tour of Parliament and ended up at Te Papa Museum. Some places, like inside of Parliament and the Maori exhibits at Te Papa, didn’t allow photos. First pictures are from inside the Old Bank Building that has been turned into shops and where we had breakfast in a cafe.

And now some sites from the bus tour, making our way up to the high point of the city:

Our first hop off was the Wellington zoo and YES!, we saw the kiwis very clearly this time! Now I really get to tick that off my list. They were very active but photos didn’t turn out in the darkened environment. We also went to see the native blue penguins but they were hiding…too rainy, most likely. We caught our Hop On and went to the government buildings and got a tour of Parliament, learned how their system of government works (only one house) and lamented that Mr. Obama was visiting New Zealand at that moment in Auckland and not Wellington. The first picture is Parliament, the second is the government library (earthquake retrofit in the basement was part of the tour, very impressive!), and the third picture is ‘The Beehive’ where the executive functions happen. There’s also an executive office in Auckland for the Prime Minister to work out of. Currently, Jacinda Ardern from the Labour Party is Prime Minister, the youngest woman to serve at 37 years old, plus she’s unmarried and pregnant. The US has a long way to go if we could ever elect someone qualified with that profile.

We caught our bus to Te Papa Museum, a huge museum that houses some stunning exhibits. It would take a day at least to see most of it. We decided to see the Gallipoli exhibit and the exhibit of Maori history and artifacts. Photography was allowed in the Gallipoli exhibit so what follows are scenes from it. New Zealand sent many regiments to fight the Turks at Gallipoli, their first war as a nation to support the British. They first sent only their white citizens but the Maori also wanted to fight since they also were, by the Waitangi Treaty, British subjects too. The photos of the closeups of soldiers and the nurse are made by Peter Jackson’s Weta Workshop. They are incredibly detailed, very lifelike all the way down to sweat and hair and are about 10-15 feet high. When you look at them, see if you can find a live person to get a sense of scale. Karen is in one of them to help. We learned so much about the disaster of war and Gallipoli.

As I mentioned, we couldn’t take photos of the Maori exhibit but here are some stock photos of parts of the exhibit.

We really did cram in a lot into our day in Wellington. After Te Papa, we had dinner at an Irish pub, JJ Murphy & Co., open since 1928. Fish and chips and Irish beer with rugby and cricket on the tv. A very nice end to the day. Tomorrow we leave Wellington by ferry to go to the South Island and take a chance at driving on the left side of the road. Whoopee!!