Firstly, I just wanted to let everyone know that I am having some dramas with the Tumblr platform with uploading pictures. Sometimes it take hours … sometimes it just doesn’t work at all. Hence the delay on yesterday’s blog.
It has hard to come up with a title for today as we walked all over Wellington finding things to do – some 21,000 steps according to my FitBit. The first order of the day was breakfast. There is a highly recommended chain of cafes called Pandoro, so we started there. French Toast for Deb and I had a healthy choice of pancakes with bacon, banana and maple syrup.
From there we headed to the waterfront to walk off the breakfast. We again found another food market which had a lot of the same stalls as the one on Cuba Street last night, but also had an excellent fresh fruit and vegetable market. Of course, my interest in that was fleeting, because I’m not intending doing any cooking in the short term future.
One of the features around Wellington is the street art, particularly sculptures, but also it’s fair share of painted murals. While not everything appeals, here are a couple of my favourites so far.
And this one
The walk around the waterfront eventually lead to ‘Te Papa’ (Maori for Our Place) which is New Zealand’s National Museum. While we had visited the museum not so long ago there is an excellent display depicting the NZ part of the ANZAC legend. The display was put together with the help of Weta Workshops, of Lord of the Rings fame, and it came with a sense of relief that all that imagination involved in crafting all those Orcs was now being applied to this much more honourable purpose. There were a number of individual stories told and the displays depicting the these stories constructed in a larger than life 2.4x scale.
As well as the individual stories, the story of the overall campaign was also told. The story is one of mostly futile attempts to dislodge the Turks, but also of the conditions were disease killed almost as many men as the battle injuries. For me, I also found it interesting that the Maori had their own regiments and that the Maori politicians had insisted that they participate in what was largely regarded as a “white man’s” war. In summary, a moving exhibit and one I would highly recommend to visitors to Wellington.
After all the walking around it was time to find a coffee and a bit of a sit down as the feet were getting quite tired.
Following the re-energising coffee we walked back to Cuba Street and had some Japanese food for lunch. The mall was a hive of activity now that the sun was out and the temperature had worked its way up to a steamy 20 degrees.
After lunch we caught the Wellington Cable Car up to the botanic gardens. Due to the terrain in Wellington there are many private cable cars that are essential for people to access their homes on top of the hills – the price one pays for the million dollar views on a nice day.
The cable car
And the view from the Botanic Gardens
We walked back to the city from the Botanic Gardens which is a great walk that takes you down a tree-lined path and eventually into Lady Norfolk’s rose gardens which are very impressive… and popular.
After the gardens the path the path winds through the old cemetery, which incidentally includes an area where the early settler were buried in a mass unmarked grave. By this time our feet were very tired, so it was back to the apartment for a couple of glasses of champagne to gather strength for dinner.
We ate at Floriditas in Cuba Street and again an amazing meal was had. The walk back got me my third badge for steps on the FitBit. Today I amassed the High Tops, Hawaii and the Urban Boot badges – 21,000 steps!
Until tomorrow
Rob's "Beats Working" Blog 