The best laid plans …

The best laid plans …

Needing to take a bus to Upper Hutt then a train to Wellington, we checked the Metlink site to work out our options.  Then we took a walk out of the campsite to check the location of the bus stop.  After all our research, we decided that getting an off-peak ticket would get us into Wellington quite late, so we’d splash out on the full price – an extra NZ$3.

So there we were next morning, waiting at the right stop, when a bus coming the other way stopped and the driver waved us over.  Thinking we were in the wrong place after all, we hurried across the road and got on.  It turned out that there had been a collision between two logging trucks on the highway and the route back to Upper Hutt was closed.  But he was very proud of the fact that it hadn’t delayed him.

However, by the time he’d called his wife to warn her to take a different route to work, shown us the photos he’d taken as he came past the scene the other way and picked up a girl waiting for a school bus because there wouldn’t be one along soon, we hit the highway five minutes late!

Then we caught the back of the queue and there we sat.  It took over an hour to get to the station, and we were just in time to catch the first off-peak train!

The first thing we noticed when we left the station was that Wellington is the citiest city we’ve been to since we arrived in NZ.  There were high(ish) rise office blocks and smartly dressed people everywhere, wearing lanyards and id cards and carrying laptops and files.  The coffee bar we went to was full of business people having meetings or networking.

We headed to Te Papa, the national museum of New Zealand, a very modern looking place in the Waterfront area of Wellington.  Everyone we’ve spoken to has raved about it and Diane was particularly interested in seeing the exhibition about the Treaty of Waitangi, NZ’s founding document.  It was fascinating, but we were disappointed that there was no context to the exhibition.  Perhaps if you’re from NZ you know all about the tribal wars and other events alluded to, but it just left us with more questions than answers.

The same was true for an exhibit about more recent migrations of Pacific people to NZ.  We did have fun watching from the fourth floor as loads of camper vans and motor homes went round and round the car park looking for a space.  Perhaps the people who laid out the museum should ask them what they think of it.

Leaving there, we realised it must be lunch time by the number of joggers in the street!  We walked off to the Cuba area, which seems to be the Bohemian part of Wellington to have lunch at Fidel’s café, as it has a good write-up in Lonely Planet.  Such a good write-up that there weren’t any tables available.  We settled for a very nice Malaysian down the road; NZ$20 for two curries in the middle of any capital city can’t be bad.

After that we had a choice; walk up Mount Victoria for the 360 degree view or take the cable car up from Lambton Quay to the viewpoint at Kelburn.  We opted for the cable car, which is really a funicular railway now, but what’s in a name?

At the top, apart from the photo opportunities and tourist café, there is a cable car museum.  This tells the story of the cable car and even has one of the original cars in the middle of the room.  First opened in 1902, it was originally a cable car, with the cable winding gear driven by steam.  There are three bridges and three tunnels on the route, as well as three intermediate stations – the designer must have liked the number 3!  Other than an electric motor replacing the steam engine in 1933 it ran more or less unchanged until 1973 when a workman stepped in front of a car and was seriously injured.  The line closed in 1978 and the current funicular railway was installed, opening in 1979.

The museum was small but perfectly formed and very informative – Te Papa authorities, please note!

From there, we walked back down into the city through the Botanical Gardens and back to the station to make our (incident-free) way home.  As the train went past the ferry terminal, we did happen to notice that the water in the bay was very choppy.  Seems like we arrived on North Island just in time!