Wellington

We didn't get any pictures of Wellington, but some of the cute ducks at our campground.

09.15.08: We left the Wairarapa Valley south towards Wellington, which sits on the far south of the North Island and surprisingly is New Zealand’s capital city (not Auckland). As we drove over a mountain range into the Wellington area, Sean mentioned how the hills reminded him of Highway 92 going over Half Moon Bay. We spent the night at a campground in the Lower Hutt Valley, and ventured into the city the next day. Just like Auckland sort of reminded me of Seattle or Portland, the city of Wellington, as I’ve heard before, appeared to look similar to San Francisco. It’s right near the water and the building architecture is similar, but without a homeless population, dirty streets, parking problems or zero-lot house lines.

The first thing we did was spot a New World market on the way into the city. I read that the city’s New Worlds tend to be larger than rural ones and we needed a few things. So, I was happy when there were things there that I hadn’t seen in other markets in a while. After, Kailani was getting hungry and I was in need of a Chinese food fix. So, we headed to a restaurant that our Rough Guide called the best Chinese place in the city. Unfortunately, it was closed. Having just fed the parking meter, we wandered down the street to find another place, and had a Yum Char (dim sum) lunch, which was decent. We had to wolf it all down fast as Kailani wasn’t having a great time there, even after being the one who was asking to eat.

After lunch, we wanted to take a ride on Wellington’s cable car, which takes you up a hill to their botanical gardens. Just as we were driving up to the cable car station, Kailani proceeded to fall asleep for her afternoon nap. Seeing as how fussy she was during lunch, we ended up passing on the cable car. It’s not like we haven’t ridden on one before anyway. Instead, we did a drive-by of the botanical gardens to at least see what it was about. Going up there, we got a good feel for what the city looked like. The downtown area had plenty of shopping opportunities, which I could have used a shopping fix too. But, we decided to take advantage of the nap time and hit the road from Wellington up north, this time on the west coast of the island. It seemed weird how familiar it looked when we were going out of Wellington as it looked kind of like the suburb of Daly City, south of San Francisco. But when we were finally out of the suburbs, it was back to looking like New Zealand. The freeway turned back into a two lane road that went in and out of small towns with no stop lights and green rolling hills with sheep and cows, more and more as you got further from the city.