Wellington

Cable Car

Alas Wellington has lived up to its reputation for wet and windy weather but, nevertheless, we enjoyed our visit there. Our motel was nice and central so we were able to walk around the town without taking the car. Headed first for the Cable Car which took us up the hill to the Botanic Gardens. After a quick visit to the Cable Car Museum, we headed for the Carter Observatory which is located in the gardens. Here there was an excellent exhibition about all things astronomical with some very well done audio visual presentations and a Cooke refracting telescope from the 1860s, much to John's delight. After visiting the exhibition, we saw a show in the planetarium. This was in two parts - first a dramatic but slightly too long film about space travel, then an all too short planetarium display, looking at the stars in the sky above Wellington.

Cooke Telescope

From here we wandered down through the Botanic Gardens, brollies up. Beautiful gardens which we would have explored a bit further had the weather been a bit more clement.  Saw the Peace Flame, which is fire taken from the aftermath of Hiroshima, committed to remain alight until all nuclear weapons have been eliminated from the world. This part of our walk ended at the Begonia House where we stopped for some lunch.

Peace Flame (in centre of pond)

The walk then continued down the hill to the Parliament Building - an elegant building onto which has been attached a 1960s extension, known locally as 'The Beehive'. This could have been an interesting modern building (though John Milne subsequently told us that it's reputed to be an unpleasant building in which to work) but looked somewhat out of place juxtaposed to the older, classical style building. Next we passed Government House, an imposing two-storey wooden building, official residence of the Governor-General, and then we reached the quayside. Walked back along the quayside which has obviously been redeveloped recently, passing some nice looking restaurants, and back to the civic centre to which we had walked the previous evening.

Waterfront restaurant

In the evening (by which time it was raining really heavily), we drove out to the Miramar Peninsula where we had dinner with John Milne and his family and spent a very pleasant evening there.