Before I get started on the next leg of the journey, a video I forgot to post from Rotorua; Tommy trying out the NZ tradition of swimming in waterholes (on the farm where we stayed):
We all loved this place -- the kids are insisting we have to come back with Margaret and Lily next time we're in NZ: lovely rooms, a balcony to sit out on in the evening and watch the harbor, a hot tub along a secret path at the end of the garden -- and a 60-inch flatscreen TV behind the mirror, with a PlayStation attached!
Halfway between the B&B and downtown Wellington was the little town I grew up in, Lower Hutt. We paid a visit to Kauri Street, and they stood outside number 3, where our house used to be. Unfortunately, ours was about the only house in the street to have been torn down and replaced with a new house. Apart from that, the neighborhood was quite untouched, and still very sleepy and safe, and it was very easy to imagine still being able to wander from friend's house to friend's house unsupervised after school. We took a trip around to the dairy (= 7-11/milk-bar/candy store) that my sister and I used to walk to, to spend our pocket money. I bought the kids what used to be a 20-cent mixture (now $2...) of "lollies" -- they weren't impressed, so I had to eat them myself. Ah, nostalgia!
It wasn't all wallowing in childhood memories, though. The city of Wellington has changed a lot: a much more vibrant downtown, with many shiny new buildings. There were also several new major attractions, and we spent much of our time at two of them: the fantastic new national museum, Te papa ("Our place"); and Zealandia.
The latter is the old waterworks in Karori, a fashionable hill-suburb of Wellington where the University is based. After the waterworks were decommissioned, a trust came up with the idea of taking the reservoir and surrounding "bush," and restoring the flora and fauna to the state they would have been in before the arrival of humans in New Zealand. They have a 500-year plan to accomplish this! Already, the whole area has been surrounded by an impenetrable steel fence and all non-native predators (weasels, rats etc.) have been eradicated. Some rare native bird species have already taken up residence of their own accord; other animals -- kiwis, takahes (more below), and the "living fossil" tuatara lizard -- have been introduced. We spent an afternoon exploring a tiny corner of this vast environmental bubble.
The pictures above are of two of the takahes at feeding time, birds long though extinct, but rediscovered in a tiny colony last century and gradually brought back to viability (there are 250 in existence -- still rather precarious!). The kids loved them -- they're quite comical, as the video below shows, and unafraid of humans.
We also spotted some tuataras wandering through the underbrush:
The birdsong everywhere we walked was phenomenal -- we tried to capture a little of it in this video:
Next, Te Papa:
The big exhibit on was about the history of video games, from Pong to the latest release. There was a lot of interesting history, cultural and artistic analysis -- but the real draw was some 150 games available for unlimited play. The kids begged (successfully) to come back for a second morning. No photos allowed, but got one surreptitiously which basically captures the entire experience):
More educationally, we visited the marae (maori meeting house), the carvings of which trace the entire history of New Zealand, from the maori stories of the creation of the universe to the present day:
We all particularly liked the depictions of modern-day New Zealanders. The scientist:
The mother and child (which the kids wanted Lily to see):
and the gardener, for Margaret:
One of the reasons we stayed in Eastbourne was that it was close to my old school, Wellesley College (of which we had an amazing guided tour our first morning in Wellington), and the hiking trails I used to do while at school, and often afterwards. One afternoon, we walked the trail to Butterfly Creek -- of which (as you see on the map), Gollan's Stream is a tributary. When I was at school, we used to do the long walk down Gollan's stream, or Gollum's Stream as we called it, and joke that this was where Gollum first found the ring (and, in my imagination, Middle Earth always looked like this). In fact, parts of these woods were used for the orc battles at the end of the Fellowship of the Ring...
On our last morning in Wellington, after seeing the video game exhibit for the second time, we walked in to town. I had forgotten that Good Friday is a holiday in New Zealand, and nothing was open, not even cafes. We had a chance, though, to observe one of Wellington's iconic monuments, the Bucket Fountain in Cuba Mall. This 60's era kinetic sculpture was supposed to smoothly tip water from bucket to cascading bucket; in fact, however, ever since it was installed it has only almost done that: the buckets cascade (kind of), but most of the water is thrown randomly about, including onto the pavement 10 ft around the fountain (as you can probably see from the picture below). I remember staring at it mesmerized as kid: both enjoying watching the buckets tipping up as they filled, but also trying to figure out why the thing never really worked. The answer is quite simple, in fact -- three (I think) of the buckets were installed back to front. It would be very easy to fix it; but Wellingtonians have become so fond of their ugly, non-functioning fountain that every time a proposal is made to repair it, it is buried by the public opposition. (The 4 hobbits in the Lord of the Rings, by the way, were almost arrested for swimming in this fountain):
We met up with old friends in Wellington, and Debbie was there for much of our visit -- all wonderful, but I don't have many pictures that came out well. I do like this one, though, of me and my very first flatmate Vandy -- 25 years on:
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