We leave Waitomo and drive 6 hours to Wellington, the capital of New Zealand. It was a beautiful drive through the countryside with rolling green hillsides full of cows, sheep, goats, horses, and even alpacas!
First, a quick stop at our hotel, The Trinity Hotel, to drop off the car and our bags. This is a large hotel just off the wharf. We had one room with double and single beds which did not leave much room for our bags. They did have a small refrigerator and a nice bathroom. In addition, they had a beautiful rooftop deck which served drinks.
We explore for a few hours down by the wharf. The parliament building is affectionately called “The Bee Hive” which is no surprise when you look at the building (top right photo). We did not have time to do the tour, but we did enjoy walking around the grounds.
We find the famous 385lb stainless fern globe estimated cost of $210,000NZD! It truly is beautiful and fills the civic square sky perfectly. Not sure what is up with the ugly hand sculpture, but it made it into the photo anyway.
We find the college district with lots of bars and eateries and end up meeting one of Matt’s friends. Matt and Chris worked together at Pluck and had not seen each other in 10 years. We met him in this super funky little back ally bar called Gildings Free Dive. It is covered in Star War’s paraphernalia!
Wellington has their very own locks of love wall where couples hang a padlock to signify their love.
Wellington Museum
The Wellington Museum is located down by the wharf and is FREE! Sweet. The museum is in a beautiful, old building and consists of 4 floors. It is a short snippet of history including models of old ships, old television studios, and more. A little something for everyone.
Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa
Dozens of people told us to visit the Te Papa museum and it did not disappoint! A massive museum that could have easily taken a full day to explore, but we only had a few hours.
One of the main reasons we came to this museum was to see a new gallery called Gallipoli The Scale of Our War. This exhibit is told through the eyes of 8 ordinary New Zealanders and it is heart wrenching and moving.
The Gallipoli exhibit was very impressive with displays that were more than 2.5x human size! The museum joined forces with Weta workshop to create the sculptures that are incredibly life like with pores in their skin and hair on their hands, legs, arms, and faces.
Look up close to the lower right photo to see the amazing details of these sculptures.
Toward the end they have a beautiful poppy display that allows the visitor to leave a remembrance of a loved one.
Te Taiiao Nature Exhibit
The next exhibit is a nature exhibit and the effects on the land. They had more replicas of the giant Moa bird and lots of kiwis.
They also had the largest squid in the world – which was really kind of creepy.
On another floor they had the history of Maori culture with a large waka (canoe), community center, and a cow made of corn beef cans.
Wellington is known for having lots of earthquakes. One of the cool features installed in most of the buildings is the earth quake proof system they have installed. So, we venture down below the Te Papa museum to check out their Quake Braker.
It truly is a magnificent museum. My photos and brief description don’t do it justice, but I just couldn’t capture all of the amazingness of this place.
At the end of the day we drove onto the Interislander Ferry which took us across the Cook’s Straight to the South Island.
- Hotel: Trinity Hotel
- Kilometers Traveled: 525km
- Travel Time: 6hrs10min
- Kilometers Walked: 6.4km
Events from this blog occurred during the end of February 2023. Our blog posts run 10-12 weeks behind actual events. Don’t miss our last blog post when we abseil 100m into the earth to visit The Lost World.