City Living

We said goodbye to the Toyota and felt pleased we had contributed a fair bit to her 341,000 already clocked kms! She had done us proud and we were sorry to see her go. But boy oh boy we were oh so pleased to say hello to our city crash pad.

Our time in the city was relaxed. We just kicked around and enjoyed great little coffee shops and views from the harbour side. We took time to wander up and down the eclectic Cuba Street peering through retro boutiques, tattoo parlours and nik-nak shops. This part of the city had a great feel to it. The city as a whole though was pretty quiet, could it be still recovering from the weekends sevens !

After much searching I finally made contact with an old kiwi work pal, Mike Butler. He's now in Dunedin we briefly caught up on the phone and loosely arranged a meet at the end of the month. 'Good as gold'.

Te Papa, the museum of New Zealand was free, warm and gave good views over the harbour side, so we were in. This was some exhibition space, 6 floors of all things proud to be Kiwi. A brilliant photography exhibition was taking place on Brian Brake, NZ's best known photographer. His work was published internationally in magazines like Life, Paris Match and National Geographic. The exhibition included some great shots taken back in the 60-70s in some of the countries that we have recently travelled through.

Finally the grey skies over the city cleared after a few dark days we finally had the chance at last to see the real Wellie that we'd read up on. Without delay we completed a walking tour of the city taking in the beehive parliament buildings and Lambton Quay. Wellie is a great walking city as it's mainly flat and pretty compact. This led us to the historic Kelburn Cable car. This Swiss-built funicular railway takes you high into the hills above Wellie for an outstanding view out to sea and of the city below.