In the interest of sticking to my budget ($350 spending money for 6 days in NZ) I'd set myself a challenge to only spend $20 on the day of my big bus trip. I totally managed to keep to it, spending $9 on a pad thai, $4.50 on a chai (somewhat frivolous, but worth it), $1.50 on a gingerbread man and $2 on the bus. I can't remember the last time any bus anywhere in the developed world was $2, so I was rightly stoked with myself, if a bit hungry. I hung out at the botanical gardens and explored Wellington, taking photos and loving the city. I saved the chai gelato for the next day and it was well worth the wait.
Having proven myself to no one in particular, I decided that $50 a day could work from then on, so wasn't quite as stringent with myself.
The bus trip down the island had been amazing and I met some great people: yet more lovely kiwis, a really interesting American girl who, for her first term of her geology degree, sailed from Hawaii to Tahiti (jealous), and a Samoan girl who kept asking me if I needed anything and searched me out at the rest stop to make sure I wasn't lonely.
She also taught me how to say a few things in Samoan, including "palangi" which is what they call tourists. This translates to "heavenbreakers", which can mean the people who come from the horizon (literally 'breaking' the heavens) or the people who have come to change their home, depending on what your view is. Very telling.
Wellington immediately felt like a massive city compared to Auckland, which totally failed to live up to its status as most-visited city in NZ, and like an actually cool capital city, unlike Canberra, which is a fucking ghost town.
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| Te Papa's main hall |
After a well-deserved rest, dreaming of food, I headed to Te Papa, Wellington's national museum - and possibly the coolest museum I've ever been to. Hands on, all-ages and covering all manner of topics, Te Papa ("our place") taught me heaps about tsunamis, volcanoes, earthquakes, fault lines, the ocean and all those other things that I should have learned about in school when I was too busy ogling the arse of my fine science teacher (ah Jez, you sexy devil). They have the world's only colossal squid on display there, and it's sufficiently disgusting. Before you get to thinking that it's just a massive squid, take a look at the wiki page and the google photos. These bastards have hooks which turn 360 degrees on each tentacle, to completely incapacitate their victims, as well as eyes the size of footballs and a giant beak - yes, that's a beak - to eat their prey. Gross.
I had noticed in Auckland that compared to Sydney, the city had a large population of indigenous people, and in Wellington I found the same to be the case - about a quarter of people seemed to be Maori or of Maori descent, and I found this to be a refreshing change from Australia, where Aboriginals are confined to the Block, or the streets of the CDB. The way NZ treats its indigenous people is, in fact, exemplary; not only have they given a third of the land back to the Maoris and rented it from them, they have embraced the culture, having signs in the language and teaching it in schools, without (from my POV) exploiting it for the sake of tourism. Sure, you can go to commercial 'haangis' and other such things, but these are presented more as a celebration of the occasion than anything else.
Anyway, after Te Papa I headed to the Wellington City Gallery which was a gorgeous surprise. They had an exhibition on named 'Roundabout' which was a private collection of 2 Americans, of works from around the world. These were all culturally or socially very relevant and included Gonkar Gyatso's 'Shambala of Our Modern Times', a Buddha image painstakingly recreated from corporate logos and newspaper headlines, and Sung's 'Toe Nails' - a gorgeous child-like painting of a girl painting her mother's toenails. The morbid twist is that the toenails are at the girl's eye level, and we take it from the position of the body that her mother is hanging above her, having committed suicide. I couldn't take my eyes off it.
It's become a habit (and by 'habit' I mean the only thing that I want to do) when I am in a new city on my own to wander round, read, have coffee and cake, meander through galleries and take photos. It's been this way in Singapore, Brisbane and now Wellington - I totally love it. Wellington afforded me the great opportunity to do all these things and for that I shall love it forever.
Incidentally this is exactly how I see myself growing old and fat in Paris; the happiest old, fat Parisian there ever was.
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