Warm Wellington

The virtue of being a tourist in the modern age is that if you forget your phone camera there is always a better picture on the www you can steal. I realised too late on our mid-morning excursion and so none of our visit to Zealandia is photographically recorded by me - only in prose.

We missed the free shuttle to Zealandia from the iSite and so had to wait an hour. This was spent eating awesome scrambled eggs for brunch at a cafe in Wellington’s cool Cuba Street. Sadly, the famous bucket fountain wasn’t working but the food and coffee were great.

The first thing you notice at Zealandia is an improbable fence climbing the mountain. It has defeated the cats, possums, stoats and rats so far.

The eco reserve is a repurposing of Wellington’s now outmoded water reservoirs.

It is now a happy home for NZ’s weird tuatara (‘please don’t call us lizards we are special’), giant bugs, and birds, birds everywhere. We mostly saw these.

And one of these.

The best show was put on by the kaka. These big parrots are encouraged to stay in the sanctuary by feeders around which a mini ecosystem has developed. Only the kaka are big enough to force down the plate which lifts the feeder lid. Small birds congregate under the feeder to grab the fragments dropped by the feeding kaka. And we watched as one blackbird waited patiently for a kaka to lift the lid and then nipped in and stole a treat!

I discovered a number of other tourists who were as directionally-challenged as Lyn and we did our best to find our way and theirs. After restorative ice creams we shuttled back to the top of the cable car, caught it back to a supermarket for lunch and dinner supplies and then headed back to the hotel for a siesta.

Our early evening challenge was to catch buses to Mt Victoria lookout and back. Lyn is excellent at buses. This trip involved 4 different buses. A half hour wait at one point led to a drink at the local pub.

The route of Bus 20 up and down the mountain is spectacular and a little hairy. At the top the 360 degree view was beautiful.

I learned that this gun was hauled to the top in order that some poor bloke could fire it at exactly noon every day so everybody could set their clocks.

Then it was back to the Wellesley Hotel for a much-needed quiet night in.