WELLINGTONClick on any image to get the large size of it. It's a good way to catch the detail.
I had about four days in Wellington before taking the train to a week in Auckland. The weather was cool and gray, raining on and off, so I enjoyed visiting both inside and outside sights. The sculpture is a lazer cut metal ball that is hung in the air. The is a cone in the same style in Christchurch, obviously by the same artist.
There are a lot of civic sculptures in and around Wellington. It makes for a very picturesque city. There are also bicycles everywhere. Look right, then left and develop the ears of a bat to hear them behind you!
The bollards are leading to a great information/travel place. The whole country is organized with these sites so you can make travel arrangements, tours, etc. You can book your next hostel from there and pay for it too. All is computerized and efficient. I loved it!
The marina is right in the core downtown, also right beside the Te Papa museum. The whole dockside was renewed in the last 15 years or so. From a rough and ready portlands to a very swish place for people, condos and restaurants.
This is the stadium for cricket, also right in the downtown core. I has a vaguely religious feel to it and was clean beyond all words!
The whole city is built on the sides of hills. Homes are perched (seemingly precarious) on whatever piece of ground they can get. Staircases are all over and getting in and out on them is sometimes the only access to houses.
Here, the contrast of the home on the right to the one on the left is quite startling, for the paint job. Apparently, because of the sea air, paint needs to be refreshed about every 3 to 4 years!
I did a lot of hiking with my sister and we visited a lot of hilltops and saw some great views of the city and it's surroundings.
This is a great view of the city, the harbour and the vegetation that make up this place. The air always has a fresh scrubbed feeling and you can breathe deeply. The wooded areas have that wet moss smell when it rains and the sounds are very shrouded and mysterious.
This really shows the precarious building that goes on in a place that has small quakes going on all the time. I wonder what kind of ties they put in to hold these places on?
This is what I mean about getting to a house with difficult access! The parking platform built way above the house and the staircase to go down. Can you imagine moving day let alone groceries? Or the climb up the hill, with the groceries to get to this place?
The charm of the gardens in Wellington is amazing. Not only are the cottages adorable, the soil is great for the green thumb and the temperate climate does all it can to help. Lots of rain in summer and winter makes everything VERY green.
A great view of Wellington homes and the beautiful grasses being the decoration on this cake.
Amazing aloe has a chance to grow to stupendous sizes. There are tons of varieties and colours to look at.This photo is only one of about 300 pictures I took of flora while on this trip.
Nina and I walked everyday. Even the morning after I arrived. I felt great and the exercise go rid of the kinks from the air trip there. We are on a tootle toward the botanical gardens. They are an amazing visit all on their own!
This is a small park we walked through that had a wonderful spooky feel to it. The city has an enormous amount of preserved and protected green space in it.
More civic sculpture. I forgot to write the name down of this character and his dog. Of course you already know I took a picture because of the dog. Again, you see all the stairs in the background as this short street has access to the next street by stairs (or sometimes escalator) to the next street.
This is part of the train ride from Wellington to Auckland. We left the station at 7am and all the pictures of the train itself are not quite in focus, thus not on show. The journey was twelve hours long and passed through some spectacular countryside. We saw the clouds that surrounded Mt. Taranaki and gorges with incredible white cliffs, waterfalls and a country side full of all kinds of animals and birds. Train windows can both help and hinder. One of the few pictures of me in the whole trip.
This is the beginning of some nice weather we had for the whole trip. We only got a little rain on the rest of the three weeks in NZ and I was grateful for that. As a matter of fact, I never used my built in backpack rain cover!
I was constantly stunned by the wonderful light during the trip. It is very hard to describe. This picture is still in the morning!
The light coming in and out of the clouds, cutting across the sides of hills. All so gorgeous.
The sheep are everywhere! They carve lines of paths in the hills that make them look like terracing.
These scenes make me think of the old British paintings. The shapes of the trees, the colours. No wonder the new comers to this country loved it so much. Yes, it was a challenge to conquer the landscape, but they had it in them to reproduce their far away homes. And they did. Just visit Christchurch NZ to see a caricature of England.
This picture caught my eye on one of the slow to stop parts of the train journey. It is now a 2' x 5' painting in an impressionistic style. It was the combination of the sky and the dark light on the ground that got me.
Small town NZ. This was a stop where you could get out and stretch your legs. They had meat pies and drinks in a little tea room, a local dog standing around hoping for handouts and a lot of local people seeing of friends.
We finally arrived in Auckland after eight o'clock and were whisked to a friend's condo in the marina area of the city. We were tired but happy to be there.
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