Wellington: Day One Hundred and Two - Afternoon (29 January)

We had a look round the Treehouse Visitor Centre and enjoyed lunch in the Rose Garden café before following the route out of the Gardens via Bolton Street Memorial Park.

This brought us out near Parliament so we joined the two o’clock tour along with two couples from Cranbrook in Kent!

There are actually three parts to New Zealand’s Parliament precinct: the Beehive, which houses the MP’s offices, Parliament House and the Library. We looked round them all. It was very interesting.

Barnaby

Wellington: Day One Hundred and Two - Morning (29 January)

We caught the bus from our motel to Wellington City Centre and then took the red cable car featured on all the postcards to the suburb of Kelburn, which has wonderful views of the harbour.

At the top we looked around the cable car museum and then followed the “Downhill Path to the City” through the Botanic Gardens. The flowers were stunning, especially the hydrangeas and agapanthus.


Barnaby

Wellington: Day One Hundred and One (28 January)

We had a little more time to explore Picton this morning before catching the Interislander ferry to the North Island. Sylvia, the Italian language student we met at Miss Berry’s, arrived on the very ferry we were about to board but because she was on foot and we had a car we could only wave at each other over the intervening railway lines!

The sun had come out again so we went up on deck to eat our sandwiches and admire the beautiful Marlborough Sounds although we didn’t manage to spot any dolphins swimming alongside. The crossing is notorious for being quite rough and once we reached the Cook Strait it did get a lot more bumpy!

The crossing to Wellington, which is New Zealand’s capital city, took about three hours. Our motel turned out to be a little way out of the city but the nearby restaurant had lovely views of Evans Bay.

Barnaby