20th November 2009
Wellington is quite a compact city, not unlike Cardiff. After a wander around the centre this morning to find the information centre and some internet access, we took the city’s historic Cable Car up to the beautiful Botanic Gardens which overlook the harbour.
The Botanic Gardens cover 25 hectares and are a unique landscape of protective native forest, exotic trees, plant collections and seasonal displays. We arrived at the top and took in the view over the central business district from the Cable Car station, before making our way to the Cable Car museum. This small museum details the history of the cable cars that have transported people between the harbour and hills in Wellington for over 100 years. It also has a fully restored original cable car known as a ‘relentless red rattler’ and a fully restored grip car. It also showed examples of private cable cars that people use to get to their homes on the hills.
Then we followed the scenic downhill path through the gardens, calling in at the Carter Observatory - the National Observatory of New Zealand. Unfortunately though no stargazing for us since it’s closed for refitting. We continued on the path, through the Australian garden and the succulent garden to the Treehouse Visitor Centre. This is on a raised platform overlooking the gardens and provides information on them.
Next we enjoyed a coffee in the cafe at the Rose Garden, a wonderful, scented area with a central water feature. It has 106 formal beds each containing a different type of rose with the entire garden being surrounded by frames supporting various climbing rose varieties. Plenty of opportunity for rose photos! We also explored the Begonia House, which unlike the name suggests, really didn’t involve many Begonias. The displays of orchids and other exotic plants, and even lilies in a pond was pretty spectacular though.
The downhill path then took us through the highly interesting Bolton Street Memorial Path. This starts with the Seddon memorial at the top of the hill where one of New Zealand’s Prime Ministers is buried. The whole park used to be the city’s cemetary, within which were three separate areas - Church of England, Jewish and public. It was closed in 1892. When the urban motorway was built through Wellinton, the route ran right through the old cemetary and some 3,700 burials were exhumed. Most of these remains now lie in a mass grave beneath a lawn behind the Memorial Park Chapel. This wooden church is a reconstruction of an earlier chapel which was also moved when the motorway was constructed, but which rotted whilst in storage.
Making our way back down into the city centre, we then walked along the sea front which has several sculptures. We walked to the other end of town where we checked out the Welsh Dragon Pub, the first real Welsh pub we’ve found outside of Wales (recommended by our Welshman in Auckland, Trystan!). Since we’ve been away, we’ve adopted a policy of avoiding Irish pubs since they are absolutely everywhere and consequently everyone knows of Ireland, so a Welsh pub is a great step in the right direction with regards promoting Wales in the same way, we just need more! Unfortunately at 4pm on a Friday afternoon it was closed - they obviously haven’t heard of 24 hour drinking. Perhaps we’ll have more luck tomorrow.
