We left Napier with a 4 hour drive ahead of us. We hadn’t planned to stop at all as we wanted to get to Wellington and have the whole day there to explore. This is not how it worked out. There were 2 very interesting signs on the way which we had to investigate. Our first sign came around 90km away from Wellington. We had been driving through some pretty strong winds and heavy rain, but it had been getting lighter so we decided to take a 11km detour to check out the contents of this sign. So, what did we go to see?

There is one of these in England, it is pretty famous and most people visiting the UK will go and visit this tourist attraction. In England, you can’t touch it and it’s not as impressive as another one that is similar to it. My parents live pretty close to it. Stonehenge!! The sign that we saw said Stonehenge Aeoteroa (Stonehenge New Zealand). Being born and bred in Wiltshire, we had to go check it out. When we got there we watched a video explaining the design of the stone circle and the other stones around the edge of the circle. It was very clever, because they had designed it that 3 of the stones matched the horizon in the distance so that the sun rose perfectly over the stones at different times of the year. There was also another 3 stones at the front in which the sun would rise over during the 2 solstices and the middle stone twice a year over the equinox. There was also a monument that highlighted the position of the Seven Sisters in the night sky and a hole in the middle pillar which if you looked through would show you the rotational point of the stars.

We walked around the site for a while and had a lot of fun a) touching the stones and b) taking cool photos. Enjoy!

We got back on the road planning to head straight to Wellington and then came the second sign. The sign was equally intriguing and we had to stop. This sign said ‘Rivendell’. For most of my audience, I will not need to say anymore, but I will clarify for the rest of you that Rivendell is a location in the Lord of the Rings. Rivendell in the movies is absolutely stunning so we decided to go and have a look. The area is very pretty, but once we got there the information boards told us some interesting facts about the area. 1) All of the set has been taken away from the area to restore the National Park back to its original state 2) Most of the dramatic scenery was filmed in Fiordland on the South Island and then super imposed on top of the Rivendell filming. It was a lovely little walk and there was a pretty river and swing bridge so we spent some time here looking around.

Having vowed to not stop again until we made it to Wellington we carried on. I can’t tell you why it happened, but as we were driving through the suburb area of Upper and Lower Hutt we both felt really positive about Wellington. The whole place felt great, the sun was shining (which probably helped), we’d just driven through beautiful National Parks and we had the rest of the afternoon ahead of us to explore. Just to jump ahead of myself a bit, to this day we are still in LOVE with Wellington. We had the best time here. It is a capital city without being huge, it’s coastal without losing its city appeal, it’s just great!! We checked into our holiday park and got straight on the bus to head into town.

We wanted to go and spend a bit of time in Te Papa Museum before it closed. Te Papa is the National Museum of New Zealand and we were not disappointed. The exhibitions told you all you needed to know about the history of New Zealand. Right from the structure of the Earth to Earthquakes, Volcanoes, Maori settlement, European settlement, current day refugee support etc. It was such a brilliant museum and really well thought through. We even got to stand in an Earthquake simulator and experience what it would be like to feel a 6. something whilst inside a wooden house. How realistic this is I do not know. I imagine every earthquake is a little different. We didn’t quite get around all of the museum that afternoon so said we would go back if we could the next day to look at the Mother land exhibition (Britain) and the Maori culture exhibition. I would completely recommend this if you are in Wellington.

After this we headed to Lambton Quay to take the cable car up to get some stunning views back over the city. Seeing as it was around 6.30pm we thought most tourists would be going up there to see the sunset and it would be really busy. Nope. It was just us and a few commuters. The ride was great! They have disco lights in the tunnels which was brilliant, but it was all over too soon.

We completed the cable car circuit walk when we got up there, taking us through the botanical gardens and around by the observatories and of course providing us with panoramic views throughout most of the walk. We loved it. You should have seen the grins on our faces. Well you might get to in some of the pictures. We walked back through town and decided we needed some food. It was nearly 8.30pm by this point. We were having so much fun we had forgotten to eat… rare for Simon.

We decided to try a restaurant we had seen around called Burger Fuel. It’s a mix between a takeaway and a restaurant. The burgers were really good. Oh and the kumara fries (sweet potato). They even had this cool cardboard burger holder device to hold you burger while you ate it. Unfortunately, I failed to get a photo of it. Guess we’ll have to go again. We got the last bus back to our holiday park and got ready for another full day in Wellington the next day.

We got up early as we were heading over to the suburb region of Miramar to take a workshop tour of Weta Cave. Weta Cave is where they build all the props for so many famous films including Avatar, LoTR, The Hobbit trilogy and so many more. The company is cofounded by Peter Jackson and has grown bigger and bigger with time. There is a sister company called Weta Digital that does all the CGI and computer generated animation for the movies, but we weren’t able to have a look around that. The tour was around an hour and we couldn’t take any pictures whilst in the studio because all of the props are owned by the film companies, but were allowed to take some in the shop. We learnt so many cool on screen tips and tricks for making things look authentic and got to see some of the stages for the production of different props. They were working on a sword of some sort whilst we were there.. who knows what movie that will appear in, they didn’t tell us anything about the future unfortunately. I was hoping to hear some secret news about Avatar.

After our tour we drove along some of the beautiful bays of Wellington, dropped Maverick back at the holiday park and took the bus into Wellington again.

The first thing we were going to do, much to Simon’s dismay was a walk to the top of Mount Victoria to the lookout. It was pretty steep in places, but we managed. We even found a slide on the way up which we spent some time playing on to catch our breath. No one else was playing on it… I found that odd. Eventually we made it to the top and WOW! Check it out.

We learnt that Wellington has around 170 days where the wind is over 30 knots and yes we didn’t doubt it as it was very windy at the top of Mount Victoria. The city also has a green band around it which the original mayor intended for 2 reasons 1) The British settlers were used to dirty air and this would make them more settled here and 2) It would increase the cost of land within the green belt.

We climbed back down and went back to Te Papa Museum. Had a lovely coffee and finished off the exhibits we hadn’t had a chance to before. We walked around the city and just really enjoyed ourselves. Here’s some of our shots out and around Wellington.

We were getting up at 6am the next day to get ourselves checked in for our ferry crossing to the South island so reluctantly we headed back to our holiday park and cooked dinner. We had heard different things about Wellington before we left and came in with minimal expectations of what it would be like. It blew us away. Realistically we know that it wouldn’t be like that if we lived there and even if we were just there for a longer period. We had ticked off most of the within Wellington tourist activities, but there are huge National Parks just on the doorstep as well as loads of beautiful beaches to explore. We will 100% be back in Wellington in the future!