A Few Days In Wellington

Wellington is the capital of New Zealand.  It's a city we really like and we can relate to.  In a lot of ways it's like Canberra - being the centre of government but not the financial or industrial centre.  The two cities are also about the same size.  Geographically, Wellington is totally different.  It's on the south eastern tip of New Zealand's North Island, on the coast with a beautiful harbour and is surrounded by steep hills  It's also built on a number of fault lines and earthquakes are common (luckily they are only small ones).
  
We've been here several times and each time we've visited the National Museum, Te Papa (Our Place).  Te Papa is fantastic.  It's the museum we measure all others against.  We think it's the best museum in the world.  This time we had a look at the Earth and Fire exhibit which has rocks from four regions - north, south, east and west.  The rocks have been cut in half with one half in Te Papa and the other half in its own region.  The Fire part of the exhibit was about using fire to farm the land through the time of human occupation (about 1,000 years).  There was a special exhibition of Meccano models which were very interesting and brought back memories of building mechanical masterpieces with childhood Meccano sets.

A special exhibition of wedding dresses from London's Victoria & Albert Museum was being promoted too.

We walked around the waterfront which was quite busy since it was holiday time and the weather was warm and sunny.

We spent some time driving around the hinterland and into the Hutt Valley to see some great scenery.  Mount Victoria is close to the centre of Wellington and gives great views of the city.