One Month In The Capital

With Wellington being the nation's capital an all that there are plenty of things to do to keep you entertained and some of them don't even involve alcohol. Most do involve coffee on account of the copious amounts of cafes, each one with its little fan club that claims it does the Best Coffee In Wellington. Well whatever gets your rocks off, once you've added the three spoons of sugar that makes coffee palatable it all tastes the same to me.

Aaanyway, here we go. Tourist type stuff I got up to before taking off up north to the nation's Should Be The Capital, Auckland.

Rowena's Lodge, Wellington

Me And Javier On A Night Out

Cable Car To The Botanic Gardens
On account of the fact New Zealand is made entirely of hills you'll find that some of the tourist attractions involved climbing up them or rolling down them. In Wellington they have a handy cable car that'll take you up one of the aforementioned hills up to the Botanic Gardens where you get to spend a few hours wandering round and looking at trees and more hills.

Wellington Cable Car

Wellington is one of those places that'll either get you really fit really quickly or have you crawling to the NHS and begging for a new pair of lungs.

Mount Victoria
Take a group of backpackers. Remove alcohol. Add boredom and a Mancunian bloke called Dan who suggests we all walk up Mount Victoria in the dark.

Welly At Night From Mt Victoria

It's a stunning view from the top in all honesty, I still haven't been up in the daylight though. When I pass back through I'll head back up there. In the car.

Red Rock Seal Colony
So you drive for about 15 minutes to the beginning of the 4WD only road, park up and begin the 1.5 hour trek to see the seals that are sprawled out over the rocks at various points along the walk. It's so cool to see them.

Lone Seal

Red Rock Seal Colony

I could so easily be a seal, me. I could get fat and blubbery and spend my days lounging around looking bored and stinking of fish. In fact catch me on any given Sunday and I'm almost there.

Getting Away
It took me a grand total of three days to get fed up of answering the retarded questions of people that in England we'd describe as A Bit Council and picking stuff up that the general public were too fucking lazy to return to the shelves themselves for a measly, piddling NZ$12 per hour so I handed my notice in and headed up to Auckland. It took a mere 10 hours by car to get there followed by about 90 minutes of driving round the city, swearing loudly at the map book which was clearly lying to me. After not being able to find the backpackers I was booked into I ended up in a tent for two nights at City Garden Lodge before there was room inside.

Auckland

As feral and outdoorsy as I like to think I am not even I'm happy about camping out when the temperature drops to 1 degree and you're kept awake all night wondering if the tent you borrowed leaks.

Fair weather camper indeed. I want to go back to the Tropics.

written by

Koala Bear on June 24, 2008 from Wellington, New Zealand

from the travel blog: Tiny Little NZ Road Trip

tagged Bollocks

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