Wellington is the capital, and has been since 1865, when it was moved from Auckland because Auckland was too interesting. The hotel is an Ibis -- clean, cheap, adequate, hatefully eager to gouge customers for internet access. A tacky gold bible sits on the bedside shelf ("Great! I was so impressed by your hotel, I was hoping you'd recommend a religion.") I'm on roughly Vancouver time, which leads to early mornings. I go for a walk in the central business district at 6am on Sunday.
The streets are empty: Every five minutes or so, another jet-lagged tourist searching futilely for an open coffee shop. It is the best time, though, to see a downtown. The buildings feel like empty monuments, or like the whole thing is a lavish recreation gotten up for tourists. I have a look at the "Beehive" and the other parliament buildings. Like all small capitals, Wellington is full of self-consciously daring buildings. Like all important commonwealth cities, it has grand war memorials built after WWI and thriftily re-engraved after each subsequent conflict. Around one corner, a red-beaked seagull is feasting on a recently-killed pigeon. Tempted into an empty ecological niche? Crazed with boredom on a Sunday morning in the Wellington CBD?
In the harbour, expensively-dressed old people trickle off the luxury cruise ship L'Austral. A jellyfish bloom builds up into a frothy muck by the shore. Cyclists, jogging old ladies in spandex, babies riding imperiously in canopied backpacks like rajas on elephants. Whimsical public art. Stores in shipping containers. Groups of pigeons looking around warily. Pieces of the harbour's industrial past -- cranes, ships, and a crane on a ship -- preserved as curiosities. A winding metal staircase to nowhere, which turns out to be a diving platform: Later in the day, teenagers queue up to jump off into the harbour. To a North American, it looks dangerous, uninsurable, a source of lawsuits that might cost you the North Island of New Zealand. Can only assume that the legal system and local attitudes towards risk are more sensible here.
Wellington is full of simple takeaways and clean public washrooms, which makes the essential tasks of a tourist, which are the same as the essential tasks of a dog, very easy. This is what makes travel so soothing: Because everyday tasks aren't assured, they provide a sense of achievement. You need to find something to eat and find a public washroom that won't give you a disease new to science, and you can't think farther than that. This is why dogs are generally content.
The national museum is at one end of the harbour. Inside, visitors are greeted by an enormous statue of Azog the Defiler, one of Wellington's founding fathers. Or one of the orcs from Lord of the Rings, I'm not sure -- both are common in museums and lobbies, and the game of "Founding Father or Orc of Mordor?" isn't one I claim to be good at. There's also a Colossal Squid in a glass case, which is great. A well-preserved sea monster, huge crowds, it just seems like a promising situation, somehow. On the top floor is the quiet contemporary art gallery, where a very tired woman guards a piece that consists of old detergent bottles scattered across the floor. I don't know. If your artworks are in genuine danger of being tossed out by the cleaning staff, and you're not Marcel Duchamp, maybe it's time to rethink what you do.
There's a cable car up the slope from downtown, and the walk back down to the city is through the vast botanical gardens. It starts with a 105mm field artillery piece and an observatory with a dented and empty telescope dome. The gun emplacement was put up in the aftermath (the plaque says) of a hoax threat of invasion by Russia -- in the days when poor communications gave hoaxers powers they no longer have. They got the site up, but didn't bother with the gun, possibly because the Japanese reduced the Russian navy to a fine paste at Tsushima in 1905. Instead, the gun is a WWI war trophy. It's interesting to stand beside it and look at the harbour; if you edit out the tall buildings, yes, it's exactly the spot from which to lob shells down on unwelcome ships.
The gardens are an amazing thing to have in a city: Patches of jungle, California redwoods, fields of roses. Towards the end is the old city cemetery. An obelisk for Richard Seddon with an inscription praising his imperialist spirit, and then a statue of a naked man with his bum facing the path. It's for a labour leader, and seems to be some kind of allegory, with the naked gentleman (whose nudity isn't exactly classical and who isn't exactly fig-leafed, but whose private bits are sort of blurred out like a department store mannequin's) representing Liberty, or something like that, and torced slaves (Dying Gauls?) looking up at him. A local woman beams at me as she walks by: "It's a weird monument, isn't it?" The cemetery is separated by faith, with Chinese and Maori monuments at the bottom of the hill, down in "miscellaneous".
I've been kind of behind, because everything depends on how lazy I am and how much internet access I have, and those are both hard to predict (though, generally, the answers are "very" and "not much") -- but this catches things up to the present. This morning, I take the ferry over to the South Island, and then a train down to Christchurch.
The streets are empty: Every five minutes or so, another jet-lagged tourist searching futilely for an open coffee shop. It is the best time, though, to see a downtown. The buildings feel like empty monuments, or like the whole thing is a lavish recreation gotten up for tourists. I have a look at the "Beehive" and the other parliament buildings. Like all small capitals, Wellington is full of self-consciously daring buildings. Like all important commonwealth cities, it has grand war memorials built after WWI and thriftily re-engraved after each subsequent conflict. Around one corner, a red-beaked seagull is feasting on a recently-killed pigeon. Tempted into an empty ecological niche? Crazed with boredom on a Sunday morning in the Wellington CBD?
In the harbour, expensively-dressed old people trickle off the luxury cruise ship L'Austral. A jellyfish bloom builds up into a frothy muck by the shore. Cyclists, jogging old ladies in spandex, babies riding imperiously in canopied backpacks like rajas on elephants. Whimsical public art. Stores in shipping containers. Groups of pigeons looking around warily. Pieces of the harbour's industrial past -- cranes, ships, and a crane on a ship -- preserved as curiosities. A winding metal staircase to nowhere, which turns out to be a diving platform: Later in the day, teenagers queue up to jump off into the harbour. To a North American, it looks dangerous, uninsurable, a source of lawsuits that might cost you the North Island of New Zealand. Can only assume that the legal system and local attitudes towards risk are more sensible here.
Wellington is full of simple takeaways and clean public washrooms, which makes the essential tasks of a tourist, which are the same as the essential tasks of a dog, very easy. This is what makes travel so soothing: Because everyday tasks aren't assured, they provide a sense of achievement. You need to find something to eat and find a public washroom that won't give you a disease new to science, and you can't think farther than that. This is why dogs are generally content.
The national museum is at one end of the harbour. Inside, visitors are greeted by an enormous statue of Azog the Defiler, one of Wellington's founding fathers. Or one of the orcs from Lord of the Rings, I'm not sure -- both are common in museums and lobbies, and the game of "Founding Father or Orc of Mordor?" isn't one I claim to be good at. There's also a Colossal Squid in a glass case, which is great. A well-preserved sea monster, huge crowds, it just seems like a promising situation, somehow. On the top floor is the quiet contemporary art gallery, where a very tired woman guards a piece that consists of old detergent bottles scattered across the floor. I don't know. If your artworks are in genuine danger of being tossed out by the cleaning staff, and you're not Marcel Duchamp, maybe it's time to rethink what you do.
There's a cable car up the slope from downtown, and the walk back down to the city is through the vast botanical gardens. It starts with a 105mm field artillery piece and an observatory with a dented and empty telescope dome. The gun emplacement was put up in the aftermath (the plaque says) of a hoax threat of invasion by Russia -- in the days when poor communications gave hoaxers powers they no longer have. They got the site up, but didn't bother with the gun, possibly because the Japanese reduced the Russian navy to a fine paste at Tsushima in 1905. Instead, the gun is a WWI war trophy. It's interesting to stand beside it and look at the harbour; if you edit out the tall buildings, yes, it's exactly the spot from which to lob shells down on unwelcome ships.
The gardens are an amazing thing to have in a city: Patches of jungle, California redwoods, fields of roses. Towards the end is the old city cemetery. An obelisk for Richard Seddon with an inscription praising his imperialist spirit, and then a statue of a naked man with his bum facing the path. It's for a labour leader, and seems to be some kind of allegory, with the naked gentleman (whose nudity isn't exactly classical and who isn't exactly fig-leafed, but whose private bits are sort of blurred out like a department store mannequin's) representing Liberty, or something like that, and torced slaves (Dying Gauls?) looking up at him. A local woman beams at me as she walks by: "It's a weird monument, isn't it?" The cemetery is separated by faith, with Chinese and Maori monuments at the bottom of the hill, down in "miscellaneous".
I've been kind of behind, because everything depends on how lazy I am and how much internet access I have, and those are both hard to predict (though, generally, the answers are "very" and "not much") -- but this catches things up to the present. This morning, I take the ferry over to the South Island, and then a train down to Christchurch.
