We started the day by taking the famous Wellington Cable Car up the mountain where a Cable Car Museum, Observatory and Botanical Gardens are found. It's $6 round trip, although one way ($3) would have been OK, as walking down to town after viewing the Lady Norwood Rose Garden was all downhill and appeared easy enough. We spent hours walking thru the Botanical Gardens (founded 1891) and surrounds, identifying trees and plants by their posted names. For lunch, we walked thru more of the downtown area, and settled on a fresh fish market serving, amongst many other items, fish and chips. The store was so small there were no tables and was a take out place only, so we walked a bit more and stopped to sit under a tree to eat lunch. There are hundreds of shops and thousands of tourists and locals around; this is a very crowded city with lots of car traffic. One nearby street to the Trinity Hotel (where we're staying) is Cuba Street, and it's cordoned off for a few blocks for pedestrians only. There, we stopped for a beer at the Bristol Hotel, one of the many well known bars in town. Talking of bars, they, along with restaurants, coffee shops, clothing and jewelry shops take up many of the storefronts. The fashionistas are in vogue here, and short skirts are definitely the "in" fashion. Clothes, and especially shoes, are insanely expensive in NZ, and seem to be even more so here. Another observation of Wellington is the variety of old buildings and architectural designs; many have been restored from the early 1900's. Later, for dinner we ate Malaysian food at a place called the Satay Noodle. All in all, we had a full last day of walking and seeing the sites here, and if you're into exploring a bit of city life, we highly recommend you check out Wellington, the second largest city in NZ, as well as its capital.
Pic: Taking a break at the Gardens.
No comments:
Post a Comment