Marc's Blog: trips - Wellington, New Zealand

Marc's Public Blog - Trips to other locations

Jennifer and I went to New Zealand since I was going there for linux.conf.au.
This year it was in the capital of Wellington. While it was centrally located between the two Islands, it was unfortunately on the north Island, or a 6 hour return trip from the south island by ferry, making visitting the south Island by car a non very worthwhile endeavour, which is unfortunate since many of the interesting things were actually on the south island.

welcome to kiwi land :)

Given that, we stayed on the north Island and were greeted by pretty poor weather (overcast and drizzle on most days), making visits no that worthwhile or enjoyable. As a result, we didn't get to rollerblade around the coastal path, or hike up the nearby mountain, or kayak, or even dive due to fairly strong winds that just mess up the waters (which were cold anyway).

We still got to see a bit, including the single nice day we used to drive to the coast and see pinnacles, but otherwise we saw a few museums (indoors), and ended up coming home a day early since whatever left we could do didn't seem worth the hassles for me of staying an extra day and travelling back on monday and going to work the same day after landing.

Random pictures from Wellington:

Parlement

cable car

weight of one car brings the other one up

View from Mount Victoria:

nice rotor cloud, Wellington is *very* windy

Botanical Garden:

nice botanical garden

Karori Wildlife Sanctuary:

See the green lizards?

New Zealand Kaka (like a parrot, but not quite)

Te Papa Museum:

Kiwis

A giant squid they caught

Very nice temple

The Maori performed for us

They taught their warrior dance to our friends

Art Museum with an expo from a Japanese Artist:

On the single nice weather day we had, we rented a car and went to MartinBorough, their wine country:

they also had wines with QR codes

and then went to the Putangirua Pinacles:

the dirt randomly collapsed under our shoes and we got a bit dirty :)

And that's about it. All in all there wasn't that much to do around Wellington, especially with mostly not so good weather. When we flew back to SFO the weat was the same, except for a 10 degree difference at best.
The trip back was uneventful outside of increasingly ridiculous TSA practices (full body and luggage search for everyone just 3mn after you clear the previous search and Xrays at security: they empty absolutely everything, even the coins in my wallet).