Monday, January 22, 2018

New Plymouth, Wellington and the Wairarapa

This post is brought to you by an afternoon of wine tasting.

When I settled in Wellington back in 2007 I started my job just after Easter, so I spent the long Easter weekend out in the Wairarapa, exploring LOTR locations and drinking wine. When I was working we had quarterly days out, one of which was a fabulous trip to Martinborough for golfing and wine-tasting. I therefore have fond memories of Martinborough and decided to put it on my list of Things To Do for this trip. Consequently, after an afternoon tootling around the vineyards on a bike, I am moderately sozzled.

 Going backwards: after Northland I drove south to New Plymouth, which last year was named the second-best region in the world to visit by the Lonely Planet. This is quite a big thing to live up to and I'm not sure it can quite lay claim to that title - but it depends what you want from a place. I was unfortunate with weather this time, as it was wet most of the time I was there, but I did thoroughly enjoy my day in NP. I had a lovely dinner with my friend Delwyn and then the next day explored the excellent museum Puke Ariki before the rain eased enough to venture onto the Coastal Walkway. NP council has now developed 13km of fabulous path along the coast - it was pretty blustery but fun and worth braving the wind for. Then I cut in along a path which runs along a really pretty little stream (Te Henui) until I got to the end, before finding my way back to my hostel through the NP park. It was a good 12km walk so I felt suitably virtuous by the end and that I'd earned the fish and chips I had for dinner.

Cape Egmont lighthouse and Mount Taranaki
From NP it was on to Wellington. I took the Surf Highway, which runs along the coast and through numerous tiny towns with crashing waves on one side and rural NZ on the other. It was a lovely drive; I took a detour to see the Cape Egmont lighthouse with Mount Taranaki peeping through the clouds behind before barrelling on south past all the towns we used to drive through on the way to swimming meets or regattas when I lived in Wellington. Taranaki's farewell signs were particularly good: "You are about to leave Taranaki ..." and then a couple of hundred metres further on, "Why?"

It was very good to get back to Wellington. It really is an awesome little city. I drove in as the sun came out and after checking in to my hostel and dumping my car headed up to Mount Victoria for a view. This was pretty much the first thing I did when I first arrived back in 2007, guided by my brother and now-sister-in-law. It seemed appropriate to do it again and it was a good clear day.

Originally I'd hoped to go rowing at some point but the Wellington wind had other thoughts and on Saturday it was a raging north-westerly with white caps across the harbour. I hired a bike instead and cycled around the bays - a trip I did several times when living in NZ. The road takes you past a number of lovely neighbourhoods, past the airport, and then eventually up a long drag back to town. I missed my road bike massively (even the hybrid I owned in NZ was better than the mountain bike I'd hired) but it was a good day.

Breaker Bay
Since I lived there Wellington has sprouted several markets - I enjoyed wandering the Underground Market on Saturday and the Night Markets on Cuba Street on Friday and Saturday were good too. Lots of street food from around the world, NZ handicrafts and the like. I had a Vietnamese banh mi for lunch on Saturday and a plate of Ethiopian food for dinner - delicious and relatively cheap. Food is quite expensive in NZ so it was good to save a bit, although I confess I also had a couple of craft beers at a cool little pub in the CBD I found via Google ....

On Sunday I went to Te Papa, New Zealand's national museum, which was as superb as always. They had an exhibition of Lego models of Wonders of the World - amazing - but arguably a better show was their Gallipoli exhibit, This was designed in conjunction with Weta Workshop, who made their name making models for the Lord of the Rings films, and focuses on the eight months spent by New Zealand troops trying to take a part of Turkey during WW1. Gallipoli is a bit of WW1 which we in Britain don't know much about (despite the fact several thousand British troops fought there too) but it was a crucial, tragic part of the war for the Aussies and Kiwis. Thousands of their men died there before the troops were evacuated and it was a tragic event for the whole country. The exhibition tells the Gallipoli story through the voices of individual soldiers and includes immense 2.4x models of eight individuals - seven men and one female nurse - who were involved. It was a very powerful way of telling their story and brought home to me a side of WW1 I was aware of but knew little about.

The giant model of Lt Spencer Westmacott which introduces the Gallipoli exhibition
A good accompaniment to this was a visit to the Great War Exhibition, likewise curated by Peter Jackson and his Weta colleagues, at the National War Memorial before I left. This also relies heavily on models to show you what went on during the war, coupled with colourised photographs and artefacts. It was also exceptionally good and complemented the Te Papa exhibit well. Both made you feel what an impact WW1 had on NZ and Australia, whose sons went off to fight for an empire they were so very distant from.

The rest of my time in Wellington was spent with a catch-up lunch with my rowing friend Lucy, appropriately next to the rowing club in the new-since-I -lived-there cafe by the club (it was too windy to row), a visit to the Wellington Museum, and a pilgrimage to the Embassy Cinema to see The Post. The Embassy has, since I lived in Wellington, added two new small screens below its awesome main screen and it was in one of these that the film was shown. It was lovely - a comfortable seat and a glass of wine!

Yesterday after the Great War Exhibition I hit the road for Martinborough, driving out over the Rimutaka Hill to the Wairarapa wine country. I rented a bike from the holiday park I'm staying at and set out to taste wine. I tasted a lot. It was all good. I didn't buy any but most of the wineries charge $5 for a tasting so you kind of feel okay about not buying, and I bought a mini bottle of gin in one of the two which didn't charge which I sincerely hope will survive the next few weeks. It would frankly be a tragedy if it didn't.


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