Wellington again (for Jan. 18)

Well, they were right about the weather. The morning had fairly steady drizzle developing into occasional light to moderate rain in the afternoon, with a strong wind all day.

We managed to find the zoo about 10 AM. It is off the edge of the detailed maps we have, but we knew its general location from the larger maps, so we thought we could find it pretty easily if we drove to the edge of our map and followed the “Zoo” signs. Wrong! They don’t believe in too many directional signs here. We had also looked for brochures with a map, but couldn’t find any at any of the tourist kiosks we stopped at. We finally found it after a scenic tour of south Wellington. It was quite a good zoo. You would think they would promote it better.

We had missed a couple of earlier opportunities to see Kiwi, so we didn’t want to miss this one. Kiwi are nocturnal, so they are housed in a darkened display house. After wandering for several minutes to let our eyes grow accustomed to the darkness, then wandering back and forth, squinting into the darkness without success, we finally gave up. We emerged from the Kiwi house, walked only a couple of dozen steps, and there was one staring right at us!

We finished up there at about 12:30 and made our way to the Te Papa (“Our World”) Museum by about 1 PM. It is quite an impressive new building filled with lots of “stuff.” The earth sciences section was very interesting, explaining New Zealand’s formation and current geology. They also had a large Maori area and many, many other exhibits. It was kind of like the Sask. Science Centre, Royal Sask. Museum, Norman McKenzie Art Gallery, and a couple of other places all rolled into one. We got out of there around 5 PM, just in time to experience Wellington at rush hour. No fun. We tried to do a dry run to the ferry terminal for tomorrow, but without much success and at the expense of a lot of time. We will just have to get an early start tomorrow.

A couple of more notes about driving. I have never been a big fan of traffic circles, but boy oh boy, they love them here. Takes some getting used to. And they really economize on street signs. The crossing streets are all marked, but they assume that you already know the name of the main street you are on – not always the case for us – and only occasionally mark them. You can go several blocks looking for signs before finding out whether or not you are where you wanted to be.