Day 13: Capitol city NZ

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Waking up to an overcast sky is never good when on holiday, but seeing today also is really cloudy and wet is somewhat reassuring. We know today we can’t walk the Crossing as we have to leave town to go to Wellington, but in this weather it wouldn’t be nice at all.
Even though the wind has gone down it is still quite cold and wet, and as it has been raining all night the track would be in a miserable state anyway.

The shuttle left for the starting point of the track today, so the conditions have been deemed good enough for people to do the walk. But not us.

The good thing is that the mountains are showing themselves through short glimpses of snow capped peaks through the grey cloudy mass. And that is very picturesque. 🙂

The drive to Wellington is quite long clocking in at around 4 hours. With our show pace it took us about 5 hours, which meant we arrived at the Trinity Hotel around 1 PM.
That gave us plenty of time to go walk around in the city.

With only 200K people living in the city itself it is quite small (1/7th) compared to Auckland. But it definitely feels like a big city anyway. It has a very busy centre, with everything you can think of very close. The hotel is right in the middle of it with everything at a few minutes walking distance.

We took the cable car up the hill towards the Botanical Gardens to get a bus drive to Zealandia. But with today being Boxing Day, the shuttle didn’t show up which meant we couldn’t go to the park in time for us to meaningfully visit it. Too bad! Zealandia has a large array of native animals on display, and probably one of the only chances for us to see a Kiwi in NZ.

Instead we wandered around in the Botanical Gardens and enjoyed some refreshments on the streets.
We have to do some serious packing today, as tomorrow we will be on a boat without our trusty Mazda 3!
The rental company does not want its cars to cross over, so we have to return this one only to get a new one on the other side of the three hours ferry ride.
Tomorrow, we’ll be on another island!