Position 41 16.870S 174 46.800E

Moved to a campervan site literally in the city centre.  Beside the water and room for about 40 vans.  No water but have electricity.  So today we walked along the front to the Museum of New Zealand – Te Pap Tongarewa.  You can walk all along the city front.

Think this is the old wharf but never did find a sign.  City in the background (obviously).

Memorial to the first peoples.

Back to the Museum…. Great Earth Story exhibition and Natural History section.  Learnt something new.  Sperm whales often have big scars on their heads, apparently from the colossus (giant) squid.  The squids have revolvable, and they do revolve, claws in their tentacles with which they grip their prey – or scar the predator, in the whale case.  The only specimen on exhibition on the world is in this museum.  You can just about see the claws in this shot from Paul.  Was it not Independence Day when the alien with the long tentacles came alive.  Know you know where the inspiration came from.

Close up of the body end – looking a bit worse for wear.

This is a model of its beak.

There was also a great exhibition of Maori marea.  Marea is a collection of building.  There was the meeting house, store house and sleeping hut but not allowed to photograph those.  After lunch we caught the ‘little red cable car’ up the steep slope to Kelburn and the top of the botanical gardens.

Trying to figure out camera.  Oh my God, is that a double chin??

180 of Wellington from the top of Kelburn.

Cable car coming into land.

Small cabel car museum at the top which told the story of the cable car since it was built in 1902.  Yawn, yawn but Paul interested.  One of the old cable cars, note the seats are slanted.  The brown to the right of me is not wood but a leather strap that presumeably held in a death grip.  H & S would have a field day today.

We walked back down to the city through the botanical gardens, of which we seem to have no pictures.  Getting tired by this stage.  Now you may think this is just a street, which it is, but it also runs along a fault line.

Part of the botanical gardens encompasses the city graveyard.  Great to be walking with the ancestors  No graffiti either.  Lots of people.  When they built this motorway, it went right through the graveyard and so loads of bones removed, placed into a casket (I think) and buried in the local church.  Very cosy.