New Zealand Holiday 2014, March 10 (Well That Was Easy)

I had to get up early to get the airport bus by 7am. The next flight was with Air New Zealand (they make a profit unlike Qantas) down to Wellington. The best part of the one hour flight was their safety video, which was funny and really well produced, and is available on YouTube. A runner up was the free drink and cookie, even for such a short flight. The worst part (if you could call it that) was that it only took like ten minutes to check-in and get to the departure gate, leaving more than an hour of time to waste (sleep).

At Wellington it was on to another airport bus. This one was just a normal domestic bus that just happens to go via the airport, which meant they had to be a bit creative to get all of the luggage loaded in - basically they just piled them up around and on top of the seats at the front, many of the smaller suitcases then became airborne when we took tight corners. To get to the downtown area of Wellington the bus also goes through this weird one way tunnel underneath Mount Victoria. I managed to get off the bus at just the right spot and was able to check-in to a room at the hotel by 1pm, a couple of hours earlier than I expected.

After getting a quick lunch along Lambton Quay and passing by the Parliament buildings we reached the Wellington train station. Since I had a bit of extra time I figured I might as well take a quick train trip out to Takapu Road where they have a small Dress Smart outlet shopping mall. I had quite low expectations for this since there was only thirty stores in total, but there was a few sports stores in the list and the express train only took about ten minutes each way. On the train they actually had ticket inspectors walking through the train punching tickets, but even more surprising was that you could actually board the train without a ticket and buy one off them as they came around.

Cenotaph, fancy word for a war memorial.

After getting to the outlet mall I found out that my low expectations still weren't low enough, the selections were poor and the prices weren't much different to what I'd already come across in the cities. The highlight of the trip instead was the bucket tree outside a motel next to the station. There was a massive Countdown supermarket near the station as well, which seemed oddly placed as there wasn't really anything else around except a freeway. This time I chose a Lift Plus energy drink which was a crap lemon energy drink that wasn't great at being a lemon drink or an energy drink, 3 out of 10.

31 stores?

Tents in all shapes and sizes!

Would not want to be the person having to shape this.

Back into Wellington I walked down along the bay to Frank Kitts Park and the Civic Centre. They have a few sculptures and nice bridges around the place as well as a few public buildings. One such building was the City Gallery Wellington which Jason thought would be good to visit - at least it was free. The gallery was totally pointless, they had several big rooms set up with just one or two pieces of weird artwork that anyone could have put together - one had a couple of masks and another had a wooden desk.

Part of the City To Sea bridge, really a City To City bridge.

These guys.

Floating ball thing.

This was my highlight of the gallery, screw the no photo policy.

I also started to walk down Manners Street or Manners Mall, whatever it is called, but didn't go too far as I planned to be coming back past the next day anyway. Instead we turned back to Lambton Quay and got in line for a trip on the Wellington Cable Car! This cable car is not like the ones in San Francisco but just a funicular that goes up and down the hill and takes only a few minutes, it wasn't free but only costs a few dollars and is an easy way to get up to the top.

This would make a great toboggan ride.

At the top of the hill they have a free Cable Car Museum which wasn't bad, they had a bit of history about how the cable cars were used in the past in Wellington and a few displays too. Also at the top of the hill is the Botanic Gardens - no good city is complete without one. Due to the amount of walking we'd already done again today we just took the short route around the edge of the gardens, passing a couple of weird art structures again and a rose garden before heading down the hill and back to downtown.

More neat artwork in the gardens.

At the New World supermarket I found a two litre banana milk! and another flavour of Demon energy drink, this one was called Ice and came in a blue can instead. The blue edition wasn't as good as the original red one so I'd only give it a 7 out of 10. For dinner we made the sad discovery that lots of restaurants shut down some time between lunch and 5pm, which included the Burrito King I wanted to visit, so instead we just had to settle for the local Subway since I was too exhausted to walk around and find anything else.

Lambton Quay.

Dinner and breakfast. All the key food groups.

First impression of the hotel:

• Crap TV options again
• They have coin-operated laundry facilities
• They didn't provide any paper or pens in the room!
• They don't have any free internet and the rates are terrible ($10 for two hours of $23 for a day, but with low data limits as well)