We watched as the ship entered Wellington
Harbour. This is the only port on New
Zealand’s North Island that the ship will be visiting.
Today’s forecast is for rain in the
afternoon, but the gray clouds look like the rain might start earlier. The temperature is about 15 C and as the
captain told us last evening, there is very little wind. Wellington is known for its strong and cold south
winds.
After breakfast in the dining room, we
watched the ship dock. There are seven
tick ropes at both the bow and the stern that the longshoremen needed attach to
the pier to secure the ship. As they
placed the looped ends around the huge iron knobs, it took two men to lift a
loop from one iron knobs to another. As
we walked around Deck 5 waiting for the tour number to be called we noticed
that there were two ambulances waiting to take sick passengers to a
hospital. When we left the ship for our
tour neither ambulance was in sight.
Our bus driver, Sean, told us that there
would be three cruise ships in port today.
Later we would see the Azamara Journey enter the harbour and when we
were walking through the waterfront converted warehouses we saw the Hapag-Lloyd
Expedition Cruises ship “Bremen”. Both
were smaller than “Radiance of the Seas”.
New Zealand was discovered by England’s
Frances Drake, but James Cook was the first to circumnavigate the country. When Cook landed he was greeted by the Maori,
in their traditional way of Welcome, which if you stayed would be a Welcome, if
you turned and left, then it would be interpreted as a sign that the group
would be going to get reinforcements and a battle would occur. Cook saw the fierce “Welcome” and
misunderstood it as a hostile act. He
returned to his ship and sailed away.
For several decades after that all English or European ships were
treated as invaders and attacked.
Wellington is the capital of New Zealand
and has a population of 204,000 and another 195,000 in the surrounding suburbs.
Wellington is the home of “Lord of the Rings” director Peter Jackson. It is situated on six fault lines, one of
which has a major highway built on top of it.
Last year Wellington had 167 small earthquakes and the last one was
three days ago. The tide from the
harbour entrance to up the Hutt River Valley is only between one and 1.5
meters.
En route to Pencarrow Head, near the head of
Wellington Harbour, we passed the town of Petone. It is where European settlers set foot in
1840. Petone’s location was supposed to
be where the planned city of Wellington was to be built, but it was a flat
flood plain. When the plans arrived in New Zealand, the decision makers decided
to move the sight to the hilly location where it is today. Thus the parks of
the original plan that curved to the form of a “C” are steep hillside forests
where the problematic imported possums now live. Petone was named after the first ship to
arrive in the harbour. We passed the
town of Eastbourne, where the whalers and sealers used to reside and was
considered an undesirable area. Now the
homes are quite in demand with values up to $850,000 NZ. The beach here used to be the place where the
whalers would dissect the whales and process the whale oil before returning to
England.
The
bus travelled along the roads going from freeway to highway to rural road to
gravel road, where special permission to access it is required, to arrive close
to the Wellington Harbour entrance. Here
the two Pencarrow Lighthouses guard the entrance. The lighthouse close to the
water by the rocks is New Zealand's oldest. The higher one was built so that
ships could see its cliff light in the fog.
The shore here has had 27 shipwrecks because of the strong tides, winds
and rocks were a bad combination for sailing ships and early steam ships. The bus stopped for photos to be taken of the
distant lighthouses and the Wellington Harbour entrance. Fortunately, a train car, vehicle and
passenger Bluebridge ferry was coming in and a short distance further out was
the Azamara Cruise Ship “Journey” heading for port.
Along the twisting gravel road up on the
steep cliffs were white goats grazing at different heights. To reach Pencarrow
Lodge, our destination, the bus needed to ascend a narrow, twisting road that
had been paved in the past 15 years.
Previous to that it was gravel and buses had to take “running” starts to
have the power to navigate the steep incline.
At Pencarrow Lodge, we were served small sandwiches and desserts before
seeing a sheep herding demonstration by the two dogs and eight sheep. It was different than yesterday’s Sheep Farm
show, in that the sheep were corralled in an enclosure which made it easy for
people to see the dogs herd the sheep.
The sheep here are Romney sheep which the ewes produce lambs that are
used for meat and the ewe’s semi-annual sheared wool is used for making
carpets. The farm covers 3,000 acres of
rolling hills overlooking the harbour entrance and Marlborough Sound. The Lodge also caters to functions such as
weddings and parties. It is a lovely
location.
When the bus returned to pick up the group,
the weather was pleasant. The clouds
were disappearing, there was only a light breeze and the temperature was about
19 C. On the way back along the same 10
km road, the driver stopped at a rusted steel hull of a ship. While people got out of the bus to take
pictures, several went up the cliff a few meters to find a geo cache, while
others watched three dolphins frolicking in the waves just off the shore. They were too far away to get a good
telephoto picture of them. The worst
ship disaster was during a storm when a Christchurch to Wellington ferry
encountered bad wind, tide and sea conditions and was blown into the
rocks. Rescuers had seen it was in
trouble and at first it looked like it would be blown to the ship’s port side
and they rushed to that area.
Unfortunately, the wreck was on the other side where no rescuers were
located and 151 people died mainly of hypothermia from the cold.
Further on the return, the bus stopped at
a rock formation where geologists have found a visible active fault line. There is a set of cables not far away that
measure the seismic activity to be sure the harbour entrance is safe.
As we entered Wellington, we passed along
the streets by the University of Victoria.
Here again the student housing is in early 20th century Victorian
bungalows and quaint two storey houses.
There was a 30 minute stop at the Wellington Botanic Garden established
in 1868. It covers 25 acres including a
large rose garden, begonia garden, herb
garden, fragrance garden and endangered species garden to name a few. Of special significance is the small Peace
Flame Garden with its waterfall. A Japanese stone lantern, in the center of the
pond, contains a flame from the fires after the nuclear bomb was dropped on
Hiroshima, Japan in 1945. It was a gift from Japan in appreciation of New
Zealand’s efforts to reduce nuclear weapons in the world. We walked through the Begonia green house and
along a trail leading to a viewpoint 100 meters above the rose garden. Once everyone was aboard the driver drove to
Brandon Street, passing the government office building, known as the Beehive,
the Parliament buildings and some Victorian city center buildings. People who wished to stay in Wellington were
let off and the rest he drove back to the ship.
We left the bus and walked about 500 meters
to the Cable Car station to take it to the top of the Botanic Garden, so that
we could see more of the different gardens.
The trip up on the cable car system that opened on February 22, 1902
took less than 15 minutes only costing $4 NZ each. New cable cars replaced the original ones in
1976. The rise is 119 meters and there
is 785 meters of cable pulling the two cars up a steep 1 to 5.1 grade. At the top we visited the Cable Car Museum
and then descended through the paths of the Botanic Garden to the Seddon
Memorial. The memorial is a column with
his statue on top on his grave and commemorates his 1893 accomplishment of
giving women the vote, preceding Australia by days to be the first country to
give women the right to vote. He also is
remembered for succeeding in getting Britain’s support for New Zealand to annex
Nieu and the Cook Islands. He did not
succeed in annexing Samoa and Fiji. He
was the Liberal prime minister of New Zealand from 1893 to 1906. His monument
is at the entrance to the Bolton Street Cemetery which served as the public
cemetery from 1842 to 1892, when it was closed and only internments to family
plots were allowed.
We continued the walk down to Bowen Street
and walk past the New Zealand government buildings. The uniquely shaped offices for government
ministers called the Beehive, the Parliament Building and the stately yellow
mansion housing the Parliamentary Library.
Then we walked through the streets to the Queen’s Wharf and along the
revived warehouses where restaurants and cafés lined the walk on our two
kilometer walk to the Te Papa Tongarewa Museum of New Zealand. We strolled some of the galleries especially
the one of the Maori history. The
islands of New Zealand were not inhabited until after the Hawaiian Islands,
only 700 or 800 years ago, and tens of thousands of years after Australia was
inhabited. There was an impressive Maori
Waharoa or totara wood entry gate in the museum that was over 100 years old.
By 5, we ready to return to the ship and
walked back to Brandon Street along Lambton Quay, which 150 years ago was the
water’s edge, before the gradual land reclamation of the harbour area. We were too late for dinner in the dining
room, so ordered cappuccinos at the coffee bar, before going to the Windjammer
buffet for dinner of salads and a stew or curry. We chose hazelnut chocolate mousse and Kahlua
Cake for dessert. As we finished the
desserts, Maureen and Bob came over having finished their dinner there, too. They
had been on a tour of Wellington and been to Mount Victoria and the Botanic
Gardens.
There was no entertainment in the Aurora
Theater this evening except the movie “Patriot’s Day”. We passed on dancing to the Orchestra’s music
in the Colony Club.
Steps 19,941 Flights of Stairs 55
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