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Wellington is the beautiful capital of New Zealand. It has the distinction of being the Southernmost as well as the most remote capital city in the World.
Our plan today is to take the Highlights of Wellington tour in the morning and see what other things we might want to do later in the day.
We drove around the city in a motor coach (again, with about 40 other people) and the cheery driver gave us some background information on this sprawling capital city. We stopped at the Parliament building, drove along the shoreline where we saw houses built so high up on the hillside that they had to have private electric cable cars that they use to get them from their garage up to their homes high on the hill.
Click here for the complete Wellington Photo Gallery.
Next we stopped at the Botanic Garden that included the Lady Norwood Rose Garden. It is a beautiful area and we had a good time walking through the rose garden and finding specimens that we want to plant in our garden someday!
Dale checked out some kids playing cricket while I went into the greenhouse at the botanical garden. There were some really beautiful plants and flowers, and best of all, it was toasty warm inside.
Back on the ship for lunch and I sent Dale on a mission – to get a picture of the “colossal squid” at the Te Papa museum – this is the largest known specimen in the world. Dale was able to see the squid and also took the cable car ride that took him up to the top of the mountain overlooking the city.
Photography Comments:
Wellington tried very hard to make a good photography day, starting out with gray, maybe even threatening skies and ending up with puffy white clouds and some blue showing through, sometimes beautifully! Some of the most interesting areas were when we were driving on the bus (of course!) but I did the best I could without driving people on the bus crazy (my opinion, you decide if you were on the bus). Some incredible older houses all around town and beautiful modern office buildings that have great reflectivity. I took the D700 today with the 28-300 lens. I also used the Canon S95 for use with others taking pictures of Margaret and me (less complicated and not as heavy). Even though the weather was better it was still a challenging lighting situation because the clouds were pretty white-out potential most of the day. I underexposed by 1/3-1 stop most of the day to prevent this and give me a chance if I had to edit in Lightroom. I got a few good shots but included many more so you can see what we did. I would have liked to have gotten some more interesting shots of and around the cable car but I the Zealandia shuttle driver was nice enough to drop me off down by the harbor instead of the top of the cable car (I had a round trip ticket), thereby eliminating any shots going down. Oh well, there’s always next time and I did get one decent shot. My favorite shot of the day is the one of the clouds reflecting in the ANZ building.
Trip Summary » Travel with Dale & Margaret - […] Wellington, New Zealand […]