Te Papa Museum, sculpture walk, funicular to botanic garden, and the waka odyssey opening the New Zealand ceremony
David wakes at 7 and climbs up, down and around the volcanic hill on the east side of Wellington’s harbor to the summit of Mt. Victoria. Just as at Te Mata, dog walkers, runners and mountain bikers share many of the same trails. Eerie dense forest of gnarled and twisted Norfolk Island pines along the trail (a few signs point to where some of The Hobbit was filmed). The day promises to be beautiful with large white clouds scudding across a blue sky with the usual hints of turquoise.
Back to apartment 9 on Austin Road, which has beautiful vegetable and herb gardens under the four clotheslines out back. Patrick McCombs, the owner who’s traded his place with us, is just one of the world’s kind and thoughtful people. We may have forgotten to mention that his refrigerator was fully stocked for us and that a salad and bowl of potatoes steamed with parsley and chives waited our hungry arrival yesterday. Thank you, Patrick.
Later in the morning, we join John and Roberta and wend our way downhill to the Te Papa Museum, where we book an hour tour with a guide who is so upbeat and amusing and informative about the highlights of the museum that she actually welcomes us into the Maori sacred artifact section with a song.
The tour mimics the museum’s plan, which begins with the separation of continents and volcanic birth of New Zealand because the story of New Zealand’s land — its spirit and powers and mysteries and abundance and rapacious acquisition and resurrection and now determined protection — is a theme that runs throughout Te Papa’s exhibits: natural environment (why no indigenous mammals, a preserved but deteriorating GIANT squid), people’s impact on the land (basically goodbye trees), social history (the Maori arrive, the Maori thrive, then they’re, ahem, “cooked,” especially after the Treaty of Waitangi, which, when the English- and Maori-language versions are compared, contain some fundamentally different nuances (Queen Victoria’s version = sovereignty, Maori version = guardianship).
We leave the museum after taking on fuel and walk along the harbor’s quais, into the city, ride up a funicular and walk back down into the city through a fabulous botanical garden with plots of gigantic ferns, chinese magnolias, succulents, Norfolk Island pines, chrysanthemums … you name it: a cornucopia of leafy pleasures.
Dinner is Vietnamese but we dawdle so when we arrive back at the harbor for the arrival of the waka horua boats, we’re greeted by maybe 20,000 spectators lining every conceivable vantage point (David’s guess but The Dominion Post gives the same number). Like salmon against the flow, we wend through the crowds to finally find a narrowly acceptable perch and the ceremony begins. Contrapuntal storytellers on raised platforms at the two ends of the harbor tell the story of how Kure and his wife Kuramarotini sailed from Polynesia to Aotearoa, while four waka houra sail the long gentle arc of the quais and several Maori long canoes ply the inner harbor. Then choirs stationed on raised platforms at the center and sides of the harbor belted out songs.
Great time had by all. We pass through the crowds leaving the harbor and climb the steep hill back to our bungalows at the top of Pirie Street under the summit of Mt. Victoria.
Another day in Paradise.
Two Tramps 