Nurse Lottie Le Gallais on board hospital ship Maheno

Anzac Chunuk Bair Front Line Assault Position

David climbing, Cynthia shopping, both revisiting Te Papa Museum for the wonderful Gallipoli exhibit and many other displays.

David climbs in Mt. Victoria Park to the place beneath the pines where the path splits, today going right to explore Mt. Alfred’s Te Akatarewa Pa (a Pa is a fortified village), sees the gale-force winds whipping across the straight tomorrow’s ferry must cross to the South Island, and turns back, climbing the trail to Matairangi (Mt. Victoria) again.

Just beneath the summit is an A-frame with almost iridescent tiles on one side, which houses a bust of Richard Evelyn Byrd (1888-1957), aviator, explorer, man of peace and father of the Antarctic Treaty (Dec. 1, ‘59), which was signed by a dozen nations and declared the area south of 60 degrees south to be forever void of borders or territories, subject to international inspection, and a demilitarized zone where nuclear explosions are prohibited.

From the peak, Wellington is beautiful: few cars on the Sunday morning streets, whitecaps rippling inside Oriental Bay with a tanker looking like a tinker toy as it waits to enter Lambton Harbor.

Cynthia and David drop down Pirie — is it named after a WWI navy man? — to Moore Wilsons on College Street, basically Wellington’s Whole Foods, where we scope the provinder and vow to return for a pick up and go dinner tonight at our lovely apartment at 91 Derby Road. A lovely Kiwi at Moore’s liquor store gives Cynthia and David samples of two NZ gins, produced about an hour north of the city with a variety of NZ herbs. (Our guide yesterday gave us tea made from one of the gin’s principal herbs, kawakawa, which has a musty nose and a faint, lingering peppery finish.) Neither of us likes either gin; they taste too astringent, like Ginevers.

Cynthia buses northwest to get shorts for our Able Tasman tramp and David wanders Oriental Bay, drifting through Sunday morning’s open air fruit and vegetable market: a half-acre maze of wooden crates stuffed with produce in every color of the rainbow and shape known to nature. Food trucks selling the usual assortment of artisanal cheeses, meats, honeys and new age doodads compete with food trucks selling the usual assortment of Greek, Mexican, wraps, craft beer, sausage rolls, meat pies, and a lone vegan vendor sparsely surrounded by anorexic chics wearing flax peddle pushers.

David eschews the food and the chics and walks toward Cray Quai — hip, ultra modern condos and boutique offices jutting into the bay and partially sheltering about 100 35-foot cruisers and sailboats. He passes three individual log benches that, when you read the worn brass letters hammered into their sides, say, “Then, with the coming of darkness, the bay opened up beneath us, like a shell splashed with beads of light” (Marilyn Duckworth, 1935-, A Barbarous Tongue).

David continues to wander the wind-blown harbor toward the Wellington Museum in which he meets Rusty — beloved, mangy HUGE stuffed lion from the zoo, almost as large as Trump’s ego … sees a good film about the Wahine Disaster: a ferry that sank in a 1968 storm with 140 mph winds in Wellington’s harbor. (This boat is the precursor of the ferry we will take tomorrow morning after we wake at 5:45 to pack our laundered clothing (thank you again, Patrick, and again …) so seeing the film inspires less than confidence as the winds today increase in howling magnitude. Wellingtonians, says the mayor in the film about the Wahine, live with the strongest winds of any known city and pay them scant attention below cyclone strength.)

Cynthia and David regroup at Te Papa Museum and walk through an overwhelmingly moving and detailed and brutal exhibition about the nine-month massacre of mostly Turks, many Anzacs and some Europeans in 1915 called Gallipoli. Speechless, can’t describe it. The reality shown in pictures taken there at the time and told by survivors makes the movie look like a Disney film.

Dinner in Patrick and Mary Jane’s lovely apartment with G&T and wine and trout and wonderful cheese and …

Another day in Paradise.