AM. Sun. warm. Drove car to Jucy - airport. Roads ok but busy. Changed car, no charges. Lunch in Appt. PM. Cuba St. busy. Fidels - coffee and brownie - excellent. Te Papa museum. Large waterfront building. V. Maori, a bit confused. Walked back - ate in Appt.
We had arranged to swap the car at the Jucy depot mid-morning. It was located somewhere out towards the airport which involved a tricky drive across the city. Wellington is very hilly and the inner suburbs' narrow streets somewhat traffic choked. We found the place eventually. I was a bit concerned that questions would be asked about the loose bumper, but they were quite cool about changing the car. In fact, staff and clientelle alike were very cool about everything. Car hire is not really Jucy's main business, renting minuscule somewhat battered campervans to perky millennials is the place's main stock-in-trade. Consequently all transactions were liberally peppered with phatic interpolations of 'hi' 'cool' 'no worries' 'epic' (well, eepake, actually), and so to reinforce this unworried and cool ambiance all business was conducted in accordance with Douglas Adam's celebrated axiom that 'time is an illusion and lunchtime doubly so'. We were the oldest people in the place by three or four decades, so alone, I think, in our appreciation of Jucy's mildly absurd commitment to zen and the art of van hire. We had plenty of time to fully appreciate the finer points of such horizontally orientated customer service. I was about to bewail the fact that this unique atmosphere was not something that you could capture readily when the young man at the counter in front of us suddenly decided to elevate 'manspreading' to a truly eepake level. Click! For anyone sceptical about how both language and culture is deeply gendered, then a few minutes reflection on the image below may give pause for thought.
Finally we managed to swap one white Fiat Punto for another, identical in every respect apart than the fact that the front end of the new one was more securely attached to the rest of it. Sadly the morning had vanished into the Jucy time-warp. We headed back to the Gilmer Apartments for lunch.
 |
| Central location (steep climb!) |
 |
| comfortable sitting room |
 |
| 'compact' but practical kitchen |
Given we spend five months of the year living in a motorhome in southern Europe, why did we not do that in New Zealand? The country specialises in camper van hire, the roads swarm with them. The answer is affordability. We are New Zealand for 27 days, starting in Auckland and finishing in Christchurch. There is no way you could spend that length of time cooped up in a pokey little camper, you would need a 6m - 7m motorhome with on-board facilities. The price to hire one for a month or so was a little under £6000. It is not practicable to wild camp all the time, so say you used campsites for half the time - that would add another £250 to the cost. All a bit eye watering We opted to stay in motels, camping bungalows and Aparthotels, they are commonplace all over the country, most have small kitchens; though hardly luxurious, they are practical, some have laundries too. They cost between £80 - £100 per night. We reckon we spent about £2600 on accommodation. By opting for a small car from a budget hire firm the cost of the vehicle for 27 days was £740 - so taken together we saved about £2900 compared to hiring a motorhome, even more if you factor in fuel - a small Fiat Punto guzzles far less gas than a motorhome. Only in the more remote parts of Fjordland did I hanker after the freedom that wild camping offers. If, no, when we come back perhaps we will mix and match, spending a week or two in a camper - exploring Northland and the Bay of Islands which we have missed on this trip, and rest of the time in motels.
In the afternoon we headed through downtown Wellington towards Cuba St. which is a bit of a bohemian enclave on the east side of the city centre. Our Lonely Planet guidebook mentioned that the best place for brunch was a Cuban styled eatery called Fidel's.
Architecturally Wellington is an endearing hotchpotch of 20th Century styles - from the Edwardian to the postmodern, with a melange of Art Deco, 50s & 60s tat - perked up with a dash of bright paint, as well as the odd Brutalist carbunckle - most notably, Basil Spence's 'bee-hive' Parliament building. In other words, its all right up my street.
We liked Cuba St. a lot, and Fidel's even more. It was busy, but we were in no hurry, happy to wait for a table and soak in the left field vibe. Time enough to share our thought to cyberspace....
Pete posts on the Traveling Turpies FB group....
We do speak to each other too sometimes, not simply staring at our screens the whole time, honest!
Suitably fortified with coffee and chocolate brownies (Gill praising the correct balance of crispy outside with gooey middle) we headed back to the harbour area finishing off the afternoon with a visit to Te Papa - New Zealand's National Museum. Like most port cities, Wellington has redeveloped parts of the waterfront. The planners have taken an interesting approach with some of the raised pedestrian walkways - rather than aspiring to 'gentrification' they embrace urban grunge, revelling in raw concrete and asymmetrical constructions in re-cycled wood and rusting metal.
As for the Museum itself, it is imposing rather than beautiful. Thinking of other contemporary waterside public buildings we have seen - Valencia's 'Ciutat de les Arts i les Ciències', The Guggenhiem in Bilbao, Gateshead's 'Sage', in comparison Te Papa is a little underwhelming, the exterior is a bit corporate and dull, like an office complex or an up-market shopping mall.
The exhibition and gallery spaces within are more impressive - as spaces - but the content of the place is really quite disappointing. The story of New Zealand is an exciting one - in terms of geology, fauna and flora utterly unique. As the last major land mass to be reached by humankind - around AD 1300 it is thought - it provides important lessons about the impact of humans on a pristine ecosystem. The arrival Europeans as colonists rather than explorers during 19th century is a complicated story of cultural interchange, more nuanced than the genocidal destruction of indigenous cultures in Australia and the Americas - but unsettling and inequitable nonetheless. Te Papa somehow managed to slightly misrepresent each of these stories. The geological and zoological area seemed to be pitched towards upper juniors, the section on Maori history concentrated on traditional belief and Maori religion but had scant information about the practicalities of their way of life, particularly in the period before European contact. As for the colonial period, it too tended to reinforce stereotypes rather than challenge them, as if the modern history of New Zealand had been serialised by the makers of Anchor butter.
Afterwards we walked along the waterfront and through the business district back to the Gilmer apartments. We like small cities by the sea we decided; over recent years we have visited many lovely examples - Bristol, Porto, San Sebastian, Syracuse, Naplion, Bastia - Wellington is as attractive as any of those with the added panache of being a capital city.
