Welcome again to wet Wellington, lol. We have had our sunny day, very wet and cold here in Wellington. Mum wasn’t doing a tour here, so after breakfast I left Mum warmly ensconced in our room and braved the elements.
The tour started at the base of Cable Car Alley in the city, and we climber 120 metres in 5 minutes, with a couple of station stops on the way. It also had light shows in the tunnels. At the top were the botanic gardens, a cable car museum (not open for another 30 minutes), a café and lots of rain. The driver/tour guide had said not to go into the gardens, don’t know why, so we had a 50-minute wait for the tour to continue. I managed to find a few munzees to kill the time. You can tell how wet it is around here by the amount of lichen growing on the trees, lol.
From there we had only had a few minutes on the bus to the Zealandia Wildlife Sanctuary. It was raining last time I was here too!!!
ZEALANDIA is the world’s first fully-fenced urban ecosanctuary, with an extraordinary 500-year vision to restore a Wellington valley’s forest and freshwater ecosystems as closely as possible to their pre-human state. The 225 hectare ecosanctuary is a ground-breaking conservation project that has reintroduced 18 species of native wildlife back into the area, 6 of which were previously absent from mainland New Zealand for over 100 years.
Anyway, this time I did the guided hour-long walk through the rain, mud and puddles, but it was good fun. Lots of birds to listen to, several visible ones and a good guide talking about them, the plants and the history of the place. It had been a reservoir, and the water is still there, but a 5.5-mile feral animal/predator proof fence has been constructed around it allowing the birds, reptiles and insects to live protected. NZ does not have any native mammals except 3 species of bats, so it’s their bird life that is important. Several rare species are surviving well at Zealandia. We saw several tui, kaka (parrot) and pateke a rare duck. He was funny, a mallard came along looking for food and the much smaller pateke chased him off several times.
All the land surrounding the reservoir had been cleared for grazing, but it has now grown back to a lovely forested area and will be even better when the high canopy trees are old enough to be high canopies!
After the tour (the rain stopped as we got back onto the bus) Mum and I had lunch and then we caught the shuttle back into Wellington which dropped us off outside the biggest wooden building in the southern hemisphere, very impressive, it takes up an entire block. I was meeting up with another munzee hunter, so we chatted whilst Mum played Pokemon.
We have another day cruising tomorrow on our way to Dunedin.
