Days 325-326: Wellington

I had a few more places I wanted to visit on the north island, but the timing was going to work out better to do it on my way back up to Auckland to fly out, so I decided to move on down to Wellington for a few days before crossing over to the south island. My bus out of Rotorua left in the afternoon so it was already pretty late in the day when I got into Wellington and found my hostel. Wellington itself is a lovely city. It's a lot smaller than Auckland, but still large enough to have lots to do. The city center stretches out near the water with the city spreading over the surrounding hills, and there are lots of little artsy places spread through town. My hostel was just across the street from the city art gallery, but unfortunately half of it was closed down and the other half was pretty dull. Much more interesting was the museum of New Zealand, Te Papa Tongarewa. A lot of the exhibits in it were on New Zealand history and nature, which were things I didn't really know very much about. Completely unrelated to all that, was this giant sculpture.

This is one of the works by Weta, which is probably the most famous props/special effect companies in the world. More on them later! Since it was a nice day out I was mostly just happy to wander through town and explore without any real direction.