So next up was Wellington, the capital of New Zealand / Aotearoa, though not the largest city.  We grabbed a taxi into town and our first stop was the Te Papa Tongarewa museum.  This is a sort of national museum and has exhibits relating to the country as a whole. 

The featured exhibit was about the Anzacs in Gallipoli, featuring tableaux of waxworks of men in action at 2.5x natural size.  These exhibits were huge and very moving and surrounded by individual stories of men from the battlefield.  I have also been to Gallipoli itself and can relate to their stories of the terrain and the impossibility of what they were sent there to do.  The irony is that if they survived that campaign they were then sent to the Somme…. ☹

I have posted these photos separately to keep them large – as the exhibits were in reality – so you can get some idea of the impact. The second one is surrounded by poppies which you pick up and write a message on, before adding to the display.

We then headed out to find some lunch, which was easier said than done, and found out it was St Patrick’s Day, so lots of green clad people having a rather merry time!

We returned to the museum to look around the Maori exhibition as until then we had seen little of their history or culture.  The exhibits were a bit disjointed and scattered around.  We mostly looked at the canoes and the examples of the Maori house.

There was also a big plaque with the constitution on it which was agreed between the Maori and the British.  However, this has been defaced – basically all the writing obliterated, as there is currently a big discussion about this whereby the translation to Maori was not entirely correct so they didn’t get exactly what they thought at the time.  So there is a movement to have it “corrected” and the graffiti is part of that. Here is the museum’s explanation of the differences.

After that we headed for the cable car funicular which takes you to the top of a hill overlooking the city and a little museum with one of the older cars and a bit of history of its creation.

We are not big on cities, but it was an interesting day nevertheless.  Then, of course, it was time to move on again. So the next day we set off across the southern part of the island to Napier.