Day 6 in New Zealand: All Things Wellington

The early bird gets to take troll photos in front of Weta Workshop without a bunch of tourists in the way!

It turns out that you can never know another person completely, because how did I not know that my spouse of 20+ years was this interested in movie special effects? He had SO much fun in New Zealand checking out filming locations and props and, especially, booking us for this tour of Weta Workshop in Wellington:

I'm into the books, not the films, but I'm very into crafting, and I also thought these spots were very interesting because of all the fine details that Weta Workshop puts into them. When you zoom in on any part of the giant troll statues, for instance, you can see all kinds of picky details--bloodshot eyes, runny noses, wrinkles, scars, chapped lips, chipped teeth...

Even broken toenails!

Every element felt handcrafted with equivalent attention to detail:

Before the tour, we got a chance to bop around the gift shop, where I did some more damage to the tune of a gorgeous box set for the younger kid:

Reading aloud The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings as a family are some of my sweetest memories!

You can't take a ton of photos inside the tour, but they did have a few older pieces laid out for people to photograph--

--or play with, ahem:

They had some mock setups to illustrate the types of materials the designers use and their work areas, and I thought those were the most interesting displays on the tour:

And they had a designer talk to us about the joys of sculpting with aluminum foil and cement clay, and we all got to make our own little aluminum sculptures for him to admire!

My little aluminum foil dragon head is delightful, I was assured, and he made it *almost* all the way back to Indiana with me...

Having been warned that parking is tight near Weta Workshop, we'd parked in a neighborhood several blocks away, and after the tour, the gift shop, and breakfast and flat whites in a nearby cafe, we were happily chatting and walking back to the car, when all of a sudden my partner, of all people, randomly shouted a greeting at a total stranger across the street!

The kid and I were MORTIFIED. This had never before happened to us in all our time together. Had he gone mad? Was he in an altered state of consciousness? Had their been psilocybin in the coffee? There is no way he knew anyone on the sidewalk in Wellington, New Zealand!

Except that yes, he did apparently know someone on the sidewalk, or at least, he recognized someone. That random dude was one of the two co-founders and owners of Weta Workshop, just walking casually to work, and he seemed happy as pie to return the shouted greeting of his biggest fan.

After that shock to my system, I clearly needed to spend the next several hours in my happy place: a museum!

The Te Papa museum was an excellent companion to our Maori cultural experience, because it had alllll the rest of the history and geography and culture you'd want for filling in the gaps. I loved EVERYTHING.

Check out this giant chunk of wood:

You can see choppy marks on it that are from an ancient adze.

And here are some other archaeological finds, including tools made from now-extinct animals and items imported from surrounding islands:

One of the things that I found very interesting is the fact that the museum had on display just the absolute porniest Maori art, presented completely without commentary on how porny it was:

Ahem.

Look how big the oars for the biggest boats are!

This model is a better look at the Maori dwellings than I was able to get at the Mitai Maori Village. They're purposefully half-sized with the even smaller doors so that even caregivers with small children inside can easily defend them.

All the pounamu jewelry is also really special:

We'd seen a couple of protests during our trip--and apparently just missed a large one in Wellington--so this exhibit on the (purposeful?) mistranslations of the Treaty of Waitangi that the British colonizers used was really interesting:

The British and Maori translations of the same document have actual different meanings. So, like, YEAH the Maori are mad about it!

Peeped out the window to make sure the car hadn't been snatched and ugh, it's pouring. It was sunny earlier!

Some of my other favorite artifacts include this wool and hibiscus bark cloak from around 1870--

--this shockingly on the nose translation of Moana's name (I was similarly startled at the Mitai Maori Village when our guide told us that the Maori word for the chicken we were about to eat is "heihei")--

--this super cool navigational tool--

--confirmation of the piece of random information that I always announce whenever I'm watching Moana with somebody but I could never remember where I heard it from and therefore nobody every believed me... UNTIL NOW!!!--

--and one of my perennially favorite artifacts to find, children's embroidery samplers:

Taking a moment to celebrate our own journeys to this place!

Taxidermied kiwis! None of these guys are as round as the ones we saw at the Otorohanga Kiwi Center:

I was charmed when I first learned that a weta, as in Weta Workshop, is a cave cricket. Here are a couple of those weta!

Albatrosses had been on the kid's must-see list in New Zealand, but she saw SO many of them from her ship before she even got here. She said that they looked just like these, though!

And here's my new nearly-favorite animal: the moa!

This moa egg fragment was found at a Maori burial site:

Downtown Wellington is pretty walkable, so when we were done with Te Papa we just left our car in the museum lot and went for a wander on foot. 

You might remember that the younger kid is obsessed with David Bowie, yes?

Well, Wellington apparently is, too!

One of the items on my to-do list was to visit Choice Bros. and, along with having a couple of pints for ourselves--

--I bought a can of Rebel Rebel to take back home for my kid:

This world in which we each have a complimentary checked bag is SUCH a different world from backpacking it back and forth to England a couple of years ago!

We made kind of a DIY downtown food tour for ourselves, filling up on wings and pints and ice cream--

--then slogged through the rain back to the car and made one last stop at the grocery store for a packed breakfast for the next day.

Because come tomorrow morning at 5:00, we'll be on a ferry across the Cook Strait!

Here's the rest of our trip!

Day 1: Auckland

Day 2: Hobbiton

Day 3: Driving to Rotorua

Day 4: Glowworms and Kiwis

Day 5: Driving to Wellington

Day 6: Weta Workshop and Te Papa Museum

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, dog-walking mishaps, encounters with Chainsaw Helicopters, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

Day 5 in New Zealand: Waiotapu and Ruapehu on the Way to Wellington

Another day on vacation, another early wake-up call! 

The kid, at least, was equally unphased by getting up and out at the crack of dawn, because C Watch apparently did its share of middle of the night and wee hours of the morning shifts on board the Robert C. Seamans. And at least when her mom wakes her up on vacation, it's not for standing watch in the cold or monitoring science experiments or scrubbing the deck, but for spending five minutes loading the car and then climbing in to fall back asleep in the comfy backseat.

And that way, we can do my favorite thing to do, which is to be waiting at the front gates of Waiotapu Thermal Wonderland when it opens:

Waiotapu doesn't have a ton of spewing things like Yellowstone does, but I was LOVING how compact all the geothermal wonders were. At Yellowstone you spend a lot of time just getting from place to place, often having to hop in and out of the car and fight traffic, but here, everything exciting was reasonably walkable, with a couple of longer trails that you could opt into to see more exciting things.

I was obsessed with everything that steamed:

Also with collapsed craters and pits where things bubble! 

This one has crude oil in it!

I went into something like a fugue state staring at this bubbling crude oil. It's very mesmerizing:

And then my partner got the kid to ask me to sing the theme song for The Beverly Hillbillies, a show I haven't watched since I was probably nine years old, and I could. I have so many theme songs in my brain in places where there probably ought to be math facts...

My photos are a little disappointing, because what with the clouds and rain coming and going and all the vibrant colors and different kinds of black, I just could not figure out the correct white balance. The ground around these ipu is too grey and when I let the trees be as saturated as they were everything else in the photo freaked out, but otherwise it's not the worst likeness:

The sun came out of the clouds just as I was taking this photo of my family gazing at another ipu and fucked up the contrast, but I'm kind of into it anyway. I just wish I knew why my white balance wouldn't permit anything to be properly green!

Fuck it. Let's just process them in black and white and call it artistic:

My two are over there at the far left, and I'm a billion feet away across Artist's Palette semaphoring at them to stand still and look cute.

There's no saving my white balance, you guys. Just pretend like all these photos come from a very slightly alternate reality, maybe one where the sun is just a little too orange:

See that sign? I TOLD you that a siren longer than 30 seconds meant flee for your life!

Okay, but then I have literally NO idea what mysteries happened with the sky in the next moment, but for some reason all my photos started looking fairly normal. It was still crazy cloudy but it had stopped spitting rain at us, so maybe that made the difference?

Behold, the mineral richness of Champagne Pool that my white balance did not formerly want you to see!

Okay, some of these look weird, too, but I was trying to show how cool everything looked in the fog of steam:

I didn't learn this until later, when I was reading more about the area, but this pool also has a few active but infrequent geysers!

I do remember seeing the geyser pits in the shallow water, but I didn't recognize them for what they were. It would have been so cool to have seen one go off!

The grounds also include numerous collapse craters, almost all delightfully steamy:

Check out that nearly correct white balance. I'm even being allowed to use some green again!

Okay, but this, though? This thermal pool was literally neon green! I have never seen anything natural like it in my life:

We'd been informed that the Lady Knox Geyser erupted at 10:15, so suitably ahead of time the park emptied and we all trekked over and found spots in the grandstand seating. I was SHOCKED when at 10:15 on the dot, a dude came out in tech pants and a high visibility vest and poured a bag of environmentally-friendly soap into the geyser to make it erupt!

To be fair--and historically accurate--I guess the geyser has always been erupted this way? The docent at the microphone said the area used to host a prison camp (which... yikes), and the prisoners would come to this spot to handwash their clothes. Once upon a time, they had the idea to pour soap into the nice pit of hot water, and boom! A geyser was born!

Even the spout around the geyser was created by people piling rocks around the pit to funnel the spray, and silica from the water built up on and around the rocks to mask them and make the geyser look very natural. I'm still not quite sure how I feel about the whole thing, but it is VERY interesting to see how human actions can affect this natural wonder in an interesting, probably harmless way.

It's probably not a great sign that on a day in which we needed to make a six-hour drive we spent the entire morning half an hour from our starting point, but eh. Progress is the enemy of sightseeing!

The drive around Lake Taupo was very pretty, and although my lunchtime sandwich was super sketchy (the entire family shares a singular horror of sloppy sauces, and this was a VERY sloppy sauce...), the cafe where we ordered it was playing "Mr. Brightside," so I got to text my younger kid back at college and tell her so. Wherever you go, there is "Mr. Brightside" to greet you!

We had a couple of little hikes on our wishlist for Tongariro National Park, entirely Lord of the Rings-themed. First, we took the short walk to see Tawhai Falls, one of the filming locations for the scene in which Faramir catches Gollum:

I swear, it's like I still had two feral children with me. Dangerously rushing river, slippery rocks right over the water, and I look around and find everyone gone. One feral child has spotted a beach to grub in and has scrambled down the rocks to get to it--

--and the other feral child thinks he's spotted a better viewpoint, and is in the process of scrambling up the rocks to get to it:

Fortunately, god watches over babies and fools, because everyone made it back to the proper path eventually:

We, however, were not watching our GPS, because not only did we turn the wrong way out of the trailhead, but we did not notice when the GPS took this wrong turn in stride and decided to just map us to what it decided was the closest U-turn... all the way up the mountain to a (thankfully) snow-less ski resort at nearly 1800 meters elevation. 

Just ignore all the many pull-offs, I guess!

This was actually so great, though, and if I'd known what it looked like I would have wanted to make this drive regardless. Look how magical and pretty it is up above the tree line!

Thankfully my partner was a pretty confident New Zealand driver by then, because this road was wild!

Look how close the clouds are!

That fun detour meant that we couldn't do the longer hike I'd planned, but we had time for the quick stop at Mangawhero Falls to see another beautiful waterfall that was also featured in Lord of the Rings:

Driving the rest of the way to Wellington in the dark was worth it!

Tomorrow, we go see Weta Workshop and everything else in Wellington!

Here's the rest of our trip!

Day 1: Auckland

Day 2: Hobbiton

Day 3: Driving to Rotorua

Day 4: Glowworms and Kiwis

Day 5: Driving to Wellington

Day 6: Weta Workshop and Te Papa Museum

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, dog-walking mishaps, encounters with Chainsaw Helicopters, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!