We already informed us about the highlights of Wellington on the ferry, why we directly drove to Claire once we (finally) got off the ferry. As already mentioned in the last post, we were quite excited about this unknown situation but the tension eased immediately within minutes. Not only that Claire baked some cookies for us and even invited us for tea (haha, we start thinking British 🙂 ) but also we were directly on the same wavelength. Even Karl welcomed us via Skype from Auckland in their wonderful house. Karl has his own business building action sport courts all over the world (why he is away for approximately 6 months every year). So we chatted with Claire having wine, bear and (Karl’s expensive :-O ) Whiskey, enjoyed the company of the two very communicative cats Bella and Harry (who actually has his name because of his red hair, like prince Harry 🙂 ) and got to know each other.
Claire is actually from Manchester and met Karl, a real Kiwi, during backpacking in Spain and went on an Africa trip afterwards. Since then they travelled together half of the world (Claire said they had their backpacks on for around 9 years). Of course she had a lot of cool stories to tell about that! It’s very hard to find the right words, but as already said, we just got along very well. It didn’t feel that we got to know each-other just hours before, but as if we would know each-other since years.
The next day was a bit nasty weather, so we decided to visit the museums of Wellington. Unfortunately, we had had to recognize that our left front tire didn’t survive the ride on the ferry, when we left the house. So we slowly drove to a mechanics with our completely flat tire who could at least put on the spare tire after he unsuccessfully tried to pump the flat one up again. With that we drove to Bridgestone a bit further down the road who inspected the tire and wanted to sell us a new one for 210$. Well, we found that quite a lot, why we just drove to the city centre to clear our head and figure out the possible options. We decided to make some phone calls the next morning to get some better offers. Anyway, we visited the old and new St. Pauls Cathedral, participated a guided tour through the Parliament, walked along the harbor and visited parts of the quite famous museum “Te Papa”. Wellington directly took our hearts! It’s not a huge city but it has its own flair and charm not many cities have to offer. After that Karl invited us for a dinner (he obviously wasn’t there but he offered to pay for us 🙂 ) and as the first restaurant was crowded we went to “Havanas”. The concept is quite interesting, because you order different small (but still quite expensive :-O ) dishes to share. We had beetroot salad with feta and walnuts, lamb with cherry chutney, prawns with chilli and herbs and a lot of other yummy things!
At our last full day in Wellington (unfortunately the last one, if we would have known that before we would have planned a bit more time) we got some new tires. After some phone calls, Tobi managed to get a new tire for 99$! While the car was at the mechanics we visited the parts of “Te Papa” we hadn’t seen so far and drove around the peninsula of Wellington afterwards and saw the Mt. Victoria lookout. This peninsula is a MUST-DO for all Lord of the Rings fans, because there are the world-famous “WETA” caves. They are one of the best artists for the production of weapons, masks and costumes but also for computer animation (e.g. Gollum). We saw some of their arts and watched a 30 minutes movie about the studios. There we found out that they did a lot of famous movies (e.g. Avatar, Planet of Apes, King Kong and so on). We also drove with the Cable Car (which is actually moved by cables) and walked a bit through the city. In the evening we cooked Kaesespaetzle for Claire, in order to say thank you 🙂
The next morning we visited the very nice Museum of Wellington City & Sea (which was voted as one of the Top50 museums worldwide) before we unfortunately had to say good bye to Claire. Definitely one of the hardest ones during our trip! Anyway, we might get the chance for a reunion. We’ll try to meet Karl somewhere on the North Island if he is around or maybe even on Fiji as he will be there when we are there as well. Additionally they plan a visit in Paris beginning of December (for what we gave Claire some hints for sure) and who knows maybe we go there for a short visit as well 🙂