Wellington

We spent three nights in Wellington; this gave us two whole days to see the city with no traveling. We spent the first day wandering around getting our bearings and shopping for cold weather and outdoor gear that we hadn’t brought with us. We both got long johns and I got some water sandals. Whoop ti do.

Our hotel was just a block away from Cuba Street. Cuba street is a narrow street, mostly closed off from vehicle traffic, that has a lot of older brick and stone buildings with restaurants and little shops.

We ate twice at Tulsi, which serves nouvelle cuisine, East Indian style. We ate there the first time because it was one of the few things open, and the second time because the first time was good.

The second day, Sunday, we spent mostly at Te Papa, the national museum of NZ. We were there from about 10:30 am until 2:00 pm looking at the natural history and Maori culture exhibits, went out to finish our shopping, and came back for another hour or so to see the post-European-contact art collection.

We are finding that traveling is a great opportunity for us to learn about ourselves. Cities, for us, are merely “nice” and not “great.” It’s beginning to look like we can’t get to great unless we are out in bush/outback/country/mountains without crowds of people around us. We didn’t take a single picture in Wellington until we were leaving and waiting for the ferry.

And we are very glad we did Te Papa, but, frankly, we have already seen the Maori meeting house at the Waitangi treaty center, and a slew of Maori artifacts already, so going to Te Papa didn’t blow us away the way it might have if we hadn’t already seen and done what we have seen and done.

Te Papa made me think about the differences I saw between the Australian Aboriginals and the Maori. In some ways there are great similarities with Native Americans; all three cultures suffered dramatically from European settlement and subsequent expansion (wars, disease, and discrimination), and lost most of their valuable land. All three cultures are striving to regain lost pride and wealth.

But the Aboriginal people came to Australia perhaps 50,000 years ago, and lived there without much change (as far as anyone could tell) for most of that time. They were hunter-gatherers who had to roam from place to place to find enough food, and they existed in small groups that made decision mostly by consensus, and that warred relatively infrequently among themselves. This was probably because they had to work too hard to feed themselves in a very hostile environment that was full of animals that would happily kill them. They didn’t have domestic animals, agriculture (most of the land was not suited for it), buildings or other permanent structures, no trees big enough for canoes or other boats, and no common language. Yet they lived successfully in a hostile environment for a vast amount of time; archeologists estimate from excavated skeletons that the average longevity of an Aboriginal before European contact was about 40 years.

The Maori, on the other hand, only came to NZ within the last 1000 years; they brought with them a complex Neolithic culture called “competitive tribalism,” domestic animals and domesticated plants. They lived in a bountiful land with huge trees, cultivatable soil, and fish and other animals that could be eaten.

The Maori developed a kind of art and music that is easy for us to understand. They also spent a lot of time fighting with each other for territory and status. Defeated Maori warriors and their families were made slaves by the victorious Maori, if they were not killed. Although the Maori lived in a much more hospitable place than the Aborigines, archeologists estimate from excavated skeletons that the average longevity of a Maori before European contact was about 30 years.

We caught the ferry from Wellington to Picton Monday morning. We waited in a queue of cars for about an hour to get on the ferry, and watched locals successfully fishing.
The ferry is huge, and carries passengers, cars and large trucks. The crossing takes about three hours and the travel guides all mention sea-sickness as a possibility. We had a calm crossing.

Picton is quite pretty, but we are getting a bit jaded. We drove on to Nelson, the major town nearest Abel Tasman National Park and Golden Bay, found a nice unit, had a good dinner at the Stingray Café, I blogged and practiced dobro, and Miriam read travel books and plotted our next move.