Today, we are in Wellington, the capital of New Zealand. Yesterday in port, Valerie had the foresight to book a Wellington Walks reverse walking tour of the city. The walk starts at the train station and ends near Te Papa, in the reverse direction of the normal Wellington Walks tour. This makes it easier to for cruise ship passengers to get to the start of the tour in time. However, since the reverse tour needs to be reserved in advance, very few people take it. Luckily for us, this resulted in a private tour for us, while the forward tours that we passed had about 10 tourists each. Our guide Gavin was excellent. He led us to see the standard landmarks: the “Beehive” parliament building, old St. Paul’s Cathedral, new St. Paul’s Cathedral. In addition, he led us to places that we probably wouldn’t have found on our own: the founding documents of New Zealand in the national archives, the pine cone shaped interior of the new supreme court building, the Olympic medal on display at Fergs Kayaks.

After the conclusion of our tour, we quickly walked around Te Papa (the national museum) for a while before sitting down for a bite to eat at the café. Quickly running out of time, we scrambled back to the ship, taking a brief detour to run through the Museum of Wellington City & Sea.