the weather picked up for our last day so we headed out of town to walk to the seal colony by Red Rocks where you can see the mountains at the top of the south islands across the cook straight.
when we started the walk it as a bit cold and windy making putting up hoods a necessity but also quite tricky
the walk goes round the edge of the coast along a road which can be used by 4 wheel drive cars for fun and adventure
you weren’t allowed to shoot people walking dogs which seemed fair enough to me
the views were quite amazing
here’s a mobile home which has been well braced to prevent it blowing away
these are the red rocks. they are called red rocks because they are both rocks. and red.
here’s another bach (holiday home) braced against a rock
this is a bird
this rock is called devil’s gate and is the location of a seal colony
it’s actually quite a sad colony as they are all males who failed to find a mater the season before
so they lie there lamenting lost love
and occasionally blubber about
we sat there for yonks and watched them whilst eating our sandwiches
then we headed back
here’s a look back towards the south island (which is actually to the west of this bit of the north island)
here is kezia’s tongue
we then went to a nearby cafe for afternoon tea
and then we drove up to the nearby wind turbine
the turbine backed on to Zealandia where we visited earlier in the week. and from the top of the hill we could see all the places we’d visited in town and on the island trip.
and watched planes taking off from the airport
we had an hour spare before we had to get the hire car back so we stopped off at the botanical garden and visited the play park
it looked really good, but wasn’t that great according to our test pilots
after getting a lift back home from the car hire place we quickly packed our bags then headed out for dinner at the Hog’s Breath Cafe with our friends Janine, James and Amy from church (and Amy is one of Esther’s best friends at school). They were down visiting Wellington for the weekend so it was great to catch up with them
friday night was really noisy in the street outside our motel so we didn’t get much sleep but that was ok as we were up at some silly time the next morning to get our taxi back home to Auckland. In fact we were up so early there were still people rolling home from nights out as we stood outside with our suitcases !
bonus information:
this cd was in our hire car CD player. it contained a number of great tracks which we knew already (black rebel motorcycle club, blondie, arcade fire, mumford and sons, gorillaz, blur) and a number we didn’t know which were also great. it turned out it belonged to the person who cleaned the car who was missing it. i’d half hoped they would have said we could keep it. but it was a nice soundtrack to the holiday
and if there’s anything that sums up wellington weather it’s this – a busted car windscreen wiper on a dry ground. plenty of much rain and wind mixed with enough lovely sunshine.
hoorah for wellington. we shall be back …