About 450,000 people live in the greater Wellington area, but the downtown core is so crowded and space is at such a premium that only about 150,000 people actually live there. Most live north of the city in some extended suburbs with names like Lower Hutt and Upper Hutt.
In at least some ways, it’s a typical hilly (very hilly) old port town. Narrow, winding streets, buildings crowded together in a very limited space.
In addition to being a port city, of course, Wellington is the capital city of New Zealand, so it has all the infrastructure of government there as well.
The city has a very nice Botanical gardens, the city seemed clean and tidy, and it’s busy building better transportation lines to move traffic in and out of the city more efficiently. The “motorway” near the city seemed very new and some parts were still being worked on. One can only imagine the traffic problems before the motorway was completed.
We walked around a bit, went around the Parliament Buildings (one part being a building they call The Beehive – gotta be the hive of activity generated by all those civil servants), saw the old Dominion Observatory overlooking the city and enjoyed the flowers and trees in the Botanical Gardens.
Wellington has a reputation of being a very windy town. For us, it was windy and cool one day and sunny, calm and warm the second day while we were waiting for the ferry. The wind does whistle through the Cook Strait, that body of water separating the two islands.
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