48hrs in Wellington, New Zealand
Un week-end dans la capitale néo-zélandaise.
En 2013, Wellington est élue « meilleure capitale au monde » par le guide de voyage Lonely Planet. Ville à taille humaine d'environ 215 000 habitants, nichée au bord du Pacifique, Wellington est connue pour ses courants d'air imprévisibles et son ambiance détendue. Visite guidée, le temps d'un week-end, avec une journaliste du Guardian.
Creative, well caffeinated and culinarily blessed, Wellington is surprisingly compact. The central area of New Zealand’s capital is just 2km across, which means it’s a cinch to get around on foot – you’re usually no more than a 10-minute stroll from the next place you want to be. You’ll need every bit of exercise you can get to stoke your appetite: Wellington is packed with cool-as cafes, boutique food factories and exceptional restaurants. It also has craft beer, a couple of critically endangered old birds and a colossal squid.
Yep, everything you want in a city break. Here’s a suggested itinerary for a weekend of leisurely exploring and a lot of eating. With everything so close, there’s plenty of time to just sit and smell the coffee.
SATURDAY
2. 8am: breakfast Owned by brothers Jesse Simpson and Shepherd Elliott, Ti Kouka Cafe in Willis Street is one of those special places where passionate people make magic happen. The timing of my visit means I’m able to taste “Aporkalypse Now”, Ti Kouka’s entry in Burger Wellington, the city’s annual battle of the bun and one of the food festival’s most popular events.
3. 9.30am: walking tour My guide is Stephanie, a Dane who moved here 25 years ago for love – then fell in love all over again with her new home town. She has a few theories about what makes its culinary scene special: for one, there are about 20 coffee roasters for Wellington's 215,000 people, and “good caffeination makes for creativity”. 4. We cross the City to Sea Bridge – part-pedestrian bridge, part-public artwork – that links Civic Square with the waterfront. We end up at Moore Wilson’s, a cash-and-carry business where Wellington’s chefs shop. It stocks a simply staggering array of food from across the country and around the world. I’m not sure the tour always ends here, but Stephanie, recognising a kindred spirit, wants me to see the mind-blowing produce, the range of game, the seafood and meat, the cheese counter, the patisserie, the dessert supplies … On a trip to Waiheke Island, I learnt that Kiwis know their food, but this place is beyond my imaginings. I take home a packet of freeze-dried pineapple powder, simply because I’d never known such a thing existed.
5. 3.30pm: Te Papa No trip to the Kiwi capital is complete without an hour or more in the national museum, the
Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa. There’s an earthquake simulator, a Māori marae (meeting place), the skeleton of a pygmy blue whale and the half-tonne corpse of the largest colossal squid captured to date. On my visit, our guide points out a design flaw in this monster of the deep: its throat runs through the centre of its doughnut-shaped brain, limiting how much it can swallow without risking brain damage.
6. I also brave the crowds queuing for Te Papa’s hit exhibition, Gallipoli: The Scale of Our War, which brings to life the Anzac campaign through the stories of eight New Zealanders. Each of them is portrayed at a pivotal moment on a monumental scale – 2.4 times human size – in stunning sculptures created by Weta Workshop, the special effects company that worked on Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings Trilogy.
SUNDAY
7. 9am: art gallery In Civic Square is City Gallery Wellington, an elegant contemporary art centre housed in the former public library. It offers exhibitions, guided tours, artists’ talks and live performances. On my visit, members of the public are sitting at a 12-metre table creating, destroying and re-creating towering structures using thousands of white Lego pieces. It’s the Danish artist Olafur Eliasson’s The Cubic Structural Evolution Project and it’s hugely popular.
8. 11am: market After you’ve had your fill of art, wander past Te Papa for Sunday’s Harbourside market, where locals stock up on fruit and veg. There are providores alongside the produce purveyors, plus 40-or-so food trucks and vans offering dishes from around the world, including Cambodia, Chile, Hungary and the Philippines. Roti vans are doing a roaring trade and whitebait patties are selling like small, fishy hotcakes. Odds are you’ll find elevenses and lunch here.
9. 1pm: cable car and Zealandia Time to get away from it all – well, 5km up the road – to Zealandia, a wildlife sanctuary with a difference. For a more scenic trip, hitch a ride on Wellington Cable Car from Lambton Quay. It takes you up to Kelburn lookout, beside the city’s botanic garden. The 25ha garden, established in 1868, has lovely winding walkways and views over the city.
10. There’s second shuttle stop at the lookout. Jump aboard to see a park in another style altogether, a 225ha “urban ecosanctuary” ringed by a predatorproof fence. Here, in a sheltered valley, some of New Zealand’s rarest birds and reptiles live “in the wild”, along with bats, fish, insects and frogs. The aim is to showcase 80m years of New Zealand’s natural history and turn the clock back 800 years, before the first Polynesian explorers reached these islands.
11. I see kākā parrots, “living fossil” tuatara lizards, and Zealandia’s two elderly takahē, a flightless bird once thought extinct. They crop grass with a slightly irritated air – you might be cranky too if a bunch of camera-wielding tourists were interrupting your afternoon tea.
12. As I hike further into this wilderness 10 minutes from the city, the only sounds are birdsong and the wind stirring the tops of pine trees lining the ridge. It’s a wonderful place to decompress – the perfect break from the perfect city break. O