Windy Welly the Capital City
Trip Start
Aug 26, 2006
1
51
52
Trip End
Ongoing
Wellington,
New Zealand
Tuesday, January 23, 2007
The offender is Macs Beers. They have great names for there beers like Macs dark, Macs light, Macs Gold, Macs Pilsner etc. and on discovering a nice bar on the harbour front where you can watch ladies jog by and have a beer I though sweet, the sun is shining and view particularly stunning. I was then to taste several of the worst beer I have had the misfortune to wet my lips with. We're talking Tennents larger served at 40'C would taste better than any of the beers I drank. That was just the Mac's Gold! The Red and Dark beers (I'm thinking looks like a nice 70 shilling or a pint of IPA type colours) may have well been stewed cabbage and with the sock of some young man and rotted parsnip dipped in for flavour, only begins to describe the horror I experienced. I may have well just fed myself shite from the arse of a constapated Hippo washed down with piss from a lemming to experience a better taste sensation.
Anyway the price of beer over here is about $6.50 for a pint (large handle) roughly two pounds and a bit so is kinda like back home which makes tasting awful beer taste even worst as I'm paying almost full price if I compared it to back home. The percentages are all around the usual 4-5% mark.
Right on to ma journey down.
After a great drive down highway 2. (only marred by passing the Tui brewery and discovering that it was 1.20pm and the last tour left at 1pm. Didn't help I also watched the end of the tour disappear into the brewery pub for their complimentary pint. Gutted I was) Up and over a mountain range (can;t remember the name of it) then down into the city of Wellington. Wellington itself is hard to describe geographically. it kinda sits on the side if several large hills which sorta are arranged in a hook formation. The harbour faces north and you have to sail north and east then south to get out. Hope that makes sence.
A friend (Pat from Aberdeen) has described Wellington as Edinburgh and Auckland as Glasgow. This would naturally lead me to assume that tonnes of folk from south of the Scottish border (the english) live there and not a lot happens. But I would be wrong.
Although compact, (you can walk from one end of the city to the other in about 30mins) the city has a nice feel about it. The general NZ populace are a friendly bunch with which I have yet to find anything particularly wrong. I visited the national museum which was pretty interesting and shed some light on the current Maori bitterness at land sales. I'll not go into this in too much detail. Basically when New Zealand was formed the Maori signed a treaty saying that the British are welcome to stay and in return the Maori became British citizens. There is a dispute about the translation of the treaty as basically the treaty was in English. The Maori didn't read that so one was hastily translated and the translated version was wrongly worded or they misunderstood. Which basically meant both parties sighned up to two kinda different agreements. Hence there is a wee stramash about rights and land etc. If you look at what other countries did with their indigenous folk. Aussies tried to wipe the Aboriginies out amd the South Africans were racist fucks then NZ comes out not too badly.
This is a nice wee place and just has a homely feel to it. Most of the government buildings are here so its odds on I'll be back down to work at some point.
Right off to New Plymouth on the east coast of the North Island before finishing up in Auckland!
Shaun
