It’s 2023 and we find ourselves sending New Year greetings to six different time zones, the final message pinged eighteen hours after the first. Tawa remains more or less quiet. There’s the intermittent sound of laughter in a garden two doors away, but that’s it. No fireworks, no late revellers, no rowdy neighbours.
On Wednesday, we take the short train ride into the city centre and enjoy rediscovering the fun of workers cooling off in the harbour, just metres from their modern office blocks. We take the funicular railway up to the hilly botanic gardens and meander back down past sculptures and shrubs, through a forest with an eight hundred year old Rimu tree, through banks of herbs and finally arrive at the spectacular Lady Norwood rose garden and begonia house that sits at the foot of the hill.
This is where we find the most colour. In the rest of the gardens, many of the flowering shrubs are finished and the herbaceous plants have suffered from too much rain. But the geometrically organised rose garden throws out more colour and scent than I’d have thought possible, let alone knew existed. For the first time I see a rose that’s almost blue and another that’s so dazzlingly red that I have to look away. The multicoloured rose makes me want to laugh as if someone has made a joke.
Behind the roses sits the Begonia house, which not only boasts the best display of begonias we’ve ever seen, but is also full of lilies, orchids and strange white wispy plants that have no roots. They’re officially called Tillandsia usneoides, a type of epiphyte, but are sometimes known as ‘Tree Hair’ or ‘Old Man’s Beard’. They’d be completely at home in Miss Havisham’s cobwebbed dining room.
We wander through Bolton Street cemetery and back into the city where we find a stall selling kingfish burgers stuffed with fresh slices of fish and piled with salad. They’re irresistible and we tuck in sitting on the edge of the harbour while being entertained by swimmers daring each other to jump off various levels of a diving tower. A crowd of spectators has gathered nearby but they only cheer for the plunges from the highest point. The absence of health and safety instructions is rather refreshing.
What is also refreshing is the absence of cars anywhere near the harbour, which is encompassed by a wide attractive pedestrian precinct with gardens, pools and bridges. As we continue walking towards the city beach, past outdoor cafes, marinas and boat sheds, past suited people on electric scooters and swimsuited people jumping off harbour piers, I can understand why Wellington has been dubbed ‘the coolest little capital in the world’.
