Child of the Planet

It's all about the free Wifi This is New Zealand's premier museum and the squat building sitting on the water front, pulls off the TARDIS trick of seeming bigger on the inside then the outside. I've discovered, while chatting to locals, that Te Papa is considered to be an ugly edifice. While the exterior might be polarising, the interior is dark and moody, and detailed with Maori design work. Lot's of interactive displays spice up the assorted historical and scientific artifacts dragged up from the vaults and locked away in glass cases. Great little Art gallery filled with local art. That's it in the background Free Wifi is available and I saw one German couple had taken over a corner of an alcove with laptops, plugged via exotic adaptors into a Kiwi powerboard, which was plugged into the museum wall. Natural sciences are given a monster movie edge, with giant squid locked in a resin sarcophagus, a skeleton of a baby blue whale...

This walk is located on the coast outside of Wellington city so there was a half hour train trip before we got to do any trekking. I got an opportunity to to grab a coffee from a van on the side of the road before we set off walking the trail , snaking along the bank of the Waikanae river. Our party soon split into turtle and hare groups with a few stragglers in between. We crossed the river on a foot bridge and followed the track down into the managed wetlands of the  Waikanae Estuary Scientific Reserve, which were cris-crossed with raised foot paths. Emerging from the scrub on to the beach we headed for Paekakariki, We had a short break in Paraparaumu to have lunch and scoff Kapiti Island ice creams (the local gourmet stuff). The tide waits for no man One of our party started to get phone calls from a couple of stragglers who had got a bit distracted with their conversation and didn't notice the group they were following, crossing over the foot bridge....

The muzac is phycosis inducing http://www.louisvuitton.com/front/#/eng_US/Collections/Women/Travel/stories/The-Art-of-packing