A quick goodbye at 6:30am to Katherine. Katherine has been our excellent host for the last 3 days and hasn't been featured as much in this blog as she deserves. In our jetlagged state I missed taking a couple of pictures. We should mention the major educational upgrade on the NFL provided by her seventeen year old son Otis!.
A cab to the Britomart train station in downtown Auckland got us on the 7:25am Overlander to Wellington.
For the first part of the trip, as we trundled through endless small stops and line repairs, we saw much the same scenery as we'd seen on the bus ride to Rotorua a couple of days ago. This is not surprising since the road ran close to the train tracks for much of the way. It is all pleasant enough: manicured sheep and cow-filled pastures with the occasional quaint town to keep things interesting.

Ruapehu
After about four hours we began to thread our way up into more hilly terrain. There are still green pasture, replete with cows and sheep but it is getting lumpier. Eventually we come to the locally famous Ruahpehu spiral in which the train, through engineering jiggery-pokery, disappears into a tunnel in the side of a hill and emerges further up the mountain, looking back on its own tracks far below. We're now heading up to

the central plateau, and sharing that plateau is Mount Ruapehu which suddently appears, snow-capped and majestic, to our left.
Not long after we are at the half-way point of our trip and stop for a half hour and lunch to admire the full view of Ruapehu.
The views are terrific here, although the lunch at the only cafeteria was both abysmal and expensive.
We reboard the train and leave; the train is now heading steadily down and we get glimpses of the symetrical Mount Taranaki to the west. As we descend, the train crosses a number of remarkable viaducts of which one, the Makahina, is captured in this video (not ours).
We gather speed and fairly rocket across a sort of pastoral plane until some highland peaks to the South begin to close with us. Eventually, we approach Wellington with a steep hillside on our left and the Tasmanian Sea to our right, rambling eventually through the burbs and into Wellington Station.
And there's Susan again to meet us! We trundled our bags out of the station and another hundred meters down one of the streets of the middle of the downtown core, stopping at what at first looked to be one of the shops, but an elevator along a short passage took us up a floor into the lobby of our hotel, where we booked into an apartment two floors above
the street. First impression was that Wellington was quite different from the small ville that I was (idiotically, in retrospect) expecting. This looks and feels like a capital—much like Sydney in fact, with crisp, modern streets and buildings and (as I began to notice) great architecture. Vancouver is beginning to look like this in parts but Wellington is way ahead of us.
But dang, the place was cold and lonely. Lyn and Susan took off by themselves to discuss tomorrow's workshop so I was on my own. It was already dark and the streets were just about deserted when I headed out for dinner, and everything seemed to be closing up. Just managed to get to a
a take-out fishburger from McDonald's (my second visit there this century) before it closed.
Afterthoughts
Our hosts were nervous about our feelings about the train ride, as they weren't too keen on it. I wouldn't do it again. If you have done the bus trip to Rotorua (which I would recommend) then you have seen 90% of the scenery. While the viaducts and the views of Ruapehu are certainly different and excellent, one hour out of twelve is not enough of a trade-off. If you do take the trip, make sure you take a decent lunch with you!
Birds
One of my few disappointments of our trip (Lynda could care less!). I should have guessed: the Field guide to New Zealand birds looked a little slender when it came in the mail but I thought that compared perhaps with the mammoth tome that I took to Peru it was almost a relief. But I should have taken a closer look. The first half of the book is seabirds (of interest only if you have planned to spend a good portion of your vacation floating in a dinghy somewhere off the coast) and 50% of the remaining entries are "rare" vagrants or visitors. Well so much for the potential variety, what of reality? Sadly, if you see 500 birds in New Zealand chances are that 400 will be common sparrows, 50 will be blackbirds, and 45 magpies.
†I will later backtrack somewhat on these harsh remarks; we began to see more variety as we headed south and Lynda actually saw some most interesting birds on her trip to Milford Sound and Te Anau
Flora
Vegetation is, in contrast, varied and interesting. In the midst of what appears to be open, English countryside, complete with sheep and cows, are dotted patches of dense brush made up of the most amazing variety of different greenery. There are lots of ferny things; palms of various shapes and sizes; enormous yucca-like plants with great spears of bloom; tree-explosions like some kind of living firework; pines—including the Norfolk Pine...and so on and so on. Color and smell is particularly notable at this time of year. The density of this brush is remarkable. The original Maori people probably kept to the coast for the simple reason that it must have been nigh-on impossible to beat a path into such floral intensity.
Animals
From the train it is possible to see cows, sheep, goats, llama, alpaca, emu, deer, horses...all penned up in pastures...and surprisingly, the occasional rabbit. I'm glad to see it as it encourages raptors and I'm hoping that in future years we shall see something other than the Australasian Harrier circling overhead.