Well today we had a day off. No Herbie (our guide) and we got to do what we wanted. I did laundry – again – and then went to the Te Papa national museum. They had a very effective gallery about Gallipoli with personal effects, photos, film and models made by Weta, Peter Jackson’s lot. It was extremely moving. There was also a good Maori display (no photos). The other picture is of a modern art thing – endless celebration or some such.
I then went up in the cable car to the Botanical Gardens which were very nice. All on the side of the hill so I walked down and back to the hotel.
This evening I went to Zealandia – a conservation area just outside the city. It is not suitable for anything else as the fault line runs right through it so they have fenced it off, got rid of all the imported predators and are trying to restore things as they would have been before humans arrived. We didn’t see a kiwi but we did see a tuatara! I have been wanting to see one of those since a grainy black and white nature programme in about 1964. No photos I’m afraid as they are all on my camera.
And, on the subject of fault lines, I’m not sure why anyone wants to live here. There are a whole load of buildings boarded up since the earthquake in 2016 and the hotel has a page on what to do, right after the fire drill.
The Retirement Travels 
I believe that Peter Jackson and colleagues did a memorable job recently on colourising film from the First World War – Gallipoli was such a bloody disaster for New Zealanders that it has embedded itself deep into the psyche.
I Googled the tuatara, a real prehistoric survivor. As to the fault lines, I suppose it’s a bit like Japan – the advantages of living in certain places outweigh the occasional inconvenience – if you can call it that. Mother has a big cast iron pan that Father bought for her in a Kobe department store during an earthquake. He said that things started falling off the shelves, but everyone else was carrying on, so he did too.
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