bigger than my home... the botanic garden (wellington part 3)

Location: Wellington Botanic Gardens

Baskets Left: 3

wellington is a big city... though i've said it already i'll say again. after spending a year and some in just dunedin you forget what a big city is like.

in the anticipation of hitting the various museums in town today, to try and get rid of these artifact maori baskets, i couldn't sleep. so i've got a couple hours to kill before the museums open...

i decided to explore a bit while killing time. the neatest things i found right away (that was OPEN anyway!) was the wellington cable car...

i'm a big fan of cars and TV... so i couldn't see how the combination of the two could be a bad thing.

getting aboard i was a bit surprised to find that it was more like a bus or a train than a car... and there was NO sign of the cable TV anywhere!

it was pretty crowded with people. most of whom i found out were on their way to work.


after a few minutes of waiting for people to get on the car it started, and it was here that i learned why it was called a cable car... it turns out that this thing is on a set of tracks that is pulled up and down wellington's big central hill by a cable... hence the name.

at the top i found something very cool but unexpected... the cable car drops you off at the wellington botanic garden.

well okay as you can see on the sign it nearly drops you off there anyway... not that it was hard to get to from here...

okay, so now i was at the botanic garden. since i had some time to kill i figured i'd check this out and compare it to my home the dunedin botanic garden.


now for those of you out there on the innerweb freaking out because of my being vulnerable out in the open with the baskets i had my reasons. unlike picton which was tiny, if whiro or another maori mystic monster tracked me to wellington they'd have trouble pin pointing me in such a BIG place.


wellington's and dunedin's botanic gardens had one thing in common they are both mostly on a big hill.

one of the key differences is that where dunedin's is fairly simple and has only 3 major routes through it wellington's has a LOT...

seriously... it has a lot. so many i got lost for a while!

finally i came to an interesting wooden outlook structure that dunedin's garden certainly doesn't have.



from here i got a view over wellington's garden. like the city itself the garden was BIG...

much bigger and wilder than dunedin's.



just imagine if i lived here people of the web wide world... it'd be like i was living in the mesozoic!

making it up to the top of the garden i walked along the ridge.

here i found a cool old observatory. i guess in the olden days before wellington got so big and bright this was a great place to come up and watch stars. though this thing didn't look like it'd been used in a long time...

from up here i had a commanding view of wellington. i could even see the ferry and terminal i'd used to get here in the first place.

i was only seeing a part of the capital, and it that was bigger than dunedin from a similar view.

yet apart from the skyscrapers it didn't look that much different from dunedin. i was liking it here thus far.

towards the end of the ridge was an old cannon gun. naturally a posed for a picture with it, cause... well i'm not sure why. just i've noticed that what humans do all the time in such circumstances.

anyways as i got up close the cannon and said cheese for my camera suddenly i felt real dizzy... and my shirt pocket heated right up... all just like when the baskets reacted funny to that whale in kaikoura...

there was a weird build up of light at the end of the gun... magic i realized! but why here?

before i could inquire anymore there was a deafening BOOM! the cannon had... well it fired!?!?!?!

for a moment i thought that had to be impossible... than suddenly one of the skyscrapers in line with the cannon EXPLODED!!!

before i could think, react, or do anything the people around me on the ridge all started freaking out! some started running away, others stared at the building which was on fire and missing a top, and a few pointed and yelled various blame type thing at me.

rather than stick around and face blame for something i didn't do, and couldn't explain to anyone like, oh say, the police... i cheesed it out of there!

i took shelter in a public washroom for a while. the radio was playing inside, and catching a news report i breathed a sigh of relief...

no one had been seriously hurt by the blast. it was too early in the morning... and i wasn't being hunted by the authorities! the experts were baffled. all evidence pointed to the cannon firing at that building. yet there was no possible way that gun could have fired as the mechanics needed to do so were absent. more to the point despite the damage, no actual physical trace of a projectile had been found in the wreckage! not even as much as gun powder residue on either the gun or the building...

there was a brief mention of witnesses seeing "a large reptile in the vicinity of the gun", but it was dismissed as hysteria surrounding the unusual event.

okay so what happened?

it had to be magic from the baskets, but why?

either they didn't like wellington (hence the trying to blow it up), or they were starting to react again like they did in kaikoura. maybe this was a step in the reaction ms. rhonwyn told me was bound to happen with them!

one thing was for sure. this little display of the baskets acting up on their own accord showed how dangerous they could be! just imagine if they fell into the wrong hands??? like i don't know maybe a certain god of darkness...

to be continued...