Wellington prt 3

Anne tried really hard to get me a studio tour but with all the secret pre-production stuff in the studios everything is off limits, even to friends and family of the staff. So on the Tuesday she did take me out to the see the exteriors and into the public reception areas

as well as to the dock where the wreck of the "Venture" (the ship from the new King Kong) is sitting and sinking. I thought it was all pretty cool. And I still feel I got to see what very few others do, and with a bit of an insiders eye.

It was grey, drizzly and which is not uncommon for Wellington, so I took a public bus back into town where I took a city bus tour athat kept me out of the bad weather and let me cover the sights I hadn't made it to on my own.

Which include Mount Victoria (yes that is the second Mt. Victoria I've gone up and they are both on New Zealand's North Island, go figure)

a couple of local "Lord of The Rings" filming locations (they sure are getting a lot of mileage out of those films), the Zoo (where I stopped off for a while and found the place sadly cramped and outdated)

and some stunning views of the shoreline.
I was back in time to take a guided night walk through the Karori bird sanctuary on the edge of town. NZ only had 2 mamals before the europeans arrives so the birds here are being desimated by invading species, especially the Kiwi. Sadly of all the animals we managed to track down that night we could not coax out a Kiwi but we did see a Tuatara. An animal from the prehistoric age that looks like a small lizard but actually exists in it's own seperate family of lizards. They live as much as 200 years and actually have a third eye on the top of there head covered in a membrane of scales. It functions mainly as a heat sensor but may have been more developed and acted as a way to see overhead predators. Sorry, no picture, they're nocturnal, but you can see the cool valve control tower in the center of the park.