Writ­ing recaps of New Zeal­and’s Next Top Mod­el is some­thing that I’d nor­mally do over at Pretty Pretty Pretty, but since the first epis­ode of Sea­son Two was filmed in Wel­ling­ton (nice work, Pos­it­ively Tour­ism!), I thought I might put up some thoughts on all the places that they shot.

  • The girls stay at
    The Museum Hotel    , which one girl describes as “pristine”, while anoth­er expresses sur­prise that they’re not stay­ing in a back­pack­ers’ to save money. It’s cute that she knows about budgets, and hope­fully she’ll learn about product place­ment soon­er rather than later. The Museum Hotel is indeed a gor­geous space, and the bathtubs are so big that you could prob­ably fit all 13 girls in at once. There is in fact a clip of them all sit­ting in a spa later but I could­n’t fig­ure out if it was at th hotel or out at Boom­rock.
  • For their first cat­walk exper­i­ence, the girls are charged with stomp­ing around the Water Whirler – which we’d already read about on Stuff. It was reas­sur­ing to see how bad most of the girls were at walk­ing in heels, but a warn­ing: if you’re think­ing about try­ing to recre­ate this scene, secur­ity guards will have a very dif­fer­ent idea about what ‘fierce’ is. You are not allowed on the Water Whirler.
  • Because every tour­ist ven­ture needs a mont­age, we get to see the girls with Solace in the Wind (a less polite per­son than me would com­ment on how Mr Solace appears to be more anim­ated – and artic­u­late – than some of them) and get­ting excited about shop­ping in the Old Bank Arcade. We also see them buy­ing cakes at the Har­bourside Mar­kets, because it’s import­ant to remem­ber that mod­els really do eat.
  • For some time-killing, the girls are taken out to Boom­rock to drive around in cars, do clay-shoot­ing and mar­vel as Sara Tetro arrives in a heli­copter. A couple of the girls read off a tele­prompt­er about how beau­ti­ful it is out there and a girl from Lower Hutt says she nev­er knew it exis­ted. Still, at least she’s rep­res­ent­ing our city bet­ter than Dani­elle from Kawerau who says she’s defy­ing the odds by not being preg­nant or in jail yet. I guess she won’t be get­ting a job at Tour­ism Kawerau any time soon.
  • Next the group are off to Mas­sey Uni­ver­sity, where heaps of people in the fash­ion industry have come from (except it was called Wel­ling­ton Poly­tech then, of course). The girls get to run around in the impress­ive big hall of the old museum to find out who’s con­tinu­ing on. It’s nice to see them in an inter­est­ing space rather than a gen­er­ic con­fer­ence room.
  • The lucky 22 who make it through are then off to the Embassy Theatre for their first pho­toshoot. Did you know it was refur­bished for the Return of the King premiere? I’m suprised that Kerry Pren­derghastly does­n’t pop up to take all the cred­it for it. I also like that they’ve take the chaise lounge out of the toi­let for the girls to pose on. Glad to see it get­ting some use.
  • After the pho­tos were done, we find the judges relax­ing in the glitzy Fox­tail (min­im­um spend $4000 for private hire) try­ing to decide who to kick out, and shortly after that they break the news to the girls in the empty func­tion room at Fox­glove (min­im­um spend $4000 as well).

It’s good to see that the girls got around the city and had a jolly good tour. Heav­en knows they’re going to have to get around enough and give enough head to get ahead in the industry, after all…