Kākā cam

With more and more kākā spill­ing out of Zeal­and­ia and spend­ing their ne’er-do-well days riot­ing in the neigh­bor­ing sub­urbs, there are now nests out­side the fence. So the coun­cil has set up some nest­boxes to keep the new fam­il­ies safe, and in one, they’ve set up a live cam­era. Today, the five chicks are only […]

Into the unknown

The deep­est cave sys­tem in the South­ern Hemi­sphere is in the Nel­son hin­ter­land. How do we know this? Because Kier­an Mckay went in and explored it. One of Red Bull’s Explorers of the Cen­tury, he’ll be speak­ing about his exper­i­ences and intro­du­cing a film about his cave explor­a­tions on Sat­urday even­ing at Onslow Col­lege. “The […]

WOAP: those doughnuts

The dough­nut popup web page said Wed­nes­day! Leeds Street Bakery! Rhu­barb and cream! Salted car­a­mel and bacon! Chocol­ate and hazel­nut! This all soun­ded pretty prom­ising. So I circled the day on the cal­en­dar and wondered. Would the dough­nuts be iron­ic­ally Simpsonesque, or would they be inspired by Portland’s finest? This morn­ing, hav­ing heard the popup […]

Review: Krishnan’s Dairy

   One of New Zeal­and’s most-loved plays has returned for a short sea­son at the Han­nah Play­house. Hav­ing not seen it before (des­pite it com­ing around every couple of years for almost the last twenty!) we took the chance to finally go see it. Gobi Krish­nan (“a small man”, as the McGlashan-esque song/narrator would have […]

feed the birds?

So you hap­pen to live out west in the faul­ted hill-folds. One day a kākā lands on your deck rail­ing and win­ningly bounces along and back. It is look­ing at you. It is look­ing for food. Its head bobs up and down. It knows you have some. Do you: A) put out a sau­cer of […]

La nouvelle bière houblon verte est arrivé!

Today is the first day of Hop­stock, a cel­eb­ra­tion of the Nel­son Hop har­vest. In what seems just a little bit like some craft beer ver­sion of the Beau­jolais Nou­veau mad­ness, for a very short time twelve bars around town will be show­cas­ing eight new beers brewed with fresh (rather than the usu­al dried) hops. This […]

Journey to Adventure

Here at the Wel­ling­tonista we are gen­er­ally in favour of the bicycle as a styl­ish and use­ful means of trans­port­a­tion. It’s true we don’t all cycle, but as pro­ponents of liv­able urb­an spaces we can all appre­ci­ate that one less car trip is a good car trip. Along those lines, Cyc­ling Wel­ling­ton is a great […]

now we’re cooking with fire

Leaf­ing through the Wel­ling­ton on a Plate cata­log some months ago, one event in par­tic­u­lar seemed to stand out for me. This was Cook­ing Over Fire, The Argen­tine Way, to be held at El Mata­dor, the new “Café, Asad­or Grill & Bar” up Cuba Street. Asad­or is the Argen­tine nation­al dish, a way of slow-cook­ing […]

the Friendly Cyclist

Some­times you see them: dig­ni­fied, ter­ribly cool, impec­cably dressed, and upright, mak­ing their way through the rush hour traffic on their old-fash­ioned bikes in a man­ner poles oppos­ite to the more com­mon fluoro speed­sters. A beacon of bicyc­ling style, and also: fairly damned hot. Yes, you think, now that’s cer­tainly one mode of com­muter cyc­ling […]

Miniature Wellington

Via Dave on Twit­ter (and a few oth­ers includ­ing, we now see, the Dom Post) comes this lovely Wel­ling­ton time-lapse video from loc­al film maker Jared Gray: If only all those cars were that small in real life!