Parkour update

In Novem­ber 2007 I pos­ted an art­icle about the excit­ing pur­suit of parkour in Wel­ling­ton, and it’s been one of our most endur­ingly pop­u­lar art­icles, gen­er­at­ing a steady stream of traffic and com­ments. In the mean­time, the New Zea­l­and Parkour Asso­ci­ation has been estab­lished. They have a strong pres­ence in Wel­ling­ton and recently got in touch to update […]

TAWA5 Best Thing in Wellington

This cat­egory is a bit of a mixed bag. It’s where we put things that we want to cel­eb­rate that did­n’t seem to fit any­where else, but that does­n’t mean these nom­in­a­tions are second thoughts. Indeed, they’re actu­ally the some of the first things we think of when we try to define what makes Wel­ling­ton […]

TAWA5 Most Missed

We loved you… and then you were gone. When will we see you again? When will we share those pre­cious moments? (etc etc.) Here are some great Wel­ling­ton things we miss:

TAWA5 Best Outdoors Experience

Some­times, we need to look up from that mon­it­or and get ourselves some Vit­am­in D from the big sol­ar dis­penser. Here are some of our favour­ite out­doors places:

TAWA5 Best Regular Entertainment

As we know, Wel­ling­ton is full of fun things to do, and on a reg­u­lar basis. Wheth­er giv­ing us some­thing to eat, some­thing to groove to, or some­thing to yell about, these are the events that kept us com­ing back for seconds.

Zealandia is freelandia

This week­end – 16 and 17 Octo­ber, admis­sion to Zeal­and­ia is free! Admis­sion to Wellington’s world-first wild­life sanc­tu­ary, ZEALANDIA, is free for all loc­als this Sat­urday and Sunday! We are now 15 years into an incred­ible jour­ney to restore a corner of NZ as closely as pos­sible to the way it was before humans arrived. […]

Lunchtime Refuge

Lunch­time Refuge, ori­gin­ally uploaded by dubh. Some­times, and espe­cially when the weath­er is out­stand­ing, you just have to get out­side and away. Now it turns out there are one or two places in the inner city where refuge may be had. These may well be places we’d rather not share, but that would be rude, […]

And you thought we were joking about the Octopus threat?

Shelmac's photo of some notable Octopus grafitti

Earli­er this month we read about an octopus off the South Coast that mugged an inno­cent diver and took his valu­able new cam­era. The news flashed around the world and every­one had a bit of a chuckle at the diver­’s expense.

Not so fast, laugh­ing boys (and girls).

It turns out that this is but the latest epis­ode in a long his­tory of crim­in­al beha­viour by the city’s ceph­alo­pod cit­izenry.

We need only look at anoth­er, earli­er encounter between a Wel­ling­to­ni­an and a rogue octopus to prove the point. An encounter that, just like our earli­er story made world head­lines… but back in 1888.

Read on, after the jump.

When are you people going to realise that the octopus threat is real?

 We’ve all heard the stor­ies about how there was a tank at Wel­ling­ton Air­port with an octopus in it and anoth­er tank with fishes in it, and the fish star­ted dis­ap­pear­ing and no one knew why until one night secur­ity cam­er­as filmed the octopus climb­ing out of its tank and into the fish tank and eat­ing the fish. Now we have yet more evid­ence shot off the South Coast that OCTOPUSES ARE EVIL AND THEY ARE GOING TO KILL US ALL IN OUR BEDS WHILE WE SLEEP. Con­sider your­self warned. 

[video:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5DyBkYKqnM]

Evans Bay Timelapse

Great 50 second time lapse video of Evans Bay towards Miramar and the air­port as shot from Hataitai by John Lewis* as dis­covered by Row­an Simpson – enjoy:

* the per­son, not the depart­ment store