Wellington is, without doubt, my favorite New Zealand city. I've always seen it geographically as a miniature Hong Kong -- there's a beautiful curved harbor surrounded by hillsides dotted with houses and elegant high-rises clustered into a central fist. There is an immediacy and a vibrancy here that you don't get in other New Zealand cities.
Once seen as a stuffy, bureaucrat-filled political capital, Wellington has reinvented itself to become New Zealand's entertainment and cultural capital and the fastest-growing weekend destination in the country.
With the opening of the long-awaited Te Papa, the national museum of New Zealand, the waterfront is alive again. The Courtenay Place neighborhood has one of the best bar, cafe, and restaurant scenes in the country, and galleries, theaters, and shops abound.
The beauty of Wellington is that so much is within walking distance. It's a compact place with a pronounced cosmopolitan elegance, and an exciting corporate component adds to the rich urban atmosphere: Morning, noon, and night, "the suits," as they are affectionately called here, crowd the streets.
The British originally called the harbor Port Nicholson, and it wasn't until after the 1839 visit of the Duke of Wellington that the city was renamed in his honor. The seat of government was moved here from Auckland in 1865.
Today's Wellington is diverse and sophisticated. The fact that it can be extremely cold and windy here in winter is understandable if you consider the fact that there's little between the capital and Antarctica to stop the gales. And the fact that so much of this city -- filled with many glass-fronted high-rises -- sits on a major fault line seems to be of such little concern to its inhabitants that I almost feel picky raising the issue. Speaking of raising, it's interesting to note that a large portion of Wellington's waterfront playground is on reclaimed land (just like Hong Kong) -- much of it forced up by a giant 1855 earthquake and finished off by clever acts of reclamation.
