The path. Apparently, I like taking pictures of paths, because there are a fair amount of those.
The second clearing. The original shoreline was actually several hundred feet back from where it is currently. A massive earthquake in 1855 changed the make up of the bay, making the land reclamation much easier.
There's a slight upslope, but this is essentially the only flat ground in the area.
Panorama from the third clearing.
...I don't remember for sure where this one is from.
Views from the top!
There's a monument to Admiral Richard E. Byrd at the top. The stones around the bust were taken from Antarctica. If you set out straight with your back to the monument, the next land mass you'd hit would be Antarctica.
There's a Centennial Memorial (built in 1939) on a smaller peak east of the lookout. These pictures were taken along the path to and from there.
The little strip of sand (well, crushed shells) down there is the beach at Oriental Bay.
The large brick building with columns on the right side of the picture is the train station.
View to the airport and Miramar (where Weta is located). It's Evans Bay on this side, the Lyall Bay on the other.
Another view over to Miramar.
This was the best that I could do from this distance, but in the center if this picture there's a string of white text - it's Wellington's version of the Hollywood sign, essentially, but because this is Wellington, the last few letters are sculpted to look as if they're blowing away. This area in particular gets the strongest of the regions already formidable winds.
More Miramar, more of Wellington Harbour, and Lower Hutt in the distance.
Back toward the city.
If you were to head straight out through the center here, you would eventually hit London. (11,6-- something miles later)
Panorama of the harbor from the memorial.
Paths that I took on the way down. If some of this looks vaguely familiar, it's because the sequence from The Fellowship of the Ring where Frodo and company are hiding from the Nazgul was filmed on Mt. Victoria (though the filming location is to the south of where I was walking today).
I was grateful for the roots, as the path down was very, very steep. They made for very useful steps.
A couple of views from the way down.
The views are phenomenal from the slope, so there are quite a few houses (some stunning examples of modern and Victorian architecture), but there's not a lot of space for parking. I thought this was a fairly ingenious, if not for the faint of heart, solution.
This is a city of stairs.
No comments:
Post a Comment