A beautiful city and a beautiful island

Caleb Schafer | Ecology, Evolution, and Conservation Biology Major - Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand

Cover image: A curious kea stands on the side-view mirror.

An overlook of the city of Wellington from Victoria University of Wellington's Library

One of the most memorable moments I had while studying in New Zealand was the first day I decided to walk around the city of Wellington. I had just gotten unpacked at my dorm and had accidentally taken the wrong bus. Instead of worrying about this, I just got off at the next stop and started walking around to see the sites of the city. Wellington is a verry dense city of around 200 thousand people. It has a wide variety of building types that all are unique and it is not a homogenous city at all, each section of the city is distinct from the other. The city as a whole has many great lookouts to get a good vantage point of the waterfront and the city as a whole. It is an extremely safe city and its nice to walk around a night. The city has a whole has been my favorite part of my exchange, it is dense, super walkable, and has a lot of activities to do. It is also really easy to find nature close to the city, a 15 minute to one hour bus/train ride you can, be on a wide variety of beautiful trails in the mountain, next to the beach, or even in an eco-sanctuary.

Another big part of my exchange was the road trip I did around the South Island once my courses finished. We flew into Queenstown, a small tourist city huddled within the southern alps, from there we traveled all around the South Island. The most memorable moments from the trip all had to relate to the amazing animals. While driving in fiordland national park we were stopped at a light and four Kea, a type of large alpine parrot, had come to are car and were exploring our car. While on the Otago peninsula we visited an albatross center where we got to see albatross caring for their eggs, Pied Shags (a type of cormorant) on their nest with chicks, and Red-billed seagulls (Endangered species) with chicks and eggs. In the small town of Oamaru we got to see little blue penguins, the worlds smallest penguin. In Kaikoura, I had the opportunity to swim with a species of dolphins known as dusky dolphins. A 35 minute boat ride and a small swim out a huge pod of dolphins of around 40-50 were swimming around the tour group. In Picton there were huge stingrays in the harbor. Finally on our three hour ferry back to Wellington we saw three different pods of three different species of dolphins.