Marcie and I just got back from a trip to the ICANN meetings in Wellington, New Zealand. This is a post of a few of the many pictures we took.

Here’s one “above the fold” — read on to see the rest…

This is the cable car we rode up the hill behind our hotel on our first day there — quite the view of Wellington (a town that reminded us a lot of San Fransisco). Read on to see the rest of the pictures.

This is a shot of the beautiful botanic garden at the top of the hill, right as we got off the cable car. A great walk back down to the hotel for us jet-lagged travellers.

The next day we took a walk in a restoration area (I’ll have to get Marcie’s help to fill in the name). While New Zealand is well known as the place where the Lord of the Rings trilogy was filmed, I found it more like settings from Myst. This picture is the best example of that.

An early morning scene in Wellington, close to where the conference was held

A better shot of Wellington harbor — a nice sunny day — but also from the top of the cable car (Marcie got a little bored in the meetings and decided to take a walk one afternoon)

After the conference ended, we headed a little further afield. This “Mike’s bench” shot was taken overlooking Upper Hutt Valley, from the park/preserve where the Rivendell scenes were shot in LOTR. We didn’t make it to the actual film site, but had a great hike. See that lake down there? We’d walked about a mile to get to that lake, and had to return, so we decided this was far enough for one day.

Here’s another shot on that same hike — about half way down the ridge on our way back.

The next day we headed up the west coast (of the north island — we never made it to the south island) to a regional park. Much different. Really nice walk through sand dunes and sea-side.

The next day we took a city bus to the southern tip of the north island, only about 10 miles from our hotel in Wellington, and explored this rocky point. We wiped ourselves out with about a 15 mile walk that day due to a map-reading error by yours truly. This is the start of the journey. See that point way off int the distance? We walked well past that point and back.

Along the way we found lots of great tide-pools in the rocks. Reminded me of Carmel, California. Here’s Marcie peering at cool creatures. A close-up of the creatures follows…

Here’s a shot Marcie took of the stuff she was looking at. I’m not sure whether she’s figured out what the Trilobite-like thingys are yet.

Here I am, also checking out the creatures. Doesn’t this look like another scene out of Myst??

When we got all the way out to the final point, we got lucky. The seals weren’t supposed to be there but we found a gaggle of them hanging out on the rocks. I aspire to the repose of this character.

There were four or five seals in the gaggle we saw — here’s another.

Marcie and I shot lots of pictures of birds, butterflies and plants along the way. I liked this little guy’s attitude.

Then, we looked up on the horizon and said “holy cow, we have to walk all the way back there???. Who’s going to carry us?” We were really whipped that night.