Wellington, city guide, 2-3 days
Auckland gets the arrivals and Queenstown gets the adrenaline marketing, so Wellington tends to be the city visitors pass through rather than plan around — usually just long enough for the cable car and Te Papa museum before heading south to the ferry. That’s a genuine miss, because New Zealand’s capital, wedged between a harbour and steep green hills, is one of the most walkable, well-fed small cities in the Pacific.
Cuba Street is the obvious starting point — a pedestrian strip of vintage stores, bucket fountain, and some of the country’s best coffee — but the real character of Wellington lives in its inner suburbs. Aro Valley and Mount Victoria are a short, steep walk from downtown and feel like a different city: villas climbing the hillside, bush reserve threaded right into the neighbourhood, a lookout at the top of Mount Vic that rivals the cable car view without the queue.
Wellington’s weather has a reputation — “Windy Welly” is not a nickname the locals invented to be cute — and the trick is to build the trip around it rather than fight it. A blustery afternoon is exactly the excuse to duck into Te Papa properly rather than rushing it, or to work through the city’s dense cluster of craft breweries and small bars, most within a ten-minute walk of Courtenay Place.
Base for two or three nights, and use one of them to get out on the harbour: the Days Bay ferry across to Eastbourne is a short, cheap trip that most visitors skip entirely, and it delivers a quiet beach village and a proper view back at the capital from the water — the Wellington postcard nobody else is taking.