NEW ZEALAND’S Rising Star

What have movie stars like Ian McKellen and Cate Blanchett been doing in this windy little city at the bottom of New Zealand’s North Island? Did they take a wrong turn on the way to Cannes or New York? Don’t they know it’s no place to have their pictures snapped?

Still, they and other movie people from around the globe have been converging on Wellington since late last year to make a trilogy of fantasy films based on J. R. R. Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings.” The three widely anticipated special-effects extravaganzas, slated to premiere in December 2001, are being shot around New Zealand by Kiwi director Peter Jackson. As the production headquarters, Wellington is at the center of the action.

The idea that the limelight could find unassuming, unexciting Wellington would have been laughable a few years ago. In those days, a sort of earnest frumpiness prevailed in a city that has long been upstaged by Auckland, the country’s transportation and finance center, on the north coast. But now it’s a whole new cricket match in New Zealand, and Wellington’s at the wicket.

Actually, the city, New Zealand’s capital and artistic center, started preparing for the spotlight before Jackson and company moved in. It spruced up its winsome waterfront, added a terminal to its airport (though the runways are still too short to accommodate jumbo jets) and gave its cricket- and rugby-mad fans a 40,000-seat bay-side stadium with an eye-popping cantilevered roof. Te Papa, a museum-cum-amusement park that tries to tell the whole story of New Zealand, from earthquakes to Maori meetinghouses to sheep, opened on a prime harbor-front site in late 1998. At $150 million, it is Wellington’s piece de resistance.

I was the perfect test tourist to Wellington last spring. I’d visited the city, which is tucked away from the stormy strait that separates New Zealand’s North and South islands, in 1994, before the new developments got underway. Even then I preferred it to sprawling Auckland, which I found heartless, while Wellington seemed to have a discernible pulse.

New Zealand is known for big, breathtaking scenery and outdoors adventure, so cities hardly seem the point. That may be partly why visitors have tended to fly into Auckland (which has an international airport) and head straight for the mountains or the shore, bypassing Wellington altogether. It’s an hourlong flight or a 420-mile drive from Auckland to the capital, but the trip is well worth making. This is a manageable town of 157,000, but it has big-city sophistication, cultural diversity and lively fine arts--everything you want in an urban area with none of the hassle.

People often compare it to San Francisco. It climbs the flanks of glistening Port Nicholson and is built to human scale, with a walkable, livable downtown. It has a cable car, colorfully painted Victorians lining the hills and valleys around downtown, and a chip on its shoulder about Auckland, not unlike the one San Francisco bears about L.A.

But the similarities end there. No matter how flashy the Tolkien movies may have made it, Wellington will always be Wellington, I suspect, a little piece of comfy, cozy New Zealand, where dowagers in the Botanic Gardens look like porcelain dolls, money goes a long way and you wouldn’t hesitate to use the public toilets.

The exchange rate is about $1 US to $2.50 NZ, but that doesn’t fully explain why parting with cash isn’t painful in Wellington. The economy here, as in the rest of New Zealand, resembles that of America around 1960, when, as my father would say, people knew the value of a dollar and you got what you paid for. In restaurants, portions are large; hotel rooms are full of unexpected amenities; tipping isn’t required; and the work force seems glad to be of service, not snide and recalcitrant in that big-city way.

Take the hotels I tried. They’re actually serviced apartments favored by business travelers (for long- or short-term stays) and new since my last visit. They looked more interesting than the city’s fairly standard crop of chain hotels. At the Terrace Villas, which occupy a handful of Victorian houses perched above downtown near the spires of Victoria University, I stayed for two nights at $50 each. My room was a studio with a full kitchen, bath, sitting area, king-size bed and washer-dryer combo. The bathroom had a heated towel rack; there was a special wool cycle on the washing machine (“Approved by the New Zealand Wool Board,” the sticker said); and the kitchen was equipped with a hot pot, coffee, tea, milk and little packets of Milo (a ubiquitous drink that tastes a little like Ovaltine).

CityLife, where I moved after my stay at the Terrace Villas, is somewhat more centrally located, on Lambton Quay, Wellington’s main business and shopping artery. It features similar considerate details and stylish new furniture. I had reserved a one-bedroom suite for three nights for about $114 a night but was put in a two-bedroom place because I wanted to look out over the city and the two-bedroom was the only thing available.

You have to love a city that makes visitors this comfortable at such a reasonable price. Give me a free newspaper and a cup of coffee in the morning, and I’m a happy camper.

Sunshiny, shirt-sleeve weather didn’t hurt either. I was there at the tail end of summer, the high season for visitors, which lasts from December to May. (Remember, the seasons are the reverse of ours.) In winter the temperature averages 35 degrees, and high winds are common, which tends to discourage all but the rugged Kiwis from spending time outside.

A ny tour worth its salt begins at the waterfront, which isn’t where English settlers landed in 1840. The first colonists pitched their tents at the north end of Port Nicholson in the Hutt River Valley. When they realized it was a swamp, they moved to the mountain-squeezed flatlands on the southwest side of the bay. After much waterfront land reclamation, this became Wellington.

Because the city is caught between the mountains and the bay, usable plots of land are at a premium. So the city has sprawled onto Miramar, a pretty peninsula east of downtown (where I spent a day bike-riding), south to the airport and north to the Hutt Valley. Still, the constricting, tussock-covered hills that surround downtown give it terrain, stunning viewpoints and a sense that it’s sequestered.

You can learn everything you need to know about the city’s history at the Museum of Wellington City and Sea. It opened late last year in the Bond Store, a historic warehouse on Queen’s Wharf that’s just a five-minute walk from Lambton Quay and CityLife. It has the jersey of New Zealand rugby star Eric Tindill, a porthole from the inter-island ferry Wahine, which sank in 1968 in a storm in Cook Strait, and newspaper obituaries for Paddy the Wanderer, a well-loved waterfront mutt who died in 1939.

Queen’s Wharf has been gentrified since mangy Paddy’s days (though he’s remembered in a statue there), with restaurants that serve as post-work party spots for well-heeled young professionals.

Those who have not overindulged rise early to kayak or row on the bay, arriving in wetsuits and launching their vessels from a boathouse south of Queen’s Wharf, at the foot of Civic Square. I saw them as I ran along the waterfront every morning, pausing near a memorial to U.S. servicemen who spent time in Wellington during World War II, then crossing the pedestrian bridge over a busy street called Jervois Quay to Civic Square.

It’s easy to get distracted at Civic Square, which looks a little like a playground for adults, with a walk-through pyramid, helpful tourist office, public library, art gallery and the 2,500-seat Michael Fowler Center, a symphony hall. Wellingtonians seem to tolerate outre architecture, starting with the bizarre Beehive, an upside-down, truncated cone of a government building completed in 1982, with exterior walls that look like honeycombs.

From the Civic Center, Wellington Harbor curves east to the waterfront avenue known as Oriental Parade, lined with Norfolk pines and rocky beaches.

Te Papa (“our place” in Maori) is in the hip of the harbor, near the starting point of the parade. The museum opened in 1998, replacing Wellington’s old-fashioned national museum (also known as Te Papa), which I fondly recall from my prior visit for its displays of exquisite, evocative Maori art. The new Te Papa, with a huge porthole-like window and waterfront terraces, tries to be nothing less than the country’s chief cultural beacon. As such, it contains parts of the art collection I saw before, artifacts of the many Polynesian, Asian and European people who created the melting pot that is New Zealand, and a contemporary Maori meetinghouse, meant to serve as a gathering place for all.

Te Papa is a museum of the future, with hands-on, computerized “discovery centers” interspersed among the galleries and virtual-reality rides especially appealing to children, simulating the country’s great outdoors and prehistoric past. From the rides on the second floor, visitors move through gadgety displays on the geological forces that created New Zealand (including a house that shakes as if in the middle of an earthquake), its bush habitats, a founding treaty with England that has been contested by disenfranchised Maoris, 49 million sheep (in varieties from Drysdale to Lincoln) and Pacific island neighbors.

Eventually, patient visitors reach Te Papa’s vaunted collection of Maori art. Its highlights are a 30-man 19th century war canoe, a fantastically carved great house and a sacred green stone that people rub for good luck as they pass.

As at the Met or the Louvre, it would take days to do this museum justice. For those who grow weary, there’s a food court on the first floor and a chic restaurant with stunning views, Icon, on the second, where I ordered a $13 prix fixe lunch featuring tuna carpaccio and grilled whitefish. I also had a crisp glass of Sauvignon Blanc (not included in the price) from Wairarapa, Wellington’s Napa Valley.

Wine at lunch makes me sleepy, but I couldn’t resist sampling vintages from a country newly bursting with wine regions, like Wairarapa (Pinot Noir, Chardonnay, Riesling), Hawke’s Bay (Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot) and Marlborough on the South Island (Sauvignon Blanc, Chardonnay). The local restaurants with buzz--Icon, the Boulcott Street Bistro, Logan-Brown on Cuba Street and Kopi downtown--have long wine lists and inventive menus, incorporating cuisines from all over the Pacific Rim (from California-style sushi to peanut-flavored Indonesian gado-gado salad). As luck would have it, I arrived just in time for the brief Bluff oyster season. These delicacies from the South Island are small, like Brittany oysters, but have a powerful taste.

Six years ago I ate happily enough in Wellington. Dairy products, like creamy yogurt and the super-foamy milk in cappuccinos, impressed me most. But since then, Wellingtonians have clearly become full-fledged foodies who expect to find delicious meals even in bars, food courts and cafes. I had one of my favorites, a hefty slice of cheese and pumpkin pie, with hot tea, at the little restaurant in Wellington’s 65-acre Botanic Gardens, which has a terrace lining the lovely Lady Norwood Rose Garden.

To reach the garden, just west of downtown, I took the cable car from Lambton Quay, a smooth ride up to one of the city’s best vantage points, looking over the skyline to the gleaming expanse of Port Nicholson and dun-colored hills on the other side. I spent two blissful hours following paths in the garden past fields of Maori flax, kauri trees and finally to the bright tropical tangle of the Begonia House.

On other days, I visited the birthplace of short-story writer Katherine Mansfield in the cheerful suburb of Thorndon; toured Parliament House, a dignified neoclassical edifice recently retooled to withstand a 7.5 earthquake; checked out the little Cricket Museum at the old stadium, Basin Reserve; and explored the thrift shops on funky Cuba Street. At night there were plays and concerts to attend: chamber music at the acoustically marvelous Edwardian Town Hall and a new play about physicist Ernest Rutherford at Circa Theater near Te Papa. I favored seeing movies at the hip Rialto in the Film Center on Jervois Quay, and at the Embassy, a vintage bijou with deep seats, yards of legroom and a massive screen.

On my last day, I met a woman in a bookstore on Lambton Quay who asked me what I’d seen of New Zealand during my stay. When I told her only Wellington, she looked horrified and asked, “What about Auckland and the South Island?”

“I guess I’ll have to come back,” I replied. I didn’t know what else to say, except, perhaps, that “only Wellington” had pleased me in every way.

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GUIDEBOOK

Finding Out What’s What in Wellington

Getting there: Air New Zealand and Qantas offer connecting service from LAX to Wellington. Restricted round-trip fares begin at $1,319. A cab from Wellington airport to downtown costs about $10; shuttles are about $5.

Where to stay: I tried the following serviced apartment hotels, which accept both long- and short-term guests:

The Terrace Villas, 202 The Terrace, tel. 011-64-4-920-2020, fax 011-64-4-920-2030, has studios for $40 to $58, one-bedroom apartments for $52 to $64, two-bedroom apartments for $88 and three-bedrooms for $104.

CityLife Wellington, 300 Lambton Quay, telephone 011-64-4-472-8588, fax 011-64-4-473-8588, Internet https://www.dynasty.co.nz, has studios for $102 per night, one-bedroom units for $114 and two-bedroom apartments for $150. Breakfast and use of the exercise room are included.

The city also has many reliable chain hotels, including the Novotel Wellington, 345 The Terrace, tel. 011-64-4-385-9829, fax 011-64-4-385-2119, Internet https://www.novotel.com; doubles begin about $68. Parkroyal Wellington, Grey and Featherstone streets, tel. 011-64-4-472-2722, fax 011-64-4-472-4724, Internet https://www.sphc.com.au; doubles begin about $70. James Cook Centra, 147 The Terrace, tel. 011-64-4-499-9500, fax 011-64-4-499-9800, Internet https://www.centra.com.au; doubles begin at $78.

Where to eat: The Boulcott Street Bistro, 99 Boulcott St., local tel. 499-4199, has a sophisticated menu and cozy atmosphere in a white Victorian house above Lambton Quay; entrees $9 to $12. Icon, on the second floor of the Te Papa museum on Cable Street, tel. 801-5300, has great views and fine food. Recent dinner entrees included roasted grouper with mustard spaetzle and pot-roasted cornfed chicken. Entrees begin about $10. Kopi, 103 Willis St., tel. 499-5570, specializes in Malaysian cuisine with a contemporary flair; entrees average $6. Logan-Brown, at Cuba and Vivian streets, tel. 801-5114, is a stylish place, with excellent service and knockout desserts; entrees begin at $10.

For more casual meals try the food court at Wellington Market, at Cable and Taranaki streets; the Lido Cafe, at Wakefield and Victoria streets, tel. 499-6666, for healthy, light meals and people-watching (entrees begin at $5); and Reds, 49 Willis St., tel. 473-3558, a downtown cafe that serves filling, hot breakfasts that average $3.

For more information: Tourism New Zealand, 501 Santa Monica Blvd., Suite 300, Santa Monica, CA 90401; tel. (877) 9-PURENZ (978-7369), fax (310) 395-5453, Internet https://www.purenz.com.

The Wellington Information Centre, Civic Square, 101 Wakefield St., tel. 011-64-4-802-4860, fax 011-64-4-802-4863, Internet https://www.wellington.net.nz.