Rugged mountains and hillsides to Wellington's south give way to a striking coastline, dotted with fur seals and volcanic red rock.
"The grey suited capital," Kent Clark says with a shake of the head, as he guides his lumbering Land Cruiser uphill toward Wellington, away from the spectacular coastline to its south.
That's how New Zealanders once described their capital, he says. It's an undeserved epithet long since shed by a city reborn.
Wellington now bursts with a vibrancy born of tech start-ups, a large university population, its string of world-class craft breweries and bars, and a strong arts and restaurant scene.
On a good day, the waterfront of Wellington is stunning.
"I think we've reinvented ourselves," Kent says.
Kent is one of Wellington tourism's old guard. He's been running Seal Coast Safari 4WD trips along the North Island's striking southern coast for more than a decade.
There, dozens of fur seals laze across crops of volcanic rock, coughing up the occasional fish bone, and keeping a wary eye on the odd passer-by.
The Fork and Brewer, one of Wellington's many bars and eateries that celebrates craft beer and quality food. It has more than 40 beers on tap.
The scene is no less than an hour from Wellington's CBD, a compact city squashed against a deep harbour by a horseshoe of steep hills and mountains.
The city shares much with its new sister city Canberra, trans-Tasman capitals which will be linked by direct Singapore Airlines flights from September.
But where Canberra is still declaring itself a city that's "confident, bold and ready", New Zealand's capital has a self-assuredness that feels streets ahead.
Garage Project, an experimental micro-brewery, is leading a craft beer revolution in Wellington and across New Zealand.
The city has, quite literally, crafted its own identity.
It has become famous for a series of experimental craft breweries that have popped up across the city, which are supported by, and in turn support, local bars, artists, eateries, and festivals.
The Garage Project brewery grew from the shell of a derelict, disused service station in the Aro Valley on the outskirts of town.
A larger-than-life model in the Gallipoli exhibit at Te Papa, the national museum in Wellington.Credit: Norm Heke
It's a mad brewer's dream realised. New concoctions are constantly dreamed up, cast away, or refined, and the brewery is deliberately small to allow for easy experimentation.
Every inch of its existence is the antithesis of a commercial brewery. Bizarre, provocative beers are deliberately pursued, regardless of popularity. They support local artists by commissioning new work for each label they put out, and the finished product is distinctly Wellingtonian.
Assistant manager Steffan Paton is explaining this philosophy as he works the taps of eight beers lined up from behind the bar at the Garage Project's brewery, a building that quite deliberately retains the disused workshop feel of its prior life.
The view of Wellington from Mt Victoria.
Steffan has just poured a Cat's Pyjamas, a creamy ale that tastes like creaming soda.
"It really polarises people," he says. "But that's what we like to do here."
Before that, he had served up the Sauvin Nouveau, a Grape Harvest Pilsner billed as "half-wine, half-beer", and the Wolfman, an Imperial American IPA. "The hops will turn your face inside out," Steffan promises.
Craft beer has exploded across Wellington. Just down the road from Garage Project is The Third Eye, a microbrewery created by Tuatara Breweries, and nearer the waterfront is the Black Dog Brew Co. The city rightly styles itself as the craft beer capital. "In Wellington it's huge, and it's just spreading right across the country," Steffan says.
The city is also just an hour's drive from the Wairarapa region, well-known for its wineries and spectacular scenery.
Wellington boasts serious tourism drawcards, too. Its excellent Te Papa museum tells the national story, and currently features an immersive, sobering Gallipoli exhibit that stuns even the most unruly Wellingtonian schoolboy into silence.
Giant sculptures of soldiers and nurses, created in painstaking detail using the renowned artistry of the Weta Workshop (think Lord of the Rings) dominate the centre of a series of darkened rooms. Vacant eyes, tense bodies, festering wounds, heart-wrenching sorrow – the models tell the stories of the doomed campaign through true accounts of its New Zealand service men and women.
You can see the veins bulging on a tense arm as it feeds ammo into a machine gun, the 1000-yard stare of a soldier who survived Gallipoli only to be sent to the Western Front, and the tears and buckled knees of a nurse who has just learnt the brother she has been searching for died months ago.
Voices read out extracts of their diaries as a powerful accompaniment to the models, which took 24,000 hours to create. The hair alone took 3300 hours.
Outside, not far from Te Papa, stands an example of the city's efforts to foster a laneway culture. Hannah's Laneway, named for the abandoned shoe workshop that sits at its southern end, is full of surprises. Upstairs, in a sun-drenched space at the laneway's northern end, sits Six Barrel Soda, a boutique specialty soda shop. Further on, there's Fix and Fogg, a hole-in-the-wall peanut butter shop that creates experimental flavours on site, and a bean-to-bar chocolate factory, bakery, and cafes.
For the active, there are walking and top-class mountain bike trails through the hillsides and valleys around Wellington. Wellington is positioning itself as a weekend holiday destination for places like Canberra ahead of international flights in September.
The Singapore Airlines flights begin on September 21, with departures on Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and Sunday. Return fares are expected to start from $469 for economy and $1450 for business class.
Christopher Knaus was a guest of the Wellington Regional Economic Development Agency and Singapore Airlines.
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